I've enjoyed several of Mellick's Bizarro books, including Zombies and Shit and Ocean of Lard, so when I spotted this one at Better World Books I had to nab it.

As with most of the bizarro tales I've read, this one includes lots of violence, grossness, and weirdness - sometimes all at once - but it also has quite a bit of humor, some deliberate homages to anime tropes, and some darned good action scenes. The premise: top-level ninja Basu has to devour an immense number of calories per day to fend off the effects of a poison inflicted by his archenemy (and - of course - former friend). This has turned him into a 700-pound ninja who, despite his bulk, can still climb walls, hide - if he can find something large enough to hide behind - and commit serious mayhem on his targets. In this world it seems that ninjas all work for major high-tech corporations to commit industrial espionage and to prevent their rivals from doing the same. When Basu is assigned to find and retrieve a stolen "piggy bank" - and learns that it's a cast-iron robot in the form of a young boy, complete with personality - he finds himself torn about his duty... But in the meantime he kicks a lot of ass, stops blades with the ripples of fat on his torso, and visits his animesque girlfriend (she had her body sculpted to look like an anime character, huge eyes and super-deformed facial expressions and all) to get his iKatana reprogrammed. Yeah, it's a lot of fun!

I'm putting this into the Otherworldly bookbox, which will be on its way to its next stop soon. Enjoy!

This book rode to the end of the Otherworldly Book box. I sometimes struggle with bizarro fiction, but I'll give this one a go and see what I think!

Sent out as part of the wishlist tag game

A man that is more round

than he is tall,
will roll you to your doom.

I have a thing for Bizarro Fiction. I'm pretty strange myself though. :)

I think if I ever get around to writing a book for publication, I think I'd go for Bizarro fiction. It's just too much opportunity for creativity and fun.

Bizarro fiction is often short. More like novellas than books, really. You can see where the book could have/should have been fleshed out some but wasn't. I liked a lot of aspects of story line, like ninjas protecting corporations and especially the piggy bank.

What disappointed me was the macho bull that took the place of what could have been a much more full fleshed main character (pun intended).

Instead, when he gets around his anime girlfriend, he's happy to use her but never gave a damn about her and there's nothing there when she dies. What a load of crap. That ruined it for me. Didn't need to go all 'women's fiction' but drop the male fantasy bull. It went out with the superhero cowboy culture of the 1950's.

(Case in point, the author was fine for using her as a selling point on the cover of the book, but is nothing but bait and switch)

Other than that whole big pile of dog crap, the rest of the story was fun.

There was someone that really wanted to read this. :)

So off it goes! ;)

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