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Loading... Pest Controlby Bill Fitzhugh
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  grizzly.anderson | Aug 28, 2009 |  Really enjoyed reading this delightfully absurd novel. Bob Dillon is just an exterminator that gets mistaken for the newest assassin in the world, called The Exterminator. Now he has to try to stay alive by dodging the top 10 hit men (people) in the world., avoiding his landlord who wants his $320, and staying away from the CIA agents that try to convert him to their side. All this while starting his own pest control business and promising his wife that he will somehow get the rent money. Amusing case of mistaken identity. aallen66 | Jun 7, 2009 | Bob Dillon not to be confused with the singer/song writer Bob Dylan is an unemployed exterminator. Now that he doesn't have a steady paying job getting in his way, Bob begins to focus on his all natural, pesticide free form of pest control. Bob dreams of the day when he will own his own truck with a fiberglass bug adorning the roof. His wife Mary dreams of a steady paycheck to pay the rent and to put food on their table. In a weird series of events, Bob gets mixed up with some shady characters and is mistakenly viewed as an assasian. Some wild events unfold as Bob tries to find himself and aviod being exterminated along the way. Bill Fithugh's humor is in line with that of Christopher Moore. He creates some strange characters and puts them in some even stranger situations. Pest Control is an admirable first novel and is well worth the few hours it takes to read. Although the ending becomes somewhat predictable the character interactions lend itself to some laugh-out-loud moments. (  ) Ti99er | Dec 10, 2008 | What fun! This is especially fun having lived in New York City. It was a great book to read out loud. (  )1  Gwendydd | Jul 30, 2008 | This light novel is a romp through the life event/crisis of Bob Dillon, an exterminator (of insects) who gets mistaken by an international cartel of spies, governments, and security agencies as an exterminator of targets, an assassin. This confusion, through an almost believable set of circumstances, brings a cast of international assassins to New York to try and bump off Bob for a mix of reasons including a hefty bounty and/or ensuring Bob does not become the #1 ranked assassin in the world. Meanwhile, Bob is trying to keep his family finances afloat, with a teenage girl, and start a business where his pesticide are attack insects. With this much going on there's not a lot of time for the action to dampen. The premise of the book and the cast of characters keeps this from being a flop. The book was either published by a vanity press, it looks like, or with very little or poor editing. The book is filled with detours into treatises about entomology, big history, anecdotes, and academic information (including multiple Latin words and animal classifications) about insects. These are almost completely non-sequiturial and almost beg to be skipped. This begs to be made into a movie. Aside from Klaus, Bob's assassin-ally-protector, who is unbelievable and unrealistic, the other characters are a treat. Bob's nuclear family, the daughter and wife and emotional, pragmatic; daughter is touching but not maudlin. Almost pitch-perfect including a very funny run-in between the wife and a would-be burglar. If you can skip the dead spots and bug statistics, I'd recommend this as a light, syrupy fun book with a great premise. (  ) shawnd | Jul 9, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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| Book description |
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Bob Dillon just can't get a break. A down-on-his-luck exterminator, all he wants is his own truck with a giant fiberglass bug on top--and success with his radical new, environmentally friendly pest killing technique. So Bob decides to advertise.
Unfortunately, one of his flyers falls into the wrong hands. Marcel in Paris needs an assassin to handle a million dollar assignment, and he figures that Bob Dillon's his man. Through no fault--or participation--of his own, an unwitting bug-killer from Queens has become a major player in the shady world of contract murder. And now he's running for his life through the wormiest sections of the Big Apple--one step ahead of a Bolivian terminator, a homicidal transvestite dwarf, meat-headed CIA agents, cabbies packing serious heat...and the world's greatest hit man, who might just turn out to be the best friend Bob's got.
PROFESSIONAL EXTERMINATORBob Dillon just can't get a break. A down-on-his-luck exterminator, all he wants is his own truck with a giant fiberglass bug on top--and success with his radical new, environmentally friendly pest killing technique. So Bob decides to advertise.
Unfortunately, one of his flyers falls into the wrong hands. Marcel in Paris needs an assassin to handle a million dollar assignment, and he figures that Bob Dillon's his man. Through no fault--or participation--of his own, an unwitting bug-killer from Queens has become a major player in the shady world of contract murder. And now he's running for his life through the wormiest sections of the Big Apple--one step ahead of a Bolivian terminator, a homicidal transvestite dwarf, meat-headed CIA agents, cabbies packing serious heat...and the world's greatest hit man, who might just turn out to be the best friend Bob's got.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:17 -0400)
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Wikipedia in English
As Bob blunders his way through several attempts on his life on his way to pest-control nirvana, a truck with a giant fiberglass bug on top, he does manage to breed and try out several hybrid bugs, meet a number of interesting people who want to kill him, save his wife and daughter, evade his landlord and eventually escape from New York.
Along the way author Bill Fitzhugh makes a sizable number of song lyric puns and references, mostly to Dylan with occasional other artists like Warren Zevon thrown in. He also manages to convey that he did a lot of research about cockroaches and assassin bugs for this book by bludgeoning the the reader with detailed descriptions of the different species, their appearance and habits. Even so Pest Control is an amusing read, if a little gruesome towards the end. (