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Anytime I see Zachary Shatzer has a new book out, it’s an instant buy for me. Even if, as in this case, I have no idea what it’s about, his name alone is enough to get me to pick it up.

As it turns out, Mayor of Turtle Town is a collection of humorous short stories and essays. Some of them read like Dave Barry-style observational humor articles, others are more distinctly fictional. All of them contain the familiar wit and wisdom any reader of Shatzer would expect.

A few highlights:

  • “Dad Writes a Book” is a story about a good-hearted but creatively-challenged man who attempts to write a novel with help from his family.  The process will be familiar to many of us in the writing community, as will the payoff at the end.
  • “Characters” is a list of characters all meant to be in a single story, although how all of them would fit together is, by the author’s own admission, a bit of puzzle. Regardless, I would certainly read that a story if it were ever written! As it is, it’s quite entertaining.
  • “My Dad’s Tank” may be the most emotionally powerful story Shatter has ever written. It’s still funny in its way, but really bittersweet as well. Probably my favorite story in the whole collection.
  • “The Hottest Trend of 2034” is absolutely brilliant. I can’t tell you why. It just is.

There is much more to enjoy, but I don’t want to give it all away. Mayor of Turtle Town is a fine introduction to the wonderful, wacky world of Shatzer for those who have yet to enjoy his work. And for longtime fans such as myself, it’s another delightful addition to the collection.

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It was H.P. Lovecraft, you know, who wrote the phrase “the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” By that, Lovecraft meant that putting together seemingly-unrelated facts, human beings could discover undreamable wells of horror.

But, that was Lovecraft, and his business was horror. Naturally, he looked at everything from the horrorist’s perspective. Can correlating dissociated facts have other uses too? Well, let’s put a pin in that for now. (Either a pushpin or a grenade pin; your choice.) For now, we must get to the work at hand: reviewing The Thing From HR by Roy M. Griffis.

If you’re like me, when you see “HR”, you probably think “Human Resources.” But in this case, it means “Human Restraint.” The narrator of our story, Narg, is a shoggoth who works in benighted vistas beyond time. If you have read Lovecraft, you know what that is. If you have not read Lovecraft, just know that shoggoths are scary tentacled monsters.

And yet “Human Restraint” and “Human Resources” are not so different after all. As Narg explains, his work involves lots of tedious paperwork, office politics, and all the other things we associate with bureaucratic offices. The fact that his department deals with human souls is incidental; the annoyances of clerical life are, it seems, truly universal.

And then Narg is sent to do some field work among the humans. His consciousness is installed in the form of a Professor Weisenheimer, a newly-arrived faculty member at an American college. To guide him among the humans, the upper management has also provided him with a human guide also existing in the same body. A good idea in theory, but like so many bureaucratic operations, it is administratively bungled, and the human consciousness that guides Narg is that of a surfer dude named Murphy, or “Murph.”

Together, the two extremely different minds are forced to guide the vessel of Professor Weisenheimer among the humans. In addition to trying to discover why Narg has been given this assignment (again, like so many organizations, the memos are not clear!), they are soon drawn into a conspiracy among the college faculty involving stolen uranium, communist spies, and of course, eldritch blasphemies and horrifying rituals. This is a Lovecraftian story, remember.

And yet… it’s also profoundly anti-Lovecraftian at the same time. A fittingly-Schrödingerian duality. (And yes, this book does include a cat named Schrödinger.) Not only is it a comedy, which is not a word often used in connection with the gloomy old prophet of Providence, but it is ultimately about very human concerns and concepts; the things that make life worth living. Sentimentality, in other words, which is a concept almost entirely absent from the Cthulhu mythos.

I recently watched the film Living, starring Bill Nighy, which is a remake of an Akira Kurosawa film Ikiru. Both films are about a government clerk who, on receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, is forced to confront the question of how he wants to spend his remaining time on Earth. Ultimately, what he discovers is that he wants to spend doing a modest bit of good in the world. Both versions are extremely beautiful films, and I highly recommend them.

But why am I bringing this up? What can a pair of slice-of-life drama movies possibly have to do with this Lovecraftian horror comedy? Well, this is where that bit about correlating contents from earlier comes in: because despite differences in setting, tone, genre, etc. The Thing From HR has basically the same theme: that what’s important in life is helping out as best you can. Even if you’re just a lowly bureaucrat in some department nobody cares about, you still may have a chance to, in some small way, make the world better. And you should have the courage to do it, even if it means going against standard practice and talking directly to the big boss.

