Publisher Description
An outlandishly funny, unambiguously bloody novel about fame, love, religion, politics, and appetite
It is one thing to die, alone and confused, trapped with your pants down around your ankles in the filthiest bus restroom in existence. It’s quite another thing to wake up during the autopsy, attack the coroner, and flee into the wintry streets of Toronto.
It’s not like Sheldon Funk didn’t have enough on his plate. His last audition, for the reality television series House Bingo, had gone disastrously wrong. His mother was in the late stages of dementia. His savings were depleted, his agent couldn’t care less, and his boyfriend was little more than a nice set of abs. Now, Sheldon also has to contend with decomposition, the scent of the open grave, and an unending appetite for human flesh. Plus another audition in the morning.
For Sheldon to survive his death without literally falling apart at the seams, he has to find a way to balance family, career, and cannibalism, which would be a lot easier if he could stop eating hoboes. Husk, the story of the every zombie.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Actor and energetic narrator Sheldon Funk wakes up disoriented in a Toronto hospital, experiencing a barrage of sensations in sentences that unspool like free verse: A spark formed, gaily glittering in the all. Starting a process. Completing a chain. Commencing a reaction. Sheldon s distress may be understandable: he s dead, or more accurately, undead. This first-person perspective provides a neat twist, and the author cleverly divides his novel into sections corresponding to K bler-Ross s five stages of grief. This structure gives a semblance of motion to the plot, which is otherwise a series of one-joke encounters. During his odyssey from shock to acceptance, Sheldon auditions for a film part (as the casting director retches, the director, taken with the actor s strange delivery, calls him the next Chris Walken! ), visits his loopy mother, kills a few people, and meets with his abrasive agent, all while falling apart literally. Acceptance opens with a single expletive surrounded by white space and continues in that form with thoughts such as How long is eternity? That this is the best section of the book only proves that less is more. Pressing hard, Redekop s (Shelf Monkey) humor is hit-and-miss, though some of the hits are priceless.
