Minister Faust

Afro-Canadian political activist, poet, and playwright Minister Faust's first novel, The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad, begins at the end. Protagonist Hamza Achmed Qebhsennuf Senesert, a disenfranchised twentysomething living in 1995 Edmonton (E-Town as he calls it), freely admits, "In advance, shut up. I know epilogues go at the end." The opening is the most conventional piece of this nonlinear novel.

Hamza and his best friend/roommate Yeh (Yehat Bartholomew Gerbles) are the Coyote Kings. Steeped in the world of pop culture, the Coyotes see everything within those terms. Comic books, Star Trek, science fiction movies, Philip K. Dick, and much more obscure references litter the prose.

Faust's humorous novel is not merely a collection of cultural trivia. He has produced a well-conceived story about redemption, friendship, and the possible end of the world with heaping samples of politics and religion thrown in. For the most part, the characters are divided into amusing protagonists and singular antagonists. The Fanboys, a collection of five geeks, are the extreme revenge for anyone who was ever picked on as a child for being different. Their employer, an ex-jock and successful entrepreneur, devises a plan for metaphysical Armageddon. Hamza's girlfriend – an enigma who worships Alan Moore, can accurately and appropriately quote Star Wars, and is given to erratic and sometimes dangerous behavior – is the one person who can stop the diabolical scheme.

With an attention to detail and an eye for the absurd, it is as if Faust channeled Mark Twain to write a Neal Stephenson novel. Although flawed – the plot unveils too slowly, and there are too many viewpoints – The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad explodes off the page as an intelligent, fun-filled pop-culture adventure.

(This review originally appeared in The Austin Chronicle, August 20, 2004.)
Link: [http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/review?oid=oid:225323]… (altro)

My essential ethos with book recommending has been to let bad book fall into the obscurity they so richly deserve--any kind of attention a terrible book gets fans that spark of interest in it... and there are so many good books out there deserving of attention and praise.
So, I hardly (I think never) rate a book 1 star. I just leave it off the radar-you won't know I even read it.

But in the case of this book I have to make an exception.

Having read the delightful "Soon I will be Invincible" by Austin Grossman, I was disturbed by how poorly written this book was.

The tone was hackneyed and uneven; little episodic bursts meant, I guess, to emulate the "In the Meantime" of comic book narrative.
Like Grossman's novel there are allusions to existing superhero characters (Brotherfly = Spiderman, The Flying Squirrel = Batman)and teams, cute creator names-as-locations (Los Diktos), but what derails this book is a sense of agenda--I don't know if Faust means this as an homage to comic book culture or a bitch-slap wake-up call; there's an almost Scientologist-like glee in messing with the processes of psychoanalysis; a weak, ham-fisted attempt at addressing the racist mis-steps of Comic Books of yore. Ultimately ideas are retread again and again into flatness, ludicrousness.

The spur of my writing this was it's mind-boggling runner-up status for this Year Philip K. Dick Award. This book shouldn't have been on a short list, let alone a long one. I feel that Faust's editor should've sat him down and helped him trim the manuscript, tighten the narrative, and brush off that chip on his should before finalizing the book.… (altro)

Current-day sci-fi set in Edmonton, Canada, of all places. Sci-fi fanboys of various stripes mingle with some mythological (Egyptian (the good guys) or Norse (the bad guys)) forces. The actual end-of-the-world consequences are never fully explained, but suffice to say that the story posits a very much more sinister conception of the crack conspiracy theory than most you've heard. Told in a variety of voices, some almost too distinctly in character and others not quite distinct enough--people need to learn not to borrow from Faulkner's toolbox until they really know what they're doing. But the heroes are loveable, and the book does come closer to answering the question "what if ordinary people were caught up in a sci-fi/fantasy adventure" than many others I've tried.… (altro)