Release Date: 6/22/2010

So Harper Collins kindly sent me a review copy of Larry Doyle’s latest book, Go, Mutants! Doyle previously wrote I Love You, Beth Cooper. He’s also a television writer with The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead to his credit, which might have given me insight into what I was about to get into, had I thought about it.

Mutants! quirky premise, a world where monsters from 50’s B-movies were real and their offspring now populate high-school, promised to be a hilarious read.  And it was, sort of.  The novel mirrored its B-movie inspiration, putting forth a mix of truly great moments and equally horrid moments.  The protagonist, J!m (the blue son of an invading big-brained alien) provided dry amusement throughout, but the narrative was a hodgepodge of painful puns à la Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, some truly witty laugh-out-loud moments, and excruciatingly low juvenile humor.  The writing style is a hodgepodge as well, veering back and forth between normal prose and movie-script, reminding the reader, as if the reader might forget, that the strange tale being read owes its existence to early horror movies.

Besides a blue, teenaged alien wannabe rebel, Mutants! also features a sentient slime blob, a radioactive man-ape, and an assortment of aliens, mutants and mad scientists.  Poking fun at the absurdity of high school and B-movies both, the novel is full of oddity and weirdness, and the end is no less twisted.  Proving just how crazy this tale is, the main character dies well before the end of the book (No, that’s not a spoiler; the narrative constantly hits the reader over the head with blunt two-by-four foretelling of J!m’s imminent demise).

It’s not a book I would reread; there are face-constricting moments I do not want to relive.  Yet if you’re a fan of alternative history, strange worlds, B-movies – or even just the tv shows for which Doyle has written – it’s worth a glance to see if you can take the groans along with the laughs.

A website was also set up for the title Go, Mutants! and can be found here.