Now, of course The Thing From HR is largely a bawdy, irreverent, horror-comedy, with all that entails. Lovecraft purists might object to that; but I would guess most readers will find it hilarious. Particularly enjoyable are all the exchanges between Narg and Murph trying to understand Earth slang. And by at least one metric, it’s the most suspenseful book I’ve ever read: for the first time ever, I actually skipped ahead a little to see if one character would be okay. (The answer, as it turned out, was ambiguous.)

If you like Lovecraft, but also don’t mind affectionate parodies of his oeuvre, then I highly recommend this book. Even if you’re not a fan of Yog-Sothothery, though, this one will likely be a hit. It’s got plenty of horror, but also plenty of humor, and plenty of heart.

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It was a near thing, this. I almost didn’t have a book to review this week. I wanted an America-themed book since we just had Independence Day here in the USA. But until this past Monday, I couldn’t find anything short enough that I would have any hope of reviewing in time.

To the rescue rode Zachary Shatzer, on a horse that was white, but also red and blue. Or something like that. But you all know by now that I always love to read a Shatzer book, and when I saw his latest was a parody of political thrillers, a genre near and dear to me, you can well imagine my delight.

Puppet Dance features all the tropes we expect of thrillers: conspiracies, assassins, double-crosses and backstabbing. Except instead of being done seriously, it’s played for laughs. The president is a simpleton elected solely for his good looks. The vice-president has to juggle his Machiavellian plans for world domination with mending his relationship with his goth teenage daughter. And the assassin, who prides himself as a ruthless and efficient killing machine, is actually a bit of a bumbling buffoon; for example, when he drops his rifle and ammunition on the way to prepare for a job, and his forced to eat one of the bullets to conceal it from bystanders.

The plot is basically a power struggle between aforementioned vice-president and the director of the CIA, both of whom are vying to be the true power behind the throne of the empty-headed president. The only person capable of saving America–indeed, seemingly the only person capable of doing anything well–is Agent Dennings of the Secret Service, who saves the VP’s life at a hopscotch convention.

From there, it’s off into a madcap labyrinth of whimsy and silliness as only Shatzer can deliver. I could try to summarize it all, but really, the whole point of the thing is the humorous way the story is told.

Which is not to say there isn’t a deeper reading that can be made. What are literary critics for, if not to systematically suck the joy out of any work of fiction by imagining things in it that the author never intended? This, dear readers, is my speciality.

You can read a fairly scathing critique of 21st-century culture in the works of Shatzer. For example, the way Vice President Beanstar slowly builds a coalition of supporters by pandering to fans of various activities, celebrities, franchises and the like, could be read as a comment on consumerism; as people who fanatically (and remember always the word “fan” is short for “fanatic”) build their entire identity around some piece of pop ephemera are easily manipulated to advance the goals of a malevolent politician.

Or again, when Agent Dennings goes undercover as a television star, but the effort fails because people have so thoroughly conflated the actress with the character she portrays that they are unwilling to even speak to her. Much of Shatzer’s humor is derived from characters who have completely dedicated themselves to raising trivial issues to the level of zealous idolatry. Something that will be familiar to anyone who has ever been on the internet.

These are interesting themes, and no doubt a healthy corpus of literary criticism could be derived from them. However, that would just miss out on the real fun of Shatzer, which is basically that in his world, even the villains are basically good, if rather eccentric, and everything can always be resolved in a pleasingly amusing fashion.

Shatzer, like Wodehouse, is fundamentally optimistic, and this shows through in all his works. Even when he is making fun of something, you can always sense the affection at the heart of it. So, in these troubled times, when one can be forgiven for checking a little anxiously, and a little more frequently than usual, whether that star-spangled banner does indeed yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave, I think I’ll give the last word to Shatzer. Or rather, to Agent Dennings, the embodiment of humble competence in a world run by madmen, narcissists, and criminals:

It was a strange thing, she mused, that America could manage to be such a wonderful place when led by people like this. And it was wonderful, she had no doubts about that. The ideas on which it was based: freedom, equality, and opportunity, though never fully and perfectly realized, had also never been crushed by the ceaseless parade of corruption, morons, and corrupt morons at the highest levels of power. An incredible feat, when you thought about it. 

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I am not quite sure when I became convinced that Zachary Shatzer is a genius. Certainly, once I read The Beach Wizard, I knew I was reading the work of one of the great comic novelists of our time. But maybe I knew it even before that; it’s hard to remember exactly. In any case, a genius he is, and that is why I was delighted to pick up his latest novella, Dog Wearing a Bowler Hat.

