I love John Waters, and this absolutely did not disappoint. What a hoot!

Thanks so much to the publisher for the e-galley.

Oh. My. God. Classic John Waters through and through!

I loved it, I hated it, I was grossed out, did I mention I loved it! If you don't know who John Waters is or have not seen his work, I suggest doing your homework before diving into this book. Trust me, you'll thank me!

It's a road trip story with a con-artist airport luggage thief and her sex deprived "chauffer", there's a group of outlaw trampoline artists who are obsessed with jumping up and down, or at the very least rocking side-to-side hell bent on killer her mother, illegal plastic surgery on dogs, and more. I couldn't help visualizing this as a film and I hope it gets made, with the classic camp style we have come to know and love with John Waters.

Again, this story is not for the faint of heart and involves a lot of sex jokes, foul language, and situations I will not name here because, well, you just need to discover it for yourself.

This novel, John Waters' first after a lifetime of films and raconteurism exporting his unique personality to the masses, is a challenging read. It contains all the hallmarks of his films-unusual characters in very unusual situations and their outrageous responses to said situations. The main problem is that this approach is much more difficult to sustain over an entire novel where dialogue is sparse and Faulknerian-length monolithic descriptions reign supreme. I kept looking for moments to carry me forward and making me want to continue reading. It didn't happen. And that is a pity of the highest order due to the face that I admire his perspective, courage, and cinematic viewpoints.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 3, 2022

Readers who want a book that mentions the male sex organ on nearly every page will fulfill their desire with Liarmouth. Daryl Hotchkins is obsessed with his penis. True, all guys share that obsession, but Daryl’s has a mind of its own. Again, that’s true of every guy’s, but Daryl’s talks. Now guys do talk to their units on occasion (usually to say something like “Calm down, buddy”) but Daryl’s talks back. Out loud, sometimes sounding like a car’s GPS.

Daryl is a petty criminal. His principal occupation is stealing luggage from airports. Daryl’s partner in crime, Marsha Sprinkle, is a more substantial sociopath. Marsha makes children cry because children annoy her. She also steals vehicles and causes general mayhem while fleeing arrest. She promised to shag Daryl to reward a year of productive work, but she has no intention of allowing Daryl, or anyone else, inside her.

The third key character is Marsha’s daughter Poppy, who operates an unlawful trampoline business, her lawful trampoline business having been shut down for violating safety protocols. Poppy has a dedicated band of followers who bounce their way through life. Poppy has replaced the seats in her van with trampolines to better transport her cultists. Marsha thinks of Poppy as “the womb-ravager.” Poppy’s attitude toward Marsha is no kinder, in part because Poppy is one of the many victims of Marsha’s thievery.

Liarmouth is, in a word, strange. In two words, strangely amusing. That won’t come as a surprise to readers who have seen John Waters’ films. Nor will the obsession with sex organs, sexuality in all of its forms, and particularly drag queens. Waters gained fame for transgressive films. His first attempt at a novel is mildly transgressive, although the boundaries have been pushed so far since Waters was in his prime that Liarmouth is fairly tame by contemporary standards of transgression.

Liarmouth has a plot, in that events follow each other in a logical cause-and-effect order. About half the plot is an extended chase scene after Daryl and Marsha are interrupted in a luggage theft at Baltimore’s airport. They go their separate ways for a time (Daryl hides out with a tickle fetishist, Marsha steals purses in a hospital after a collision that brings all the characters together), only to separate before Daryl and his talking penis can claim their reward.

The plot is freewheeling and easily sidetracked. Characters are always on the move, as Waters mocks air travel, Amtrack, and discount bus rides. Daryl’s search for his sexual payment is interrupted by his fear that his penis has turned gay. (If a man is straight but his penis is gay, the man and his penis are bisexual … or so the penis concludes.) When Marsha meets a man who is her sociopathic equal, will she finally kindle a lust for men? The reader never knows what might happen next. That’s sort of a virtue, although it gives the plot a sense of randomness. Then again, life often feels random when plans go awry.

