Charlie Human

Bananas.

Delicious, chocolate-covered, frozen summer-camp bananas.

This has been on my TBR for quite a while, largely due to the lack of library access. When I saw it on sale, I grabbed it. Recently, I pulled it out of the kindle backlog while on vacation. Though I protest that it is not actually set during the end of the world as we know it, I thought it was a lot of fun and even unexpectedly charming.

Baxter Zevcenko is precocious, with a good head for business. He's like Alex from Family show more Ties, if Alex was into managing a porn distribution network for school. He is currently troubled by headaches and violent dreams, and is blaming his autistic brother, Rafe, who has been drawing a series of increasingly violent pictures.

"These dreams always end with people being massacred. It’s like my sleeping brain is constantly set to the History Channel. If all the re-enactments were directed by Quentin Tarantino."

When his girlfriend disappears, Baxter undergoes a brief crisis of conscience that resolves into Baxter seeking out Ronin, who has a reputation for being able to find weird stuff.

"I’m pretty sure there are crack dens with better interior design than this place. Ronin looks like he has grown organically from within this apartment like fungus, a human-sized version of something you’d find growing under the sink."

Baxter is initially skeptical of Ronin's abilities, but soon finds he's more than up for most tasks. Baxter is even able to contribute.

"A guy stumbles past me and I notice an Octogram lanyard peeking out through his jacket. Instinctively I stick my leg out and the guy trips, hitting the ground hard. Ronin raises an eyebrow."

At one point, Baxter undergoes a character transformation, and after that, I was all in. I love me a smart-mouthed main character with a gooey middle.

"The other is a personality I didn’t even know I had. This is the me that feels. Gross, I know. This me probably attends crystal-healing sessions in my cerebral cortex, believes people are important and almost certainly likes piña colada and getting caught in the rain. He is a flaming metrosexual. I call him MetroBax."

Potentially triggering for some people, there's also a lot of mention of porn at the beginning of the book. Baxter has taken to distributing monster-porn in his high school--not because he's that interested, but because that's what the market calls for. Interestingly, I found a lot of the mentions about it highly tolerable, as it's more about describing the business than voyeurism by proxy, but your mileage may vary.

Interestingly, it's set in South Africa, so it draws upon history and folklore for some of it's fantasy elements, which makes it more unusual in the urban folklore genre, although it does derail into government-lab problems as well.

It's a fun story, with some occasional very meta unreliable narrator bits. I thought it also engaging enough to be good for a re-read. There's sarcastic descriptions that made me laugh and introspective moments that tugged at my sympathies. I finished at the beach, and I really, really wanted to start on the next book, but held out because I was afraid of diminishing returns with our sarcastic teenage lead. However, I won't make the mistake of letting the next one linger as long. Highly recommended if you like a bit of twisted but redeemable humor. show less

I very much enjoyed reading Apocalypse Now Now, a dark fantasy tale about a porn-dealing cynical teenager’s quest to retrieve his kidnapped girlfriend from a pseudo-Lovecraftian underworld populated by South African mythical beings.

Charlie Human has written a book that runs on the rule of cool: it features a high schooler who runs his school's porn distribution, an autist kid taking out flying monsters with molotov cocktails, and a fight on a boat with a flaming chainsaw. And then there's show more the mafia-run teenage sex trade, bounty hunter specializing in fantasy creatures, and to top it all off, the humongous time-travelling mecha duking it out in down-town Cape Town. It’s all gloriously over the top, and it’s a hoot to read.

I have two complaints about this book, though. One is that, for a book that tries to be edgy and grim, the story beats as well as the gender roles are fairly traditional -- the older mentor, the damsel in distress, the quest that turns out to be tangled up with the protagonist’s personal history, and so on. My other complaint is that at the end everything is tied up way too nicely: closure is swift, traditional and entirely predictable.

But since this is the author’s debut, I’m willing to overlook that: the rule of cool is so gleefully applied that I remember the fun I had while reading it more than the gripes. And that, I suspect, is what the book was trying to do. In other words: a success! show less

It was a quick and easy read for a 300+ page novel. It is essentially a twisted Harry Potter using South African mythology for its magical underworld. The horror elements were also interesting and entertaining, and the reality hopping was also well done. Other than that, there is not much else here. Still, I would recommend it to those looking for familiar urban fantasy with horror elements and a bit of time and dimensional travel.
Favorite Quote:
I can create whole worlds inside my head, so show more excuse me if I don’t spend a lot of time spouting mundane bullshit like you do. [pg.339] show less

This book...wow. Absolutely loved it. One of the first things that I noticed about this book is that the writing is top-notch--Baxter's voice is strong, funny, and easy to go along with. The author manages to perfectly show Baxter's witty, sardonic look on life and provides some great descriptions of the world around him (i.e. "The sky was the exact grey of the diseased lung of a two-packs-a-day smoker.")

Baxter is content to run his little porn business at the local high school before his show more girlfriend, Esme, is kidnapped. Her kidnapping makes Baxter (a wound-be business man with definite sociopathic tendencies) realize that he DOES have a heart, and so he promptly goes off to rescue her. Baxter subsequently meets a red-bearded alcoholic supernatural bounty hunter and stumbles into the magical underworld of Cape Town, where he has to deal with all manner of magic, gore and madness in order to save the potential love-of-his-life. The book moves very quickly and throws things at you at a likewise pace, but despite that I had no problems following along. It helped that no matter how crazy the situation (and there were PLENTY of those in the book), Baxter always had some witty saying ready to bring us back to earth.

So yes, I loved everything about this book--a fast-paced plot, a crazy supernatural world and unique, interesting characters--including a witty, intelligent anti-hero who grows not just as a character but in power as well. We leave Baxter after he's just agreed to go to a school for magic-users ("But", says Baxter "If I'm forced to play Quidditch, I swear, someone is going to get shot"). I can't wait to see him there. show less