Book Reviews (Fiction) The Everything Box

[FICTION]

The Everything Box

Richard Kadrey

Harper Voyager 369 Pages

A religious/mystical/historical artifact desperately desired by disparate groups of people willing to stop at nothing to acquire it. This has been the plot engine behind everything from The Maltese Falcon to Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Now, writer/photographer Richard Kadrey tries his hand at something also done before in Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Not to mention the humorous apocalypses of Douglas Adams and Christopher Moore...

A Los Angeles cat burglar named Charlie “Coop” Cooper - a specialist in purloining magical objects - steals and delivers a small box to the mysterious client who engaged his services. Coop doesn’t know that his latest job could be the end of him - and the world as well.

What follows is madcap mayhem of confusion and double-cross straight out of the pages of Elmore Leonard and Thomas Perry. For a secret US government agency called the Department of Peculiar science coerces Coop to steal the box right back. The problem being of too many cooks; two doomsday cults trying to get the box so they can trigger the apocalypse, criminals who want to sell the box for money, a mysterious stranger who only brings destruction in his wake, and the angel Qaphsiel, who misplaced the box in the first place, trying to get it back.

A knockabout comedy of errors enlivened by dark wit and a large cast of buffoonish characters, The Everything Box can be occasionally exhausting to the reader in the repetitive disasters that the hapless characters keep lurching towards. The increasingly absurd events in this book best exemplify Murphy’s Law – “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”

Anything can happen in the hilarious pages of this ludicrous caper novel shot through with magical realism – and quite often does!

Comments

Book Review (Fiction) In The Valley OF Shadows

In The Valley Of Shadows Abhay Narayan Sapru Chlorophyll Books 2017 170 Pages The long guerrilla war waged against the British state by the IRA in Northern Ireland spawned a new literary sub-genre, “the troubles thriller” as practiced by authors such as Chris Petit ( The Psalm Killer ), Stephen Leather ( The Chinaman , The Bombmaker ) and Gerald Seymour ( Harry’s Game , Field Of Blood ) . The current conflict in Kashmir, with Pakistan-sponsored terrorist proxies attempting to wrest the state away from India, seems all set to follow suit . Some of the growing tribe of authors in this nascent sub-genre have backgrounds in journalism covering the valley or have actually served in the Indian Army there. ...

Short Story - The Dog Defenders

The Dog Defenders “The dogs have gone to their kin, the sons of dogs,” growled the Pathan scornfully. He had reasons for his displeasure. The prowling pack of pi-dogs that patrolled the main portal of the fort ranged in colour from a dirty jaundice-yellow to the dull khaki of the native regiment that manned it. These animals made surprise attacks and incursions difficult. A long time ago, a kindly cook from a bygone regiment had set out boiled leftover scraps from the cookhouse in a large terracotta plate for the dogs. This individual act of charity had since become a tradition set in stone. In the customary way of the Indian Army, cooks from the regiments that followed had continued the practice. They had even extended it, by adding a crude trough that was periodically filled with the dishwater left after cleaning utensils used in the mess. The dogs, while not allowed within the precincts of the fort, were very grateful for this particular amenity. Especially during ...

Article: Pressing Concerns

I once rented an apartment in a pleasant residential block of flats in Dwarka sub-city, National Capital Region. The residents’ homes there were all equipped with washing machines that took care of the laundry. However, that still left the problem of the ironing. The busy working couples inhabiting the society seldom had the leisure or the stamina to perform this seemingly minor chore at the close of an often exhausting day. And as neatly pressed clothes were essential for a smart turnout in the office, the Residents Welfare Association misguidedly gave the contract for providing this service to a burly, surly native of eastern UP. Barrel-chested, with an incipient paunch to match, this gentleman gave the impression of resenting this employment as being beneath him. This was much too low; he was destined for greater things – which unfortunately never materialized (like Achche Din ). This resentment found expression in his “work”; he accepted clothes for pressing...

Words From Vaish

Search This Blog