Attention-getting title, isn’t it?
Okay, so you’ve got two best friends, Hamza and Yehat, living in the center of a vibrant black community in Edmonton, Alberta. Yehat is a mad-genius inventor and confident horndog, Hamza is an intelligent would-be writer with an unexplained talent to find things, and who’s past has nailed him in place as a lowly dishwasher.
In the same city is a cult-like gang of violent social misfits, led by a brutal ex-football player in a scheme involving Norse mythology and a new drug that’s taking the place of crack cocaine: cream.
Into all of this strides Sheremnefer, a mysterious beauty with a hidden agenda, who sweeps Hamza off his feet with a smile and some well-timed Star Wars quotes, dragging him into a world of Egyptian mythology and lost magical artifacts.
Comic-book, TV, and movie references are brought up in every page, and many of the chapters start with a D&D character sheet with stats like “Armor Type: Tweed, ratty” and “Charisma: Steel or wooden, through windows, across rooms, into skulls, over spines and ribs”. There’s violence, sex, drug use, occasional misogyny, even some cannibalism, and the novel begins with the epilogue and ends with a prologue. It’s all a great big, splashy, over-the-top adventure story mess, and I think I’ve read the whole thing from cover-to-cover at least four times. I freakin’ love this book.
This book is, most importantly, a geek book. Those D&D Characters sheets? Just about every one includes a genre alignment showing which TV shows, comic book, or movie types they’re loyal to. Everyone talks in sci-fi quotes and metaphors pulled from a favorite move or series episode. The evil drug-dealing gang recruits new members with comic-book names and abilities. Hamza’s roommate is an MIT-level techie, and he spends his spare time building a (working) high-tech set of battle armor. And Hamza gets an inkling that he’s met the girl of his dreams when he sees her in a comic book store buying a copy of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. The love of everything sci-fi runs throughout the entire book
It’s also, yes, a book that’s almost completely centered around guys. There’s exactly one main female character; every other adult female in the book is basically an object of desire. And you know what? Didn’t bother me at all. Part of it I think is due to Minister Faust creating such a bizarre and fascinating cast. Each chapter is narrated from the point of view of one of eleven different characters, and every character has their own voice. Yehat throws in a lot of lists and percentages into his narration, while Hamza is poetic in spite of himself (especially when he’s depressed). Characters like The Mugatu and Alpha Cat only get one chapter apiece, which was kind of a relief; that sort of thing can get irritating, fast. And Dulles’s dial is constantly set on rage; he’s racist, sexist, and his own brand of foul-mouthed (profanity for Dulles mostly consists entirely of tacking the word “ass” onto everything). You get to see inside everyone’s head, and there’s just no time to focus on anything that might be excluded.
There’s also a pretty strict racial divide between the Good and Evil characters, and I would have felt excluded by that if this had been written by a different author. With Minister Faust, this is never a simple case of White versus Black, or Men versus Women. It’s entirely about Good and Bad people, and good and bad choices. The choice to take whatever you want without worrying about who you’re hurting, versus the choice to work a crappy job but then run a free summer camp for neighborhood children. The choice to do something with your life versus the choice to wallow in misery forever because of something admittedly awful in your past. The choice to be there for a friend and brother, and the choice to lie, for what may or may not be good reasons. There’s a lot of lying going on in this book; one of my favorite chapters centers around just how deeply one of the characters has been involved in the lies since before the story even started.
I think the main reason this book can appeal to so many people is because there’s literally something for everyone. Action, romance, comedy, horror. Poetry, and worrying about responsibility to the less fortunate, and then a practical joke with an intercom. At one point a purely terrifying chapter that takes place in a laboratory, one of those amazingly violent and yet creepy scenes that can be so hard to do well (Faust more than manages to pull it off), but earlier on there’s a shouting match where somebody angrily eats ice-cream sandwiches at someone else.
This book is weird, is what I’m saying. I might not have read this if my reading group hadn’t picked it; if I have a comfort zone when it comes to fantasy sci-fi, this would definitely been outside it. It’s definitely worth a read, especially since Minister Faust has released several new books and short stories in the last few years (for a while it was just this book and one other). I honestly can’t say I know what to expect from the rest of his writing, and I think that’s a pretty good recommendation for me to try his other books, since Lord knows from the title I didn’t have any idea what to expect from this one either.