I couldn’t resist taking this up for the novelty of a science fiction thriller/comedy written in rhyming verse. Admirable attempt, but for me the novelty wears thin pretty quickly. Hard to get past the sing-songy element, which undercuts immersion in the characters and plot. I recently enjoyed an audio version of Pope’s 18th century translation of the Iliad, but in that case the elevated verse aligned with the elevated drama. Sometimes here the verse enhances the humor, but the limerick-like requirements often distracts from comic action by calling attention to word forms themselves.

Beyond the verse issue, what about the sci fi stuff and how does that jive with the comedy? The first aspect kept me going. We have Carmen, a relatively inexperienced agent from one or the other agency, who is working on infiltrating the networks of lower level employees at the same Los Alamos base that built the first atomic bombs. A body turns up that is in small pieces, suggestive of a fiendish weapon of some sort. Another woman appears to be compressed to the size of a garbanzo bean.

<i>No more untidy corpses with blackened
cells; all fleshly matter fizzled down to a
chick pea. No more Fibronacci counting,
what who could tell; this sleek, improved
Higgs boson filled them with glees.</i>

Is there some secret government experimentation going with a novel weapon or has the wrong sort of people gotten ahold of the theoretical weapon? Drug dealers and gangsters are in the woodwork, as are believers in alien invasion and secrets of Area 51 and bad karma over the subjugation of Native Americans. Carmen and her intrepid associates have their hands full with all potential suspects, and in this the chaos and bad juju, the comedy brings needed relief in snatches.

But as we struggle to figure out what is fracking going on here we get another assault on our suffering attention span. The author intrudes every few pages. He talks about his tricks and problems in writing what you are reading and renders excuses and apologies for flaws and deficiencies. Just when you are getting pissed enough to close the books (getting addressed as “dear reader” already got old in Victorian novels), he starts talking about his own life until he becomes at least as interesting as the characters in “his” story.

He has a girlfriend who makes both reasonable and radical complaints about details in his drafts. She finds that one character resembles his daughter and wants him to render her a happier sex life. Most of this the author character lets roll off his back. Soon we get confused between the characters in the author’s supposed life and the fiction ones he is writing about. His power of words is applied in his own life by giving his girlfriend different names according to her mood and outlook:

<i>Here’s something I should set loose about Trixie: She’s
quite the lass, cunning, funny, and gay. But oft times
she becomes a Dixie,
strident as Stonewall Jackson, has to have her way.
Then after she gets it, ooo, love city. Her little toes flex
and I call her Pixie….”</i>

At one point the author complains his readers shouldn’t expect too much from him, followed by a pep talk for his characters:
<i>Though we be but entertainers, we so hope to shield poor human souls! How? By embellishing, disguising, sugar-frosting, or just plain lying concerning this globe’s woes.
Listen up! (My dear and faithful Reader, this complaint aims not for you.) Listen up, you wayward, dratted characters in this beleaguered, blasted, blessed, beatudinous novel! Back off! Show respect! Act as if you inhabit more than rhyming quatrains spewing dreck, or you. just. might. wind. Up. in. some snake-infested hovel!</i>

Yes, there is some novelty here, but it just feels too smug. And the novelty isn’t that novel. Already by 1914, we had Unamuno’s “Fog”, in which we have a character making a revolt on playing his part and taking his objections and threats to the author. In Pirandello’s “3 Characters in Search of an Author” in 1921, we have a director’s play rehearsals interrupted and taken over by the people the characters are based on. In 1939, we get a Russian nesting doll of characters and authors in Flan O’Brien’s “At-Swim-Two Birds”, and in 1979, the characters in Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveler” are readers hopscotching their way through interrupted stories from 10 books getting fed up with authors and publishers.

You now have enough information I think to tell if this twisted tale might fulfill your taste in whimsy. One more factor is your tolerance of non-PC speech. A goodly number of the characters are stuck in misogynistic and racist attitudes and say those ugly words that deserve no callouses. It takes the right, trusted comedian to make bigotry sing as humor, and I can’t provide much assurance that Taylor foots that bill.

This book was provided by the publisher for review through the Netgalley program.