“When they’re offered to the world in merry guise / Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will. / For he who’d make his fellow creatures wise / Should always gild the philosophic pill.” –W.S. Gilbert. The Yeomen of the Guard, Act I. 1888.

The title is a lie. This isn’t just a review of Zachary Shatzer’s new book, The Beach Wizard and the Easy Mind. This makes the third entry in the Beach Wizard chronicles, and while I have no idea if Mr. Shatzer plans to continue the series or keep it as a trilogy, this seems like as good a time as any for a big picture retrospective

That said, since this is the newest entry in the series, it requires an in-depth recap. In this episode, the town of Benford Beach is overrun by a gang of rude and obnoxious mermaids. This is the sort of problem that the Beach Wizard was born to solve, under normal circumstances. But, as luck would have it, the Beach Wizard’s mind is controlled by a mysterious bug which makes him calm, detached, and indifferent. Not bad things, necessarily; but when they cause a man to neglect his duties as the magical guardian of his home, they become a problem.

There is also a subplot involving a bar in the sewer run by a wandering adventurer, and a new character known as the “hobo professor.” He quickly became one of my favorites.

Naturally, the story is resolved after plenty of hijinks and appearances by the many zany characters who populate Benford Beach. Though, I must confess a smidge of disappointment at the absence of Warren Grumley and Deputy Mayor Swivelson, two of my favorites from earlier installments. On the other hand, Mayor Smacks features heavily in the story, which is always a plus.

Bottom line: if you enjoyed the first two books, you will like this one. But probably if you read the first two books, you don’t need me to tell you that. So what do you need me to tell you?

I guess the main thing I would like to convey, about both this book and the series as a whole, is that the general wackiness of Shatzer’s style is not the main appeal for me. That’s not to say I mind it; I enjoy the whimsical touches. But they aren’t the main attraction.

Now, it’s probably the case that are some readers who will just never be able to get into Shatzer’s oeuvre due to the zaniness quotient. Obviously, if you demand complete realism in your fiction, a story featuring things like reanimated pirates and extremely intelligent blue lobsters probably isn’t going to be for you.

But I think the majority of readers are in more of a middle ground. They don’t demand complete realism, but they aren’t going to automatically like anything just because it’s silly and off-the-wall. I consider myself to be in this category: I don’t mind surreal humor, as long as it’s done well. Which, I contend, Shatzer’s almost always is.

If your first reaction to the madcap universe of Shatzerism is negative, I would echo Harrison Ford’s rejoinder to Mark Hamill when he asked about continuity in Star Wars: “Hey, kid, it ain’t that kind of story.” Some stories are that kind of story, and when they have completely mood-ruining goofiness break out, I am the first to decry it. Not everything can be a cavalcade of silliness.

At the same time, even when something is a cavalcade of silliness, that also doesn’t mean it can’t show a few glimpses of something deeper beneath the surface. (Anyone who doubts this should check out the work of that Gilbert fellow quoted above.)

Shatzer’s writing often has layers to it. You don’t exactly have to be a Straussian to see that Dog Wearing a Bowler Hat can be read as more than just a funny story about a silly painting. (Though it works as such.) The Beach Wizard Chronicles are less obviously allegorical, but they too have layers. There is more of real human nature in these books than in some supposedly “gritty” novels that I have read.

What makes the Beach Wizard stories so good is not their whimsical humor, but the way important philosophical concepts are woven into them. This book, for example, is about how to deal with the worries of life without letting them either consume you or, even worse, becoming numb to them.

The Beach Wizard is a stoic, through and through. He deals with the unpleasant realities of the world, accepts them, and then gets along with his day. He’s not perfect, and he doesn’t pretend to be.

There are moments of sincere emotion in every book in the series, and it’s to Shatzer’s credit that he never undercuts or shies away from them. It’s his essential good-heartedness, more than the humor itself, that makes Benford Beach such a pleasant place to come back to again and again. Like Wodehouse, Shatzer has created a world filled with basically pleasant and likable people. Even the ostensible villains, like the mermaids in this volume, aren’t truly evil; merely rowdy and disrespectful.

And this is what I admire most about Shatzer: almost nobody else, with the exception of Chuck Litka, writes stories like that these days. I’m not saying that everyone should. Everyone should write what they want to write. But it’s pretty cool when what people want to write also happens to be something that almost nobody else is writing. (This, by the way, is why the concept of “comps” in publishing is so toxic.)

The point is, I strongly encourage you to try this series, even if you don’t regularly read this sort of thing. I don’t think anyone regularly reads this sort of thing, because there isn’t enough of “this sort of thing” for anyone to read it regularly. Maybe you’ll hate it, but then again, maybe you won’t. You never know unless you try, and besides, the best way to keep from having your choices curated for you entirely by marketing algorithms is to occasionally do something so weird the algorithm can’t account for it. Remember, “you are not a number!”

Well, I have gone on long enough. I haven’t done Shatzer’s work justice, but oh well; a critic never can really say the right things about the good books. What makes them good is unique to them; a singular quality which can be appreciated one and only one way: by reading them.