Sunday, September 6, 2015

Bizarro Fiction - Shatner Quake by Jeff Burk


Imagine, if you will, a fight to the death amongst James T. Kirk, T.J. Hooker, Denny Crane, Priceline Shatner, Rescue 911 Shatner and the inestimable William Shatner himself. Who would emerge the victor?

Welcome to the world of bizarro fiction courtesy of Shatner Quake:an action novel by Jeff Burk.  The first ever ShatnerCon was the terrorist target of the Cambellians (all named Bruce) whose object it was to erase all fictional representations of William Shatner with their "fiction bomb". Technology being what it is, the bomb malfunctions and releases all the versions of Shatner into our reality, all intent on the others destruction.  If you are not intimately knowledgeable about William Shatner's career from Esperanto Shatner to cartoon Kirk to Priceline and beyond, you will need to have the Internet Movie Database open as you read.  My favourite was Rescue 911 Shatner who would unhelpfully would stand by and coldly narrate a victim's gruesome demise.

If the bizzaro genre of fiction with its weirdness, absurdity, and unpredictability (though sometimes offensive) is up your alley, you might want to try other suggestions from Bizarro Central.

If your tastes run in a slightly tamer direction consider:

The Cat Who Killed Lilian Jackson Braun by Robert Kaplow "America's most beloved writer, Lilian Jackson Braun, author of twenty-four Cat Who... mysteries is now the subject of a mystery herself. In this spoof by one of her most ardent admirers, her beheaded body has been discovered in the men's room of a gay bar in Lower Manhattan. The police are baffled, and so it is up to Braun's eccentric writer friend, James Q. (Qafka), and his Siamese cats Ying-Ton and Poon-Tang to solve the ghastly mystery. Q.'s quest leads him on a hilarious, ribald chase that's a cross between a story by Lenny Bruce and Dashiell Hammett. Before it's done we've encountered Pulitzer Prize-winning Philip Roth, a sex-starved suburban housewife, a mysterious Hollywood diary, Britney Spears, an ancient secret society, and two gifted cats whose trail of urine and hairballs leads Q. and his spunky undergraduate assistant to finally unravel the riddle of The Cat Who Killed Lilian Jackson Braun." - publisher


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1 comment:

  1. John MAugust 1, 2010 at 3:56 PM

    Thank-you for completing a very bizarre (if you'll pardon the expression) weekend. I'm so out of it I thought "Cambellians" must be referring to mid-20th Century SciFi magazine editor John W. Campbell.

    The allusion to everyone being named "Bruce" brought back the experience of coming under the evil influence, about a decade ago, of a group at work where everyone was named Bruce (one the husband of Halifax poet Eleonore Schonmaire), except for one guy named Dan. Thanks to that experience I'm now trying to juggle Sabina Spielrein, theoretical chemistry, the Lascaux cave paintings and aesthetic supervenience in the context of anti-submarine warfare praxis.

    But hearing about a ukulele seminar on CBC Weekend Mornings yesterday led to learning that October 1970 marked climactic political events both in Canada in the Philippines, which I blogged about in a poem today, except that our blog site is catastrophically down.

    So Shatnerquake may even make sense by comparison.

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