The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad [Mass Market Paperback]

Minister Faust (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2008

Hamza and Yehat are The Coyote Kings–best friends, one a disgruntled dishwasher and the other a video store clerk, but each brilliant in his own right. Yehat builds prototypes of space-age inventions in his spare time, while Hamza, a former English honors student who was kicked out of the university, writes lush, lyrical poems when he’s not blocked–which, these days, is nearly always.

When the gorgeous, mysterious Sherem shows up in E-Town decked out in desert finery, Hamza’s creative spark is ignited. Who is this sophisticated woman that speaks arcane African tongues, quotes from obscure comics and Star Wars movies, yet seems somehow too ethereal for the world Hamza inhabits? And what is the lost artifact that she and a cast of coiffed collectors and criminal cultists so desperately seek? As Hamza falls blindly in love with Sherem, little does he know that he and Yehat play the biggest part of all in the recovery of the ancient relic–and in the future of all living beings. . . .


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What do Edmonton, D&D, cannibalism, Star Wars, comic books, ancient African mythology, black culture, drugs, organic food, magic, and television shows have in common? They all play important roles in The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, a zany, stylish, and fun novel. Coyote Kings, the debut by Edmonton writer, teacher, and radio host Minister Faust, has a large cast of characters but mainly follows two roommates--Hamza, a former graduate student who's been reduced to working as a dishwasher, and Yehat, a video store clerk who invents insane gadgets in his spare time. They're stuck in a rut of self-pity and going nowhere real slow when a mysterious woman shows up and seduces Hamza by quoting his favorite comics and sci-fi films. (The only problem: she may not be human.) Before long, the three are caught up in a quest for a magic artifact, but they're not the only ones. Arrayed against them is a wide assortment of characters--including an old romantic rival of Hamza's, drug dealers who peddle a mystical high, and a former Canadian Football League player with aspirations of immortality--all with their own plans for the artifact. The action takes the cast through the streets of Edmonton and to Drumheller, where an ancient, startling secret is revealed.

The originality of the plot of Coyote Kings is only half the appeal of the book. It's also strong on characterization--the story is told entirely in first person, from the perspectives of all the major players involved--and culturally hip without being pretentious. For instance, the characters are introduced with D&D-style character sheets listing their vital stats--Hamza's alignment is "SF (general), ST (original series), SW, Marvel, Alan Moore +79." You can't help but appreciate style like this, even if you're not a geek. But if you are a geek, it doesn't get any better than Coyote Kings. --Peter Darbyshire --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Black Canadian media personality Faust blends pop culture, Egyptology, SF and gaming in his clever and often amusing gonzo debut. Hamza and Yehat, slackers, roommates and soul brothers (aka the Coyote Kings), work respectively as a dishwasher and a video-store clerk, but Hamza also writes poetry and Ye invents things. When Hamza meets the beautiful, mysterious Sherem, even love can't blind him to her oddness. She, along with Hamza and Ye's old pals Kev and Heinz, is searching for a jar with inexplicable properties. The Coyote Kings find themselves on the side of the ancient House of the Jackal, charged with keeping the artifact safe, or at least out of the hands of Kev and Heinz. Hamza has a skill the bad guys want to literally eat his brain to get, and only he may have what it takes to find the artifact. The dense writing, the ponderings on the nature of reality and a complex plot that all comes together at the end (if thanks to long inserts that finally provide background and context) will remind some readers of Neal Stephenson. If Faust isn't yet Stephenson's equal as a stylist, he nonetheless represents a sharp-edged new voice in the genre.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Del Rey (January 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345466365
• ISBN-13: 978-0345466365
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,995,732 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Minister Faust is a long-time community activist, writer, journalist, broadcaster, public speaker and martial artist in several disciplines.

A lifelong fan of science fiction, his earliest memories of the genre were watching Star Trek: The Original Series in black & white and having his mother read to him from Robert Heinlein's Red Planet.

