I'm over the blurb.Really.
Over it.
I mean, I really want to believe in the blurb, its endless sexy come on lines, but damn it...I've been lied to, cheated on, left in the rain without cab fare in the hinky part of town.
And yet, yet, I secretly still check the blurbs anyway. It's like checking my horoscope. When all is chaos I guess people will believe in anything, I suppose....
So, it was the blurb that made me pick up JACK FISH by J. Milligan, a blurb by (for my money) an atomic bomb blast of white hot crime intensity--James Ellroy:
"Dig it: Jack Fish is a wild ride through a groovy new novelist's imagination. It's juicy metaphor, hot satire and a boss meditation on media."
Wait a minute. James Ellroy? Blurbing a book I found... in the science fiction aisle? Did I snap through a quantum shift of existence?
No. And after devouring this outrageous novel I realized that JACK FISH didn't belong in sci fi at all. Ellroy was right, it is a satire. But it's more than that. It's a fantasy. It's a thriller. A love story. An assassin's lament. A book for older teens. A book for adults. No wonder the bookseller was confused.
Sent from the lost city of Atlantis grumpy leadership council, special agent Jack crawls out of the briny surf on a mission to kill a traitor to the undersea race, a man named Victor Sargasso. A Bond-like trained weapon below the waves, Jack is a pie-eyed innocent on land and struggles to blend in. He hides his webbed feet and gills and enters the cruel top world via Brooklyn, NY. Jack sustains himself with fish sticks and the miracle properties of Fierce Melon Gatorade. Betrayal, Atlantean spies, and danger lurk around every corner. It all leads up to show down in (the boyhood home of Jack Nicholson) Neptune, New Jersey!
Take one part Tom Robbins, two parts John Kennedy Toole, mix in a heavy dash of the Venture Brothers and your on the right track. This book is insane. You will laugh so hard people will inch away from you on the bus with palpable unease. My Friday forgotten book.