The story is a straightforward one: a young man named Wilkins goes to his social club one day to find a new artwork added to the club’s decor: a painting of a dog wearing a bowler hat. Wilkins is largely indifferent to the piece, but his friends at the club have strong feelings about it. Some think it’s a masterpiece, others despise it.

Wilkins thinks little of it at first, until differences of opinion begin to tear the club apart. Friendships are ended by disagreements about the hat-wearing dog. The division ramps up further and further, escalating into a conflict that seems unimaginable, forcing poor Wilkins, with his lack of any strong feelings on the matter whatsoever, into making increasingly difficult choices.

So, that’s the story in a nutshell. Seems simple enough, right?

Heh, well, you probably know whenever I say that, I’m about to launch into one of my rambling disquisitions. Admit it, deep down in places that you don’t talk about at parties, you want me doing this sort of thing.

Mark Paxson and I have observed there’s this pattern of book hype where, (for example) Stephen King will have a new book coming out and early reviews will say, “It’s Stephen King like you’ve never seen him before!” Then, one reads the book, and finds that it is, in fact, Stephen King almost exactly as you have always seen him. Which is not a criticism of King. After all, most people buy a book by Stephen King expecting to get a Stephen King book. No; it’s just a criticism of critics, who build a book up to be something it’s not.

All of which is to say I hesitated before saying, “This is Zachary Shatzer like you’ve never seen him before!” Was I doing the very thing of which I accuse others, and describing it as something it isn’t?

It is a very funny book, to be sure, but then all Shatzer’s books are funny. That alone isn’t enough to say it is breaking new ground for him. It is also insightful, but The Beach Wizard and The Hero and the Tyrant are insightful too. That’s not what’s novel in this novella.

I finally decided that why I think this book is something different than that to which we Shatzer-heads have heretofore become accustomed: it has an allegorical quality, almost like a fable, that is not found in his other works.

Now, there is nothing I would hate more than becoming one of those people who sees symbolism everywhere. Figuring out what the green light across the bay stands for is just not my thing. And I’m not suggesting that this story must be read allegorically, or that Shatzer necessarily intended for it to be. To paraphrase Hemingway’s take on The Old Man and the Sea: “The dog is a dog. The bowler hat is a bowler hat.”

But, it is the way it is presented, the way this trivial and even absurd picture drives people into a kind of madness, that has something to say about politics, about culture, and–yes, I’ll even go there–about human nature itself.

I spend my free time as an amateur critic on the internet. I’ve seen takes you people wouldn’t believe. To this day, there are arguments on Twitter about a sci-fi movie that came out almost seven years ago and whether it is a moving and transcendent work of cinematic genius or a loathsome travesty that defames all that is noble and good in the world. As I feel about this movie pretty much like Wilkins feels about the painting, I can certainly relate to him.

Over and over, this pattern is repeated; of people fighting over things that are, at bottom, unimportant and silly. It is my fervent hope that the words “Dog with a Bowler Hat” may become a byword, a meme, which signifies when something has inspired more passion that it deserves. Shatzer’s accomplishments are many, but here may be his most amazing feat yet: he has coined a phrase which can be used to stop pointless arguments before they begin, an anti-polarization pill gilded with his usual whimsical wit.

But for it to work, of course, people need to read the book. And that, my friend, is where you come in. I know I’m constantly ordering you to read books, and I suppose you get tired of it. It must feel like I do everything but shove the books in front of you, saying “it’ll change your life, I swear,” like Natalie Portman in Garden State. But I really mean it; this one is something special. Do yourself a favor and read it.

UPDATE: the book is free on Kindle today, 4/19. All the more reason to get it!

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I heard about this book from Lydia Schoch’s review and I knew right away that I had to read it. Originally, I thought I would wait until Halloween season to review it, but then I thought, “Zis is Ruined Chapel! It is alvays Halloween here!” And besides, it’s such a delightful book, I couldn’t wait to share it with you all.

It tells the story of a ghost named Lazarus Bently, who is helping an amateur ghost out with a difficult assignment: haunting a woman named Maisie. Maisie’s artistic temperament makes her immune or oblivious to most of the standard tropes associated with hauntings: objects being hurled through the air, threatening messages on the walls etc. have no effect on her. What is a ghost to do?

Since this is a short story, I can’t say too much about how it all develops, or I’d risk giving it away. But, I can say that the author packs a lot of humor and clever ideas into a very short space. It’s like a supernatural version of “The Odd Couple,” with plenty of witty lines. I especially liked the idea that the ghosts feed off of fear, and when they need a quick hit, they drop in on people who are watching the news.