Waters’ social commentary can be amusing, from skewering the upper class by imagining cheek lifts for dogs (maybe that’s a real thing) to using motel Magic Fingers devices as full-body vibrators. I could have done without the trampoline humor and the dick jokes get old after a hundred pages or so. My response to Liarmouth alternated between “this is sort of funny” and “this is really stupid.” The balance point is somewhere in the middle. This might have been a more effective novel if Waters had written it thirty or forty years ago, when it was still possible to shock readers.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

If you know anything about former filmmaker John Waters, it is that, based on some of his past output, he is a filthy, dirty man. Especially early in his career, he would frequently push the limits of good taste. For example, in his 1972 film Pink Flamingoes, he famously got his drag queen star, Divine, to eat a piece of dog poop. (To his defense, and as recounted in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep, Waters has argued that it was a small piece of dog poop.) Thus, much of his work is transgressive and he often pushes back against the status quo. There’s probably a good reason for this: as an openly gay man who was open long before it became even remotely fashionable in mainstream society to be so, he wants people to see his characters as challenging what it means to be gay, or a drag queen, or whatever they may be. Therefore, you should come to his first novel, Liarmouth, with no surprises. The novel is about as transgressive as it could get without bringing child porn into the equation, and it will definitely push your buttons and offend you, likely. And that’s the whole point.

To that end, there isn’t too much of a plot in Liarmouth. These are just filthy and perverse over-the-top scenes strung together with characters trying to get from point A to point B. But if you need a frame of reference, this is the story of a woman named Marsha Sprinkle who is a con artist and a thief, both professionally. She’s off, at the book’s start, to pull off a heist at an airport with her “employee” Darryl, who has been promised sex with her at the end of the day (it’s complicated), but things go south and Marsha and Darryl get separated. Marsha goes after her daughter, Poppy — who owns a trampoline school for misfits — and then her mother and ex-husband as she gets hooked on getting revenge from people who have wronged her somehow. Darryl, meanwhile, is chasing after her trying to get his payoff, so to speak. His member gets injured, however, and it begins talking to him (not an original idea, Mr. Waters) and then happens to pull Darryl into some, well, sticky situations as it has a mind of his own. Darryl’s penis even gets a name: Richard (again, not an original idea).

I have to say that I’m not easily offended, and found the novel to be rather fun in its first half as Waters loads on the puns and double entendres, showing that he’s a master at filthy wit. And I can also say that this is a novel that will never get filmed because it’s so outrageous: early on, Darryl gets punched in public (at an airport) in his privates (oh, my wit!) by a five-year-old child (which is about the most any children get involved in this outlandishness) and Darryl begins ejaculating like a geyser because he’s been holding it all in for Marsha, allowing him an easy escape for the bungled caper he was trying to pull. To a point, and especially early on, this is a fun novel. However, it all falls apart in the second half as Waters keeps trying to up the ante with sexual exploits and misdeeds. I know what Waters is doing here: he’s trying to show that what society views as disgusting and moral is actually normal and okay, because he, too, was probably victimized by society as a gay man. However, Waters crosses a line when a couple of sexual assaults are viewed as okay because the “victim” (if I can use that term in context) is acting perfectly consensually. So when Darryl gets jumped, for instance, by a gay man on a train, it’s okay that he’s not homosexual because his penis, which has a mind of its own, is bi-curious. In this context, it’s presented for laughs and is not really considered to be rape. Even though it kinda is.

That’s actually a pretty mild example because, and not to spoil things, but, by the novel’s end, Waters is trying to okay rimjobs by having characters take part in a rimjob festival (analogous — look what I did there! — to gay pride parades and celebrations). Now, even though this sexual proclivity doesn’t turn me on personally (whatever consenting adults do in their own bedroom is their business and not mine), it just seemed to be offensive for the sake of being offensive. However, I think a real criticism of this section of the novel is that it just narratively doesn’t make a lot of sense, per se. It’s just there, as though Waters ran out of ideas as to how to wrap things up, and, conversely, just tried to leave readers with the worst taste in their mouth (pun intended) that he could dream up. Had this been a novel written by anyone other than a big name such as John Waters, it would have probably languished for ages on the slush pile before finally being rejected as too outré.

