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A dark-humored employee-angst novel, seasoned liberally with the Cthulhu Mythos. Spencer has a wonderful antic wit -- he reminds me of Thomas Disch, as in The Businessman. His hapless hero bounces from one dead-end job (Ralph's One-Day Resumes) to another (corporate giants with names like MicroMeg and Pelidyne), but he can't seem to get away from those monsters. Great scenes in which Xerox machines and fax machines and the industrial sprinklers they install overhead in offices interact with Lovecraft's Elder Gods. Lightweight, as horror novels go, but unusually good fun. Winner of the 1995 International Horror Critics Guild Award for Best Novel.
From Publishers Weekly
Word processor Philip Kenan is not just stuck in a series of dead-end jobs in this satirical novel, but trapped in delusional fantasies about undead co-workers and monsters from the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft as well. An unsuccessful novelist himself, Philip possesses an imagination that creeps out of the shadows and sucks up quotidian reality like a B-movie alien, a quality appreciated by neither his ex-girlfriend nor his semiretired therapist, much less by conventional employers. As Philip struggles with temping, therapy and a new love affair, his sanity gradually crumbles to reveal a far more bizarre universe than that in his unpublishable manuscript. Spencer's goofy conceit of an office-life horror novel spoof is kept afloat by a cast of eccentric co-workers at Ralph's One-Day Resumes and the Pelidyne Corporation, easy cracks about data entry and some ingenious narrative tricks (a flashback related as an out-of-body experience, for example). Although this oddball work is often appealing, Spencer (The Return of Count Electric) ultimately fails to unite satisfactorily the workplace comedy and Philip's deranged imagination.
A dark-humored employee-angst novel, seasoned liberally with the Cthulhu Mythos. Spencer has a wonderful antic wit -- he reminds me of Thomas Disch, as in The Businessman. His hapless hero bounces from one dead-end job (Ralph's One-Day Resumes) to another (corporate giants with names like MicroMeg and Pelidyne), but he can't seem to get away from those monsters. Great scenes in which Xerox machines and fax machines and the industrial sprinklers they install overhead in offices interact with Lovecraft's Elder Gods. Lightweight, as horror novels go, but unusually good fun. Winner of the 1995 International Horror Critics Guild Award for Best Novel.
From Publishers Weekly
Word processor Philip Kenan is not just stuck in a series of dead-end jobs in this satirical novel, but trapped in delusional fantasies about undead co-workers and monsters from the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft as well. An unsuccessful novelist himself, Philip possesses an imagination that creeps out of the shadows and sucks up quotidian reality like a B-movie alien, a quality appreciated by neither his ex-girlfriend nor his semiretired therapist, much less by conventional employers. As Philip struggles with temping, therapy and a new love affair, his sanity gradually crumbles to reveal a far more bizarre universe than that in his unpublishable manuscript. Spencer's goofy conceit of an office-life horror novel spoof is kept afloat by a cast of eccentric co-workers at Ralph's One-Day Resumes and the Pelidyne Corporation, easy cracks about data entry and some ingenious narrative tricks (a flashback related as an out-of-body experience, for example). Although this oddball work is often appealing, Spencer (The Return of Count Electric) ultimately fails to unite satisfactorily the workplace comedy and Philip's deranged imagination.
I enjoyed it, but I think I would have liked it more if I'd actually read Lovecraft.
This is a wonderful FUNNY pastiche of Lovecraft, and one of the best novels about work in America that I have ever read or heard of. I keep lending it to people, and they don't give it back!
