Corey Redekop

Employees of a big-box bookstore band together to combat bad taste in books, and its avatar, one Monroe Purvis, a talk show host who uses his book club (and publishing company) to promote utterly vacuous books; hilarity ensues.

Shelf Monkey is both fun and funny. The fun is in Redekop's continual allusions and borrowings -- you will have to be fearsomely well read to spot them all, and I'm sure I missed many. and the funny, of course, is in his razor-sharp satire of an age where art is show more "content," to be sold as so much sausage filling.

It's tempting to see Monroe Purvis as a stab at Oprah Winfrey, but he's more than that. Oprah, as even Monroe Purvis points out, actually reads some good books; she's used her position to encourage people to read Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Carson McCullers, among others. Purvis is something else again. His publishing company churns out what you might call literary anti-matter, unredeemably vile books dripping with contempt not only for their readers, but for reading itself.

Shelf Monkey is a quick, light read, but not one that you'll easily forget. show less

For starters, I usually prefer not to read books about our time. We live it. We are inundated with it. The news coverage is already overwhelming. The worse it gets out there, the more I long to reread Buddenbrooks.

However...occasionally a book overlaps so closely with my actual life that I not only bother reading it, I really enjoy reading it. (Wow - does that ever sound egocentric!)

Shelf Monkey is, delightfully, one of those. Although the narrator, megabookstore-employee Thomas Friesen, is show more almost painfully manic, his tastes, his book dreams and his book frustrations are similar to mine. I am even a bit of a shelf monkey myself, volunteering in a school library once a week. (Is anything more pathetic than a librarian wanna-be? We even inhabit the same loser-land.)

The premise of the book - bookstore staff jointly working up their frustrations to the point where they snatch an opportunity to attack a talk-show host cum purveyor of trash-fiction - is the set-up for a disquisition on the culture of reading as I guess is experienced by...dare I say it?...most, if not all LibraryThingers. The tone is hard and smart and funny. The story is sufficient unto itself - no padding. Hate padding!

I have promised to lend my copy to a few friends, but I really want to keep it close to hand, to track down the references to books that I couldn't get or re-read the ones that seem like they might bear new fruit. The whole book is like a conversation about books with a smart-ass friend.

And thus, in conclusion, Shelf Monkey rox!

Fun fact: I discovered Corey Redekop here on LibraryThing because I saw that he connected two books I love through Recommendations, and I looked at his profile only to discover he is a writer himself! Go LibraryThing! show less

In the genre of speculative fiction, the best authors posit an alternative universe and make it convincing by populating it with believable characters whose struggles mimic or mirror our own. This alternative universe can be familiar, whimsical, or outlandish, or simply a place where strange and far-fetched things happen. This doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the author’s confident treatment of the material dispels any doubts and draws the reader in. The author knows the show more events he’s describing can’t happen (the reader knows this too or else he’s in big trouble), but must never as much as hint to the reader that this is the case. Once the story grabs us the willing suspension of disbelief kicks in and all is forgiven. Such is Corey Redekop’s first novel, Husk, the story of Sheldon Funk, struggling small time actor turned zombie. Sheldon suffers a messy and ignominious death in a bus washroom, revives on the autopsy table, and escapes into Toronto of the here and now. Sheldon the zombie is unique: unlike others of his kind he is capable of assessing his actions and controlling his appetites. He knows eating people is wrong, it’s just that sometimes he can’t help himself. As a zombie Sheldon senses an opportunity and resumes his acting career, landing gigs he would never have had a hope of getting prior to his death. His agent is suitably impressed and pushes him until Sheldon is a headliner. With fame and fortune, however, comes unwanted scrutiny, the consequences of which lead Sheldon down a path he never saw coming. Redekop’s novel is by turns hilarious and horrific. Certain scenes are, quite literally—when you read the book you’ll see what I mean—stomach turning. Gore and gruesomeness abound. This might all seem like good fun. But there is a serious message lurking at the core of this novel, one regarding life and death and overweening ambition. In the blood-spattered pages of Husk Corey Redekop displays the confidence of a seasoned novelist. His concept is bizarre, his vision grotesque, but never once does he stray from his chosen path. The result is memorable and unceasingly entertaining. show less

I didn't know whether to laugh or shudder reading Corey Redekop's Shelf Monkey. So I did both.

The novel tells the tale of failed lawyer turned bookstore widget Thomas, who finds his soulmates in an eccentric group of fellow employees at hypermegabookstore READ. The only problem is they're more crazy than eccentric. They hold secret meetings where they burn offensive books -- you know, Michael Crichton, Candace Bushnell, the Left Behind series -- while assuming the monikers of beloved show more fictional characters. Oh, Corey, you had me at Yossarian. They have a particular hatred for a book club host called Munroe Purvis, who's sort of a sordid cross between Oprah and Morton Downey Jr. and whose book club selections represent everything wrong with western society -- imagine your grandmother's diaries turned into bestsellers, and you'll have an idea of what Purvis's book club represents.

Of course, Purvis isn't what he appears to be, and neither are many of Thomas's bookstore friends. Some of them turn out to be hiding deep secrets about the bookstore, while others are just plain dangerous in the way only geeks can be dangerous. When Purvis goes on tour and comes to town, the secrets and craziness collide as Thomas's friends set out to destroy Purvis, and the novel quickly moves from the Nick Hornby section of the bookstore to the Joseph Heller and Chuck Palahniuk table.

Redekop manages to keep his own voice throughout the novel, while winking, nodding and even raising a beer every now and then to literary culture. He name-drops authors more than a fourth-year English student, and he makes some literary traditions his own, such as adopting the epistolary novel and turning it into an email exchange while Thomas is on the run from the authorities. Even this is a bit of a literary joke for Redekop, though, as the recipient of his emails is Eric McCormack, a real-life Canadian author. At least I think he's a real-life Canadian author. I've never met him, and after reading Shelf Monkey I am beginning to wonder if he's a clever construct on the part of Redekop to flesh out the book.

Shelf Monkey is a literary thriller but it's also a fun romp -- unless, presumably, you're an Oprah fan. But if so, you're not Redekop's imagined audience. His ideal reader knows this book is blackly, blackly funny because it's all too true.

Full disclosure: Redekop gave one of my novels a fine review at his site, but I would have liked this book just as much anyway. show less