28 November 2011

My Fake War

My Fake WarIn a dystopian near-future, Saul Dressing's evening is interrupted to discover his forty-something, overweight ass has been drafted. Given no training, only a gun that can do everything, he is air-dropped into a desert country he's never heard of with orders to declare war on the population. Now, if he could only find someone...

From the way it started out, I was expecting a satire of the current U.S. geopolitical situation. The United States of Everything declaring war on every nation on earth provides a perfect analog to the U.S. government's policy in recent years to engage in as many
warskinetic military actions as it can handle. However, once you get past this bit of irony, the book goes nowhere quickly and resulted in a completely anticlimactic dud of an ending.

This is a trend I'm seeing in the four bizarro novellas I've read: The author comes up with a few unique, creative, and weird ideas, expands on these a bit, but then has no idea what to do with the actual plot, so s/he just rushes out an ending to finish the tale. This probably explains why most bizarro novels run in the 75–150 page range. I guess it comes down to whether or not you're a fan of the genre. If you are, then you'll probably love this book. If not, well... you probably won't be too surprised.

Available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million.

Title: My Fake War
Author: Andersen Prunty
Year: 2010
Pages: 112