RICHTER THE MIGHTY

A satirical skewering of the machinations of a despicable fictional American president.

Vermont-based author Manning exhibits a well-honed sense of the absurd in a silly but humorously absorbing debut. Wilhelm “Hick” Richter is the current American president, a double-chinned, Trump-esque, coke-snorting scoundrel his 13-year-old son, Billy, describes as “mean as a gutter rat” with a dyed comb-over and nefarious ties to corrupt international entities. Disgruntled with his young wife, Savanna, and their newborn baby, Richter continues to maintain nefarious ties to corrupt international entities while Georgina, one of his daughters, runs his sketchy companies. Cody, another daughter, snoops around and uncovers her father’s corruption and alerts the FBI. She is kidnapped and drugged by someone hoping to make her accept her father’s innocence by, among other things, forgetting some incriminating evidence surrounding her mother’s death. Cody’s brother Billy, who himself has bugged the Oval Office, is determined to swoop in, save her, and have his father implicated. Add to the cast Richter’s chief of staff Baron “Bugsy” Knowles and a host of unscrupulous druggy hoodlums, and you’ve got a serpentine stew of dirty politics. There’s also the smart, young Jeremy Green, who plans to hijack Richter’s reelection plans with his own campaign. Richter enters into a deal with a Russian ambassador named Boris to reveal secrets about a robotic prototype in exchange for help securing his reelection. Cody narrowly escapes her captors and goes on the run, while Richter’s legions of “Hick Brigades” crisscross the nation inciting violence and discord in honor of their philandering leader. Manning lays the head-spinningly satirical groundwork for all of these eerily familiar antics with the ease of a seasoned comedian. If it all sounds insanely zany, it is, yet Manning’s imagination, ambitious plotting, and comic timing are impeccable, and the outright corruption is hilarious. The hijinks steamroll common sense toward the conclusion, when the parade of bumbling idiots makes one final plan to dispose of poor abused Cody. This is a brilliantly conceived parody.

A sprawling, cleverly imagined spoof of political culture and the miscreants it spawns.