The Shroud of the Thwacker

It's Chris Elliot...most people love him or hate him. This book is ridiculous and absurd in all the right ways as far as I'm concerned. If you don't find Elliot funny, you will hate this book. I love him. ( )

http://www.cozylittlebookjournal.com/2006/02/shroud-of-thwacker-by-chris-elliott...

Sooo funny. One review said he does for historical mystery what Douglas Adams did for science fiction...and I have to agree. I love that he just made up all the historical research (like gas-powered wooden cell phones).

I hope he keeps writing. He's a much funnier writer than he is an actor or comedian.

And I love the ridiculous "19th century sounding descriptive chapter titles! ( )

What a mess of a book. I could not finish it--totally silly and the plot was just not that interesting. ( )

It’s gonna be hard to give two craps about this book and review if the following do not apply to you:

–You have a mild crush on a balding man who used to write jokes for David Letterman.
–You read and had a violent reaction to Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper — Case Closed, in which she pins the Whitechapel murders on a famous painter, using less hard proof than I use when I look at my nine cats, the hairball befouling the living room carpet and decide Wooster did it on the basis of his twitchy whiskers (actually, this is a mildly unfair assessment – if the wad of wet fur is white, it was undoubtedly Wooster).
–You read and found interminable Caleb Carr’s The Alienist.
–You read and were largely ambivalent about The Da Vinci Code.
–You find puerile humor as hi-larious as I do.
–You embrace the ridiculous more than anyone else you know.

read the rest of the review here: http://ireadeverything.com/?p=70 ( )

Chris Elliot's first 'novel' is written with the same surreal sense of humor as Get a Life and Cabin Boy. Chances are if you liked those, you will enjoy his fiction as well. The book was chock full of bizarre, laugh out loud moments for me.

At the same time I do think that the story was so silly that it was a bit of a strain carrying it on for three hundred and sixty eight pages. I loved the lunacy of his writing and would have to say that for me it stayed consistently funny throughout, but I think his fiction would work better in a book of short stories. ( )