Still, if you don’t take things seriously and aren’t outraged by all the depravity, you might enjoy this concoction of literary pornography. I enjoyed it to a point, but by the time I got halfway through the book, it seemed evident that the plot wasn’t really going anywhere — and Poppy has a gang of clients who join her on a mission to kill her mother that’s takes over the second half and gets quite silly. I mean, these people can’t sit still literally for a minute. Thus, we get descriptions of how they move and jerk around and how they’re just trying to be accepted by society — which goes back to Waters’ point with all of this: can’t we all just get along no matter our fetish? Still, it gets a bit tedious and ridiculous, culminating in these people becoming kind of yoga flyers. In any event, if you enjoy taboo material and don’t mind a tasteless pun now and then, you might fully enjoy Liarmouth. Everyone else? I can see the book burnings already in my mind.

Before we begin, I need to know that you know who John Waters is. Do these movie titles ring a bell? Hairspray? Pink Flamingos? Pecker? Cry-Baby? Serial Mom? This is an entertainer who wears many hats who once had his lead actress eat dog poo on film and it made both of them famous beyond compare (that movie, “Pink Flamingos”, is one of the films in the historic registry with the Library of Congress). This is a 100% gay man who loves to make fun of the gay community because he believes they have more rules than his own mother does. Most of all (and possibly closest in relation to this book), Waters says of almost everything he creates, “I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value.”

“Liarmouth” really and truly has absolutely no socially redeeming value to it whatsoever. And you know what? Just as with everything else John Waters has created: who the heck cares? It’s campy, ironic, sarcastic, derisive, spit-take worthy funny, causes snickers and constant mumbles of “I just can’t with this right now”, and caused me to deliberately stop reading so I could go and tell someone what was going on in this book I was reading right now.

This book is like John Waters built a huge campy theme park where you enter at one point, and there’s pre-planned routes where you go through one ride or one scene before it spits you out and you barely have time to recover before it’s your turn for the next one and here you go again! Are you ready for what comes next? Who knows! Who cares! You’re going whether you want to or not! Are you going to feel like someone spiked your drink? Maybe? Are you going to feel like you fell down some kind of weird rabbit hole? Quite possibly! But you’re sure as heck not going to stop reading because you’re caught in this snare: there’s no way you’re not going to keep reading, because you need to find out what in the ever-living heck happens to all these absolutely horrid people at the end of this book. You’re in until the end.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review.

John Waters, writer and director of cult hits Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, has switched mediums from movies to fiction with his first novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance. Waters absurdist humor is definitely present, and if you enjoy his work, you'll find something to like here.

Liarmouth tells the story of Marsha Sprinkle, a scammer on the run from her most recent con stealing baggage from the Washington-Baltimore Airport. Like many of Waters heroines, Marsha is a lifelong Baltimorean, and like many Waters' heroines is surrounded by an eclectic group of characters in Charm City. Among them include Darryl, her partner in crime who is obsessed with sleeping with Marsha and talks to his penis (who in segments of the book does talk back), her mother Adora, an eccentric plastic surgeon to New York's UES most pampered pets (yes, that's right, a plastic surgeon for pets), and her daughter Poppy, who is a trampoline/bouncing enthusiast and may be in a cult. The central story sees each of these characters seeking out Marsha as she treks to Boston on a mission to murder her ex-husband, who is addicted to rimming (yes that kind of rimming) and is attending a conference for like minded addicts/enthusiasts.

The plot of this book is wild, and is designed to shock. This is of course not shocking coming from Waters. What is surprising is how anachronistic the novel feels -- it ostensibly takes place in current times with smart phones, WiFi, etc, but feels like it has been pulled from the 80s or early 90s. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does make some of the character's choices seem odd. I also kept thinking that this may have been a better movie -- all vibes, little character development. The book's saving grace is it's brevity and a continuous current of good humor. While I couldn't give Liarmouth my highest recommendation, it is fun and breezy enough for a casual read heading into summer.

