Erika Lopez, “They Call Me Mad Dog!”
Shelving books in the store can get pretty mind numbing, particularly since I don’t need to hum the alphabet song in order to figure out where a book should be placed. So on these days where there is a lot to put away, my mind starts to wander.
It was around the end of December, and I was thinking about what book I wanted to read for the first of the year. I hadn’t really thought about this before, with the exception of the Kevin Murphy book in 2003. But, for whatever reason, I wanted the book that I started this year with to have a statement. A message. A summary of how I felt.
So while I was shelving I looked at the book in my hand. When I saw the subtitle, I turned around and bought it.
The subtitle reads, “A novel for bitter, lonely people.”
There’s a lot about the book, based on appearance alone, that could make me hate this. It’s written out in handwriting instead of regular typeface, and it has things like pseudo-smudges and things crossed out or written over.
I generally don’t like these kinds of gimmicks. To me it’s like a band like Gwar, or someone of their ilk who do lots of things like blow fire or smash things or whatever to try and shock people — most of the time it feels like they’re doing it to distract you from the fact that they suck as musicians.
But it is possible for a band to do all the outrageous things and be good musicians, and it is possible for the book to have al this quirkiness and be an excellent novel.
Although it’s kind of odd calling this a novel — it reads almost like a blog except that it’s laugh out loud funny, and it’s totally filthy.
So am I, so you can see why I liked it. And now there’s yet another author that I’m going to have to pick up all her other books. This is why I’ll never catch up.
I can see why it’s for the bitter and the lonely — it’s so hysterically funny that you forget your own problems. I certainly did.
But I’ve since finished it.
Sigh.