You might be saying, “But it’s only 18 pages long! Can it really be worth it?” Comes the reply: yes, it can. I read it in one evening and found myself chuckling the whole time. Sure, it’s a short read, but every minute spent reading it is fun, and that’s what matters.

Ghosted is a perfect fun supernatural story to read when you want a good laugh. As usual, Lydia is right on the money!

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Imagine a series about a school for sorcerers. Imagine that it involves an evil sorcerer, returned from a death-like state by his cult of followers. Now imagine that this sorcerer takes over the sorcerer school, and starts using it to instruct young magically-inclined persons in the ways of dark magic.

But! All is not lost. For there is a hero, chosen by prophecy, to fight back against the evil wizard and his minions.

This is of course a perfectly screwball premise for a zany comedy, and who better than Zachary Shatzer to do such a silly concept justice?  This is the third book in Shatzer’s Sorcerers series, and perhaps the craziest one yet. By this point, the Incompetent Hero’s penchant for triumphing through his own stupidity has become so well-known that various factions actively try to to harness it for their own ends. And he rarely disappoints; bumbling his way through multiple assassination attempts, barracuda attacks, and other assorted misfortunes that will come as no surprise to readers of the first two books.

Last year, I reviewed the book The Stench of Honolulu by Jack Handey, which Shatzer considers the funniest book he has ever read. I realize now that his Sorcerers series is very much in the same vein, with much of the comedy coming from the self-absorbed and careless main character spreading chaos wherever he goes.

I don’t know if Shatzer plans to write more in this series, but if he plans to keep it to a convenient trilogy form, then I must say that I think this one ends in a way that seems entirely appropriate for the buffoonish protagonist. After his more ambitious The Hero and The Tyrant, this volume is like a light-hearted satyr play. The premise I outlined above might not work as (for example) the culmination of a serious and sprawling story, but as a wacky comedy, it is just the ticket.

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If you don’t know by now that I’m a fan of Adam Bertocci’s fiction… well, I guess you’ll just have to read this review, and then you will.

Crappy Valentine’s Day is about a young woman in New York City who just wants to have a nice day. Not a romance or anything; just a pleasant day at home. But those hopes are dashed when her boss calls and asks her to come into the office to run a focus group session. As fate would have it, it’s for a dating service.

What follows is an interesting discussion of the different expectations men and women have for each other, as well as Bertocci’s hallmark, the emptiness of the careers most millennials find themselves in.

But Becca’s day doesn’t end there; not by a long shot. Valentine’s Day still has some surprises in store for her, and not just because of her cat, Boots, either.

This story is like a companion piece to Bertocci’s wonderful Samantha, 25, on October 31. That one is a more in-depth treatment of a young millennial adrift in the city, (as well as a cat with an attitude) but this book also has plenty of his trademark wit and charm.

If you haven’t read any Bertocci, despite my prior exhortations, then this is a good introduction to his style. And if you are a devoted Bertocci-head like me, this feels like a visit from an old friend. Either way, I recommend it.

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In my undergraduate poli sci classes, they told us that Aristotle defined three forms of government: rule by the one, rule by the few, and rule by the many. Of these, each came in good and bad flavors, so the good version of rule by the one is “monarchy” and the bad version is “tyranny.”

As the title suggests, Zachary Shatzer’s latest comic novel concerns itself with the latter, and we are quickly introduced to the land of Kragolia, which is ruled with an iron fist by the Grimheart family.

But within a few pages, the reigning Dictator and his eldest son perish in the course of terrorizing the population, and the role of dictator falls to Trin, the younger son, who is a mild lad with no appetite for cruelty. However, he is quickly urged on to more tyrannical acts by the senior advisor to the dictator, Mysborn.

Ah, Mysborn! One of the most interesting characters in the story, because he is a classic archetype from history. From Michael Psellus to Talleyrand, the figure of the clever, manipulative advisor is a familiar one. For fictional equivalents, see Grima Wormtongue or Sir Humphrey Appleby.  Mysborn is a man who uses deceit and manipulation to get his way.

At first, he thinks he’ll easily have his way with the soft-hearted Trin, but the reluctant dictator refuses to oppress the people. Eventually, he decides to sneak out of the castle, along with his faithful manservant Malcolm, and see the kingdom for himself.

