The Great Escape: Quirky Summer Reads

Are your vacation plans this summer limited to a plastic kiddie pool in your backyard? Do you wish you could find a way of temporarily and (cheaply) escaping your boring, everyday life? Why not join the pigeons of Test Group C, as they mambo back to their lab for unlimited sherry and cigarettes. Or uncover the secret of the dinosaurs' extinction (an intricate and guarded hoax). For these adventures and more, check out the writers below, who march to a different drummer. Marked by lots of humorous and frequently irreverent dialog, their novels are peopled with unusual characters trapped in ridiculous situations.

The bible of offbeat reads is Douglas Adams's intelligent and witty sf satire THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (Harmony: Crown. 1989. ISBN 0-517-54209-9. $18; pap. Ballantine. 1995. ISBN 0-345-39180-2. $7.50). Arthur Dent, grabbed from Earth just before a cosmic construction team destroys the planet to build a freeway, cruises the galaxy with his alien pal Ford Prefect. Dent finds himself causing comic chaos along the way, always caught up in some Monty Python–like trouble.

In Gordon Houghton's DAMNED IF YOU DO (Picador: St. Martin's. 2000. ISBN 0-312-26288-4. pap. $13), Death, a.k.a. the Grim Reaper, needs an assistant. Hence an unfortunate soul is yanked from his grave and embarks on his appointed rounds helping Death dispatch other unfortunates. Bored, Death gets creative in his methods of execution (ravenous ants, poisoned chocolates, bizarre accidents) while coworkers War, Pestilence, and Famine grumble about their boss and his policies, adding to the bizarre eternal predicament from which the narrator sees no escape.

Robin, the intrepid avian narrator of C.D. Payne's FRISCO PIGEON MAMBO (Aivia. 2000. ISBN 1-882647-24-6. pap. $12.95), describes life at Test Group C, where the captive birds are granted unlimited amounts of sherry and smokes from the Drag-O-Matic and listen to lovely lab assistant MaryAnne read passages from The Maltese Falcon. The boys...err...pigeons have it made until an animal-rights group whisks them away and frees them in downtown San Francisco. On their quest back to their lab paradise, the feathered refugees bum free drinks and cigarettes with flash-dazzling mambo moves in this uproariously funny romp.

Christopher Moore's BLOODSUCKING FIENDS: A LOVE STORY (Avon. 1996. ISBN 0-380-72813-3. pap. $12.95) is a tongue-in-cheek romance about lost love, lost blood, and lost souls. Waking up in a dumpster after being attacked, Jody realizes that the mugger has turned her into a vampire! The new Lady of the Night hooks up with grocery-store manager and wannabe writer Tommy, who spends his working hours surfing on a floor maintenance machine or bowling with frozen turkeys. Falling into a wacky relationship, Jody and Tommy endure the problems of living together, made even more difficult because Jody sleeps all day to avoid the sun. As the lovers argue and fuss, the big question is: Will Tommy cross over into the world of the Undead?

It seems we've been misled all these years about dinosaurs. They actually faked their extinction millions of years ago and have blended into the human race with the help of latex disguises. Vincent Rubio, private investigator and closeted velociraptor, stumbles onto a murder that leads to (gasp!) a plot to crossbreed humans and dinosaurs! As Vincent treads through the mean streets using deadpan humor as a weapon, the hard-boiled private-eye genre comes alive in ANONYMOUS REX by Eric Garcia (Prime Crime: Berkley. 2003. ISBN 0-425-18888-4. pap. $6.99; LJ 7/99).

B.B. Starr, former exotic dancer and present CEO of ExShell, hires Zachary Nixon Johnson, the last private detective on Earth, to find her missing robot double. Partnering with HARV, the dry-witted and extremely conceited superintelligent computer planted in Zach's brain, the duo track down the sexy, plutonium-powered android while dodging assassination attempts from an unknown enemy. John Zakour and Lawrence Ganem's THE PLUTONIUM BLONDE (DAW, dist. by Penguin. 2001. ISBN 0-7564-0006-6. pap. $6.99) offers an amusing blend of genres, saluting classic robot sf and noir detective pulps.

College students Ryan and Cass are both special and gifted—Ryan can turn into a fly, and Cass can make herself invisible. When they meet at the local diner, sparks fly—together they discover sex, cope with a dying parent, and locate a great vintage clothing store. As superheroes committed to social justice, the pair use their talents to subvert authority and battle huge cigarette corporations. In FLYBOY ACTION FIGURE COMES WITH GASMASK (Spike: Avon. 1999. ISBN 0-380-81043-3. pap. $12.50), Canadian Jim Munroe has written the perfect satire for the Gen Xers.

The hero of Carl Hiaasen's NATIVE TONGUE (Fawcett: Ballantine. 1992. ISBN 0-449-22118-0. pap. $7.50; LJ 9/1/91), ex-reporter-turned-slacker Joe Winder has taken a menial job as a PR flack at a Florida theme park run by a former mob rat and land developer, Francis X. Kingsbury. When rare blue-tongued voles are kidnapped from the park and destroyed, the public relations fiasco prompts a pistol-toting environmentalist granny to hold the kidnappers captive in her condo. Deducing that Kingsbury may be behind the vole-napping as part of an effort to scam the federal government, Joe sets out to take down Kingsbury's evil empire.