Yeah, I think I'm pretty firmly a Julia Elliott fangirl. This book had me continuously laughing out loud with its Southern gothic absurdity, sardonic academese, gore and horror, King Crimson references, recreational use of pharmaceuticals, taxidermic dioramas, bioengineering, animatronics...jeez, Lord Tusky! The Panopticon! Just the fen of Elliott's lurid prose... In ways, it had elements of Moby Dick, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it was all its own. I loved how it began, how it slipped into madness, all its endings. I had no real grasp of where it would go and didn't give a good goddamn. Fun, crude, hilarious. ( )

A tremendous amount of fun. A witty, postmodern Southern sci-fi Gothic that matches a backwoods taxidermist with a scientifically reborn brain against his genetically engineered porcine counterpart. I'm checking the 'recommend' box on Romie Futch next to quite a few of my friends' names. ( )

A wonderfully surreal book that balances humor, loneliness, heartache, and science fiction with a deft hand. The tone runs a ridge never faltering to the side of lampooning or belittling. There is a river of warmth that burbles along beneath the conspiracy, paranoia, and disconnection. I will definitely search out more of Elliott's work. ( )

a fun, psychedelic trip of a book, zany funny and hogwild. Enjoyable, readable prose, with a truly original plot. ( )

Julia Elliott is one of those underappreciated novelists I love to discover. I will be a Julia Elliott fan for life. I wanted to read something with a weird science theme, quirky, funny, fresh, full of pop culture. This book is all of those completely. Romie Futch is a taxidermist in South Carolina, pining over his ex-wife he met in middle school. He sees an ad for intelligence enhancement at the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia and signs himself up. Romie gets books downloaded into his brain with the help of nanobots. After the downloads, Romie combines his love of sculpture from high-school and his inherited taxidermy business to create "absurdist animatronic taxidermic dioramas". Awesome. Obviously if you write a book about geniuses, you must be a smart writer and Elliott is! Though written in first person, I thought there might be a difference in Romie's style pre and post downloads and would have liked to see a wildly different style of writing between the two. This might be explained by him trying to hide the intelligence enhancements from his friends when he returns from the lab. The experiments might be a little more darker than only enhancing intelligence... Then there is the giant flying hog. Elliott uses this book to satirize everything, but the redneck characters here are never cartoon caricatures of rednecks. Elliott emphasizes the dangers of science, though it was difficult to see where the science was going here(but maybe that was the point... aimless harmful science.) Plot points could have been stitched together better, but overall I adored this book. Elliott's writing is full and rich and detailed and just my thing. Books like this keep me alive! In the middle of reading this one, I had already ordered her short story collection 'The Wilds'.

This book reminded me of so many favorites. I'd love to see a list of Elliott's influences but in every interview she says there are too many. If you're a fan of Kelly Link and Karen Russell (even included in the narrative!) this is one that should be picked up! Here is a list of other books if you love this gem or if you loved any of these you'd probably love Romie (though this book is entirely unique!)
T.C. Boyle, Kiese Laymon, Victor LaValle ( I could swear there are elements from most of LaValle's books within Romie Futch)
Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer
The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac - Sharma Shields
Parasites Like Us - Adam Johnson
All the Birds, Singing - Evie Wyld
Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy ( )