The Shroud of the Thwacker

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.

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.

This was funny; I will not deny it. Pitted against almost anything else to be read, however, there are few books I for which I would trade it. I might choose it over, say, genre romances or sparkly vampire novels but that is it. Were I given a time machine (accidental or otherwise, snicker) and the chance to decide again to read it, I would choose something else. Life is too short, really.

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 show more 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.

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How could I have expected more from the creator of "Get a Life"? The best part of this book is Yoko Ono. The worst part is a three-way tie between plot, characterization, and geography of New York.

hilarious through out the book, one pun after the other (towards the end i was "punned" out. wild and crazy at times. good read though. jumps around alot

I expected more. As a fan of Get a Life and, yes, even Cabin Boy, I was hoping this book would be... well... funnier.