Victor Gischler

Victor Geishel does it again. Rollicking good noir. Morgan, a visiting professor at a Midwestern university (Geishel assures his colleagues it certainly NOT the one where he teaches creative literature,) wakes up naked next to a young coed he bonked the night before. Problem is she's not waking up having been given some pills by her weed dealer that should really not have been taken with all that alcohol.

Morgan's also teaching poetry to some grad students, one paper he is forced to read and show more grade is entitled, "The Fallible Quiescence of a Wrathful Jehovah." He despises his students, the Dean, the faculty, and especially Fred Jones who just gave the school lots of money and in return expects his ostensibly awful poetry to get published in their third-rate literary journal. But Fred Jones, it turns out, wants to help with relocating the dead girl.

And one Harold Jencks decides to impersonate a student his buddy just killed who was on his way to Eastern Oklahoma to study poetry. The school desperately needed some diversity. On a campus of 8,000 they had 5 black students, "Granted it had been hard to attract black students after the lynching."

There are some priceless quotes. During a faculty party, one professor starts a tirade on Finnegan's Wake: "You Irish folk have been skating on Joyce for too long. Finnegan's Wake is bullshit. Everyone knows it's bullshit. Joyce knew it was bullshit when he wrote it. Now get out of my face, you ridiculous little tit." This particular Joycean had "hitched himself to the James Joyce bandwagon and never looked back. He fully enjoyed the massive safety of James Joyce studies and relentlessly needled "fringe" scholarship as new wave, multicultural, carnival acts." But another professor gets so pissed at this comment that he hides in the bushes, waits till the prof rides by on his bicycle (in ridiculous spandex that "scrunched up his nuts," and throws a copy of Finnegan's Wake into his spokes, sending the rider head-over-heels into a concrete fountain. "I thought I'd killed him. I could have fucked up my whole life. I'm up for tenure next year. You can't get tenure if you kill a guy." "No, it's not like the old days." Morgan replied.

Or the conference they attend: The Thirteenth Annual International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Humanities and Fine Arts was something special. Scholars and writers from all fifty states and twenty-two countries stampeded like hyper-caffeinated lemmings to the host city, where they delivered mind-numbingly complex papers on obscure subjects in their desperate bids to rack up points toward tenure. Morgan had been to more than one panel where the panelists outnumbered the audience.. . .[He had to chose between:] Homosexual Transmogrification in Androgynous Eighties Techno-Pop or Pimple and Blemish Imagery in Victorian Fiction.

The story comes to a smashing conclusion at the college's annual poetry reading during a blinding blizzard where a graduate who has had poetry accepted by such luminous publications as Word Junkie, Gas-Hole, and Pea-Pickin' Potpourri " wove his poems like elaborate spells designed by some evil wizard to suck all that was interesting and beautiful out of life. . . .If his poems had been a meal, it would have been a plate of wet cardboard." Meanwhile, the Dean's silk panties "were so far up his ass, he had tears in his eyes."

I'm going to make it a point to read everything Geishel writes. show less

Great opening line:
“I turned the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer’s headless body in the trunk, and all the time I’m thinking I should’ve put some plastic down.”

Poor Charlie. His boss is being squeezed out by a guy from Miami, all his buddies are dead, and his workplace has been burned to the ground. And he is running around trying to find out what happened and why! And the answers are none too forthcoming!

A quick paced, action-filled read! A good main show more character, and an even better supporting character in the "New Guy"! And I very much enjoyed the killing scene set to Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line"! That added quite a bit of corpses to an already high body count in this book! I liked the ending too!
Maybe I'll check out the movie next... show less

My first Gischler book.

His lead character Charlie Swift is a National Geographic-loving killer, whose girlfriend is a taxidermist. ..:)

I believe one has always to start at the beginning. He proves, should anyone have any doubts, that exceptional prose can turn the merely ordinary into an extraordinary winner.

Gischler's prose is charged with kinetic energy and it’s darkly funny.

Narrated in the first person, Gischler’s writing is contextually real and simply, deliciously, show more hilarious. From the opening sentence, which has to rank as one of the best openers ever, “Gun Monkeys” delivers a fresh take on good old-fashioned sleaze, written with great style, enormous energy and even greater wit.
Noir Crime Fiction at its best.
PS. Almost everybody he meets gets bumped off and the body count by the end of the book is in war movie territory… show less

Author Victor Gischler put together a book that reads like an R-rated Douglas Adams novel complete with Adams' humor, yet at times a bitter accounting of Man's last days on earth. This post-apocalyptic novel has a catchy title for sure, and the hot woman with an assault rifle on the cover would make any red-blooded American want to read this book.

There are so many crazy coincidences and odd happenings that make the world end that you would not fathom it. It breaks the envelope of credulity, show more for sure. A terrorist nukes Washington and a major earthquake ruptures the west coast and at the same time World War III happens in China, Russia and Europe. Everything goes to hell all at once.

Except for our former insurance salesman and (we think) divorced husband who has been holed up for nine years in a well-stocked cave somewhere in Tennessee, a state that still has some sense of normalcy -- if you don't count the Red Stripe gangs and the slaves on bikes.

Interesting society: One side ruled by The Red Czar, who rules with an iron hand has gathered all the gangs into one large gangland. On the other side we have Johnny Armageddon and his Go Go clubs, that are really nothing more than a "titty & bar" show (which Johnny denies of course).

The book makes interesting premise as to the different kinds of society here -- capitalism on Johnny's side and a military dictatorship on the other. Each plans the others' demise and Mortimer is the pawn that both sides attempt to use to wipe out the other.

At times the story is tedious, especially the relationships between Ann, his former wife, and Mortimer. Also the subplot of slavery, with men riding bicycles to generate electricity was kinda silly -- there were solar panels around and someone was starting to refine oil again -- as was the convoluted war between the two factions towards the end of the book.

It's not a bad book by any means and reads rather quickly, if somewhat violently. A bit of graphic sex and lots and lots of drinking and vomiting ensue between plot points, just to warn ya!

Are we heading to a future where the buck rules and the girls are hot? Read the book and find out!

Other Novels by Victor Gischler:

To the Devil, My Regards
Shotgun Opera
The Deputy show less