This book was a dumpster fire in the best possible way. I had too much fun reading it to put it down. Funny, filthy and downright bizarre, this book is not to be missed.

I feel the need to take a shower, say a prayer, and avoid people for a while after reading this book. This novel is an absolute roller coaster of mayhem and debauchery and I loved every perverted minute of it.

I somehow moved along this planet without knowing who John Waters was, so aside from the amusing plot summary, I went into this book totally blind. The summary really is something though - a professional suitcase thief, Marsha Sprinkle, is on the run and her entire family hates her. There are tons of laugh-out-loud events that the infamous criminal encounters, many of which I'd feel uncomfortable repeating here. It's the type of book you really just need to pick up and read for yourself.

That being said, having an open mind is critical. Regardless, I certainly have never read anything comparable to Liarmouth.

I was looking for something mindless, hopefully something entertaining, so why not John Waters’ first novel Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance? I knew what I was getting into with Waters — in the early days of VCRs, my friends and I would watch rented tapes of Polyester and the original Hairspray on repeat — but while this was campy with bizarre details, I don’t think it went far enough for my tastes: not truly transgressive or envelope-pushing, it almost felt like the world has moved on and Waters is still telling the same dirty jokes from the 1980s. Not a waste of my time — I did have some laughs and cringes — and fans of Waters’ films will no doubt enjoy the cinematic beats of the storyline even more than I did.

As a movie, yes. as a novel, maybe. I've been a fan of John Waters from the beginning and so was looking forward to his novel. I can't begin to describe the plot (such as it is) because this careens from thing to thing with wild abandon. If you know John Waters, you know this is classic but it's easier to watch on a screen than it is to read. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

I really wanted to like this more than I did! Waters is a legend and his non-fiction writing is always a must read. Liarmouth was provocative, but didn't feel as vital as his film or non-fiction work. That said, I'ill support him in any creative endeavor he chooses to pursue. A true original!

It's John Waters. So what do you expect. Having enjoyed his more than generous memoirs and, shall we say appreciated, his filmwork, I was curious to see if his edge had been smoothed as he approaches his mid 70's. I was thrilled to find, it hasn't. There is somewhat of a plot featuring the most anti-heroic heroine, but if you're looking for a plot synopsis, look elsewhere. How Waters can wring so much absurdity in many of the set pieces (one in a laundromat in particular made me laugh longest), but this is more of a wild ride than anything else. One side note, I give thanks to FSG for making me an early reader, and see that in his Acknowledgments Waters thanks his editor, Bill Clegg, who himself wrote some generous memoirs and one of my favorite novels, and is credited with "...being a voice of reason . . . even in the midst of fictitious anarchy." That last phrase sums this up best of all.

I struggled to read Liarmouth even as a fan of John Waters. It's really not very good. A bit of grotesquery is great but this book has it instead of a story. It feels like a series of icky tableaux and set pieces instead of a proper book.

This book was FUNNY! Super funny! Also, a little too much to read in one setting or even week for me but very easy to appreciate over time.

I love that it IS a feel BAD romance. The tickle guy? Hysterical! What a great thing! How did John waters come up with these people?

I do believe there are bad people out there but this book was unbelievable in a great way!

Thank you netgalley for the advanced copy!

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy of this filthy fiction title.

John Waters has been at the forefront of what could be called gross-out or shocking humor, with jokes and scenes that makes audiences laugh out loud while twisting in their seat, either pain, disgust or eldritch horror. Mr. Waters has been so far ahead that even with the advents of the Jackasses, the Borats, the Eric Andres, Mr Waters is still looking back at them from a 1966 Buick Electra, same car that Jane Mansfield died in, waving with a smile and a "Is that all you got look" on his face. Uncomfortable humor, word play, serial killers, and killer's victims, with a heady dash of S-E-X, fill Mr. Waters' first foray in fiction, entitled Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance.

