Author: Vincenzo Bilof
Publisher: Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing
Rating: WARTY!
I can't tell you what this novel was about because this was, without any shadow of a question of a doubt, the most incoherent novel I've ever read. I made it about a quarter of the way in and I still had no idea what was going on or why. I mean it made no sense at all. It was not even remotely coherent. It was literally a mess because it had collapsed under the weight of its own pretension.
We all know it's the job of a book blurb to lie, and lie well, so the only way I can review this effectively is to take the blurb apart. Even the blurb is rather incoherent. We're told, "Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke meets Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood meets an episode of HBO’s old, late night series Real Sex meets the movie Death Becomes Her meets Condoleeza Rice’s collection of unflushed tampons." Yeah, that does kind of describe it (if they'd spelled Rice's name correctly), but I don't mean that as a compliment. If you're a Chuck Pahlaniuk fan, I still suspect that you'll find this so far out in left field that you need binoculars and a lot of patience to get a glimpse of it.
The blurb asserts that time is infinite, which I know Einstein would disagree with if he were alive and could be bothered. The publisher's website gets it right: it's imagination that's infinite! I confess I was drawn to this because the title was so outrageous, but the title is all that this novel has going for it. I honestly don't think I'm going to request any more books based on how outrageous the title is, although I do have a print book on my shelf awaiting my attention which can compete with this one! I mean that's a cheap shot to offer something that irresistible up front, and then not deliver between the covers. I've sure lots of us have had dates like that.
I was hoping for funny, but that wasn't available in this color. The blurb tells us that "the beautiful and sultry Rene leads her trio of vampire strippers from (around) Saturn to destroy Earth" I have no idea how they plan on destroying it - strip (mine) it to death? There was certainly no destroying going on in the portion I read - unless you count my brain cells. So many of those suffered that my nervous system set up a charity for them. The feverish attempt by my mind to flush the memory of this completely from my system obviously worked rather well though; just a few days after I read it, I've pretty much forgotten everything I'd read. They say that happens when your mind is traumatized. It's a healthy defensive mechanism.
Even the blurb is incoherent, though. Check this out: "...if the vampire strippers fail to destroy the world now, men will be nearly extinct, and women will be hunted for sport by the surviving males." If they fail to destroy the world, men will be nearly extinct? Does that imply that if they don't destroy the world, men will be completely extinct? Definitely a whisky tango foxtrot moment there. How will men hunt women for sport if the men are in the tiny minority? No earth woman will allow that to happen! It's more likely to be the other way around (religiously oppressed women excepted, of course, but I won't guarantee even that).
I can't in good faith recommend this rambling nonsense. On the contrary, I heartily dis-recommend it, as I am sure my parallel selves are doing at this very moment in all parallel universes.
