Book Reviews [Fiction] The Everything Box

The Everything Box

Richard Kadrey

Harper Voyager 2017 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!

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