My Fake War (Book Review)

I thought I'd branch out into a non-movie related area, and talk about books and such. Any book I read that is either strange or sick (not planning on wasting a lot of hours on the awful ones) will hopefully get put here.

Bizarro novels are new, both to me and in general. They only go back as an official genre about ten years, and has been described as "literature's equivalent to the cult section at the video store" and a genre that "strives not only to be strange, but fascinating, thought-provoking, and, above all, fun to read."

Andersen Prunty's My Fake War is my first 'full length' bizarro work. I use quotation marks because the whole thing is fucking 100 pages of huge writing! It took me 45 minutes to read the entire thing. I am a fast reader, but this is ridiculous.

But this length is appropriate; it tells the story in all of it's ample weirdness, bows it's head, then leaves. I warmed to it really quickly. The story, in a non-revealing way, goes along the lines of a middle aged citizen of the United States of Everything, a future state that controls almost every part of Earth, gets drafted into the military, dumped in the middle of a desert with a magical gun that can provide necessities, and has no clue as to what he is meant to do. Strange lizard men, invisible houses/everything and 'thinking traveling robots' show up as well.

As far as I know, bizarro novels are just suppose to mainly be fucking stupid and crazily out there, but this one had a really obvious undertone of American imperialism that was so heavy-handed and blindingly noticable that it came across as funny. As was the rest of the book.

I immediately bought two more bizarro books online, and eagerly await their arrival in two weeks! Hopefully they will be as amusing as My Fake War.