Lucky Wander Boy
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Adam Pennyman is ruled by an obsession of his own creation: the Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments, an encyclopedic directory referencing every video game ever played. But his chronicling hits a snag when Adam realizes that no matter where he looks, he can find nothing about “Lucky Wander Boy,” the game that meant the world to him as a kid.
Then his luck starts to turn: A chance encounter lands him a copywriting job at Portal Entertainment, the monolithic media company that holds the film rights to the “Lucky Wander Boy” concept. Soon Adam embarks on a journey through the corporate sprawl of Hollywood that will ultimately lead him to the game’s beautiful creator, Araki Itachi. But even with the help of a plucky fellow game-head named Clio, such a reckless expedition will require the agility of Pac-Man, the nerves of Mario, and the tenacity of Frogger. Not to mention, a whole lot of luck.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although its disaffected hero is a walking repository of video game arcana, you don't have to know Galaga from Galaxian or Dig-Dug from Mr. Do to enjoy Weiss's ambitious but flawed first novel. Both a heartfelt paean to old-school video gaming and an angry, Chuck Palahniuk style exploration of contemporary anomie, the novel can be slyly postmodernist and surprisingly erudite. The literary and pop culture references come fast and furious, drawing from sources as offbeat and various as Shakespeare, Leonard Cohen and Donkey Kong. For protagonist Adam Pennyman, video games (that is, the simple, low-tech arcade classics of the early 1980s) are the perfect means of escape from a reality increasingly polluted by venality, hypocrisy and casual cruelty. While languishing in a dead-end position at Portal Entertainment, a lowbrow Los Angeles production company that proudly claims the video game based Eviscerator movie franchise as its top cash cow, Pennyman becomes fixated on writing the "Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments," a pseudo-intellectual treatise on the philosophical and transcendental merits of video gaming. He also develops an unhealthy obsession with Lucky Wander Boy, an obscure and surrealistic arcade game that no one seems to have ever beaten, and with Araki Itachi, its enigmatic female creator. Weiss adroitly sketches the claustrophobic confines of Pennyman's monomaniacal mindset, but is far less successful in fleshing out the men and women who share the stage with his tortured protagonist. Both Pennyman's lovers the dissatisfied Polish migr Anya and the hip, laconic Clio and his boss, culturally illiterate megacapitalist Kurt Krickstein, are flimsy, slapdash archetypes. Weiss further falters with some overly pretentious prose and muddled themes. Fortunately, his cleverly sardonic sense of humor (Pennyman mentally sorts a group of fellow Internet copywriters into "the thick and the dead") helps breathe life into this uneven but undeniably original tale.
