A kinetic, knowing takedown of corporate greed.
A horror director clashes with a greedy producer in Irvin’s wickedly satiric illustrated novel.
The story opens with a stranger approaching spooky Frankenstein Castle. Inside, he meets Frankensam, who has Dr. Frankenstein’s brain inside his monster’s body. The visitor is revealed to be Ygor, the doctor’s former assistant. Sexual attraction builds between them until…the monster’s neck bolt falls off. That’s when it becomes obvious to the reader that this scene has been playing out on a movie set. This latest mishap gives producer Max Million, a Peter Lorre look-alike, the excuse he needs to shutter the production and take a tax write-off instead. Sam the director, who also plays Frankensam, stumbles onto an idea to save his movie when invoking the mumbo-jumbo phrase “Zhuzh time for the glam squad!” turns him into Captain Samouflage, “Waging all-out war against injustice, toilet paper shortages, and crimes of fashion – all while stylishly hiding in plain sight!” Samouflage sneaks into Max’s mansion looking for incriminating information; hijinks ensue during the cat-and-mouse action between the two throughout the volume’s second half. Irvin and illustrator Gallagher’s narrative has the madcap energy of an old-school Looney Tunes cartoon; it also offers a big basket of Easter eggs to pop-culture fans of all types. (Irvin even points these out in detail in his afterword so that the reader can enjoy the layers of this work.) The duo’s first topical storybook parody was 2020’s Sam’s Toilet Paper Caper!, released during the Covid-19 pandemic. This second spoof was inspired by the decision of David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, to kill three nearly-completed HBO Max movie projects and convert them into tax write-offs. The morality of such maneuvers makes a perfect target for Irvin, who has a knack for creating adult content that still manages to appeal to the kid in all of us. There’s a bonus of five additional cartoons included at the back of the volume.
A kinetic, knowing takedown of corporate greed.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9798342698993
Page Count: 43
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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