Meanwhile, the people of Kragolia, led by a woman named Gail, are contemplating rebellion against the oppressive regime. But they’re not very optimistic about their chances, since the military might of the Empire seems overwhelming. That is, until a mysterious hero named Eric Strongbow appears, and rallies the resistance with his bravery, not to mention his good looks. He looks like “a conquering hero, but not the kind of conquering hero who had let his victories go to his head. No, his appearance was that of an easygoing sort of conquering hero. The kind you could make a mild joke about without fear that he would be obliged to slice open your torso to restore his sense of honor.”

I have to say it: men, what’s stopping you from looking like this?

As with all his books, Shatzer’s humorous prose sparkles throughout, and I love the style of the narration. It’s a sort of distant third-person tale, with occasional reminders that we are, in fact, being told a story, as the omniscient narrator makes frequent parenthetical asides. This style of storytelling has fallen out of favor lately, and I think it’s high time it made a comeback.

The thing that makes this book great, right up there with Shatzer’s wonderful Beach Wizard, is that it has a real emotional core to it. The scenes with Trin and his mother are perhaps the most poignant, although there are several others. While the book has a jolly tone, Shatzer is never afraid to shy away from moments of true emotion, and that gives it a certain weight that so many humorous stories lack.

For this is more than just a silly comedic adventure. It is also a commentary on government. Dare I say, it’s a kind of mirror for princes, meant to instruct on the virtues that make a hero and warn against the vices that make a tyrant. The contrast between the cruelty of Mysborn and the Grimheart regime vs. the heroism of Eric Strongbow is the distillation of the difference between Aristotle’s good and bad forms of government.

This is a wonderful story. On Twitter, I said it was “like if P.G. Wodehouse wrote fantasy,” and I’m hard-pressed to think of higher praise. Shatzer is a national treasure. (Admittedly, I don’t know what nation he resides in, but whichever one it is, he’s a treasure of it.) And I wish like anything I could persuade more people to read his books.

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What can I say about Shatzer’s works that I haven’t said already? Well, at a minimum, he’s prolific. This is the fifth book of his that I’ve reviewed this year, and it contains all the elements I’ve come to enjoy in his work: zany magical mishaps, oddball characters, and usually at least one book-within-a-book.

Actually, The Cowboy Sorcerer itself started out as a book-within-a-book. The title is referenced in Shatzer’s Sorcerers Wanted. In my review of that volume, I desperately wished that it was a real book, and now ta-da! It is. Sometimes wishes do come true. Noah Goats said that books lead on to books, and that certainly is the case with Shatzer’s rapidly-expanding oeuvre.

The Cowboy Sorcerer is in some ways an echo of some of Shatzer’s other great characters. There’s more than a little of Ebbius from The Beach Wizard in the stoic sorcerer who arrives in the town of Destiny’s Crack, searching for a vampire. The way Shatzer riffs on these concepts in different ways throughout his books is one of the pleasures of reading his work. He’s like Wodehouse in that respect; similar situations and characters recur, but we never get tired of reading about them, because of the light and entertaining way he tells the story.

If you’ve already been reading Shatzer, then you probably already picked this book up the second you saw it existed, and don’t need any further convincing. But if you are new to his books, then this is as good an introduction as any.

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Zachary Shatzer recommended this book to me. He called it the funniest book he’s ever read. Well, when the author of some of the most gut-bustingly laugh-out-loud funny books around says something like that, you pay attention, no? So naturally, I had to get myself a copy.

It lived up to Shatzer’s billing. Indeed, the style of humor is much the same as his, though maybe a bit darker and raunchier, skewing more towards a hard PG-13. Still the dominant feeling is one of utter absurdity. Begin with the title: “the stench of Honolulu”. Since when does Honolulu have a stench? Well, in this book, Honolulu is depicted as a horrible place, decrepit and filthy.

Of course, the narrator is far from reliable. A strange, cowardly, narcissistic and paranoid individual, he is forced to accompany his “friend”–using the term loosely–on a quest to find a golden monkey statue said to be in the Hawaiian islands.

The book continues in this vein, with each escapade more bizarre than the last, including recurring violent yet inexplicably non-lethal encounters with a scientist who our narrator decides is evil. This is one of many running gags that just get funnier as the story goes on.

I could go on and on describing all the madcap episodes that form the bizarre journey, but honestly, you’re better off just reading the book. The hardest thing about reviewing a comedy, I find, is that it’s really impossible to explain why something is funny. You either get it or you don’t. Some people won’t get this, either, and that’s okay. But those who do get it are in for a zany and weird and hilarious ride. I’m very grateful to Mr. Shatzer for the recommendation.