Marsha Sprinkle is hated by everyone and gives it right back at them. She eats horseflies, hates children, including her own. Hates men, especially the desperate loser that is her sole companion and accomplice. She steals luggage from airports, wallets from pockets, fakes identities, forges leases, squats in homes and is unpleasant in every way possible. A simple scam at the airport is ruined by a child, driving our two desperados apart and on the run. From there the story gets odder, and more vile. Always more vile.

Familiarity with John Waters, his world and work is almost a must with this particular piece of fiction. The book is written not in the same style as a screenplay, but there are film beats, POV changes that seem very much as if it was a screenplay. The inner voices of the characters are far more apparant though, and boy are they a messy bunch. There are many mentions to the city of Baltimore, serial killers, crimes, old movies, faded fads and lost camp. The writing is consistent, throughout the book, and the story moves well, though there are things that a reader could live without ever contemplating. If something seems pleasant it won't last, and if you find the worst thing you have ever read, just flip a page, something will beat it.

Definitely for fans of John Waters, or for people who like a little grit in their paperback. Casual fiction writers might find it too odd, Texans will probably just add it to the burn pile. The story leaves you needing a bath and the characters are the reason why people should continue to wear masks in public. Unlike his movie Pink Flamingos it won't leave a bad taste in the mouth, though, just a wonder of what could come next. If you like sick humor, you probably have already pre-ordered so enjoy.

And now, the next to impossible task of reviewing the latest tome from the inimitable John Waters, #Liarmouth. Please watch closely as I cop out and magically change Review to Rate before your very eyes. I’ll use The Motion Picture rating system to keep this simple. To start we’ll give #Liarmouth a G for Giggles & Guffaws, which it’s loaded with, and also Gross, but we’d expect nothing less from John Waters. Moving on, PG, which in this case stands for Perversely Grotesque ( but in a weird/funny way at your discretion). Moving on once more', PG13, which again stands for Perversely Grotesque , but only if you figured out the parental blockage code and have been watching porn for the past 3 years. A plethora of R’s: Ribald, Rowdy, Riotous, Repulsive and Roaringly Rambunctious to name just a few. Finally X for X-Ray, which I’d like to see of Waters’ brain to help determine how his twisted mind created #Liarmouth. No matter how many stars I give it, many of you will disagree so I’ll go with four, with the disclaimer that I have a sick sense of humor. Consider yourselves warned.

There was a moment about 20% into Liarmouth when I forgot I was reading a novel from the warped mind of John Waters and just could not go on. It was just too absurd. Who in their right mind...? And then I remembered, and I settled in and enjoyed the ride. Liarmouth is just as funny and deranged as anything you would expect from Waters, especially from the 80s forward. The danger of the Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos era is absent from this novel, but Liarmouth carves out a perfect space for itself among Waters's later work.

Liarmouth is a known quantity. It is full-on John Waters. It's well-written chaos and filth and impossibilities that are made believable by the sheer insistence that you should believe them. It's camp, it's gross, it's a little bit mean and a little bit sweet at the same time. If you love John Waters, you'll probably love Liarmouth. If you don't love him or aren't familiar with his work, I'll be very interested in hearing about your reading experience.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the digital ARC.

As weird as they wanna be! As you'd expect from Waters, a most unusual ride, but such a fun one. Recommended!

John Waters is a national treasure, and that’s all there is to it. Liarmouth is 100% what you’d expect from a John Waters book. It’s got filth, perversion, and other fun things that make regular folks uncomfortable! You need to either know exactly what you’re getting into or be open-minded with a sick sense of humor. If you aren’t sure if Liarmouth is for you, watch “Pink Flamingoes.” That’s an excellent starting point into Mr. Waters’ work and will give you a decent idea of how this book may play out.

This book is for those that require a less than serious read, though I feel as if that kind of goes without saying.

Thanks so much to NetGalley, the publisher, and John Waters for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!