After deciding to become a comic book writer and artist when he was ten, he secretly changed his ambition to science fiction novelist after glancing through the glossary to Frank Herbert's Dune. He'd planned to become an ecologist so as to gain Herbert's ecological depth, but before his first university class switched his entire enrollment to English Literature, having concluded that learning to write was more relevant to the career of a writer, and that going to endless lab classes at 7 am for four years would likely suck.

As a member of E-Town's anti-fascist movement in 1990, he and other youth marched on a Nazi skinhead gang house, the hub at that time of a series of violent assaults. Confronted there by skinheads with guns, Minister Faust held them back with nothing but the power of his words. Thus began a speaking career that has taken him across Canada and before of crowds in the tens of thousands.

Minister Faust taught English Literature in E-Town junior high and high schools for a decade, and later worked a mentor and trainer for the Keshotu Leadership Academy, an Africentric organisation whose manual he wrote.

A radio broadcaster since 1989, he hosts Africentric Radio (formerly The Terrordome), for which he's interviewed luminaries such as Tariq Ali, Molefi Kete Asante, Martin Bernal, Noam Chomsky, Chuck D., Austin Clarke, Angela Davis, Karl Evanzz, Tom Fontana, Glen Ford, Nalo Hopkinson, Reginald Hudlin, Ice-T, Janine Jackson, Michael Parenti, Ishmael Reed, Gil Scott-Heron, Vandana Shiva, David Simon, Scott Taylor, and many more.

As a radio and print journalist, he's gone as far as the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, DC, and to the Ain-al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, to collect stories and hear directly from people living and making history.

A maverick novelist increasingly described as one of the finest voices of his generation, Minister Faust is the author of the critically acclaimed The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and the Kindred Award-winning Shrinking the Heroes. His latest is The Alchemists of Kush, which writers and readers alike have already hailed as superb; novelist Sparkle Hayter calls the book "brilliant."

Minister Faust refers to his sub-genre of writing as Imhotep-Hop--an Africentric literature that draws from myriad ancient African civilisations, explores present realities, and imagines a future in which people struggle not only for justice, but for the stars.

He lives in Edmonton with his wife and daughters, where he also runs Canada's top bean pie bakery, Desserts of Kush.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Canadian Geek Homiez Grok Multiversal Jimpification, January 26, 2006

By 

doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (Paperback)

I was not aware that Edmonton, Alberta features a vibrant black and immigrant community (my own poorly-traveled ignorance), and that's the setting for this riotous fantastical pop-cultural novel. Minster Faust gives us a fast-moving, brainmelting story populated by a wide variety of multicultural geeks and goons in E-Town. The events rotate around two excellent main characters, Hamza and Yehat, a moody writer and a brainy engineer respectively, who are down-and-out working dead-end jobs and reveling in a realm of comics, movies, sci-fi nerd TV, role-playing games, and all other forms of geekitude. The brokenhearted Hamza soon falls stoopid in love with the beautiful and mysterious Sherem, who claims to be an archeologist just returning from an expedition to Egypt where she learned about ancient languages and old African kingdoms, hence blowing poor Hamza's mind with exotic trivia. It turns out that Sherem wishes to recruit Hamza and train him, a la Obi Wan and Luke, to fight a millennia-old archeo-narcotic cannibalistic conspiracy. Faust's construction of this eviltacular nogoodnikery gets a little bit out of hand, and some dark passages in the build-up to the story's climax don't mix too well with the lovable humor of the rest of the novel. However, rest assured that Faust is a master of bodacious language, with a lot of heart and hipness and laughs, and his characters are uniformly fascinating. This especially applies to Sherem's true nature and the deep, complex friendship between Hamza and Yehat as the self-styled Coyote Kings. This has gotta be the most creative and offbeat debut novel to come along in a while. [~doomsdayer520~]

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A joy!, February 12, 2006

By 

Robert J. Sawyer "Science Fiction writer" (Mississauga, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (Paperback)

Every closet geek and every secret Trekker should read this book, but so should everyone who enjoys a stylistic tour de force. The characters are unforgettable, the slang infectious (I'll be calling chumps "jimps" for the rest of my life), and the whole thing is just incredibly charming. People say _I'm_ blatantly Canadian, but Minister Faust takes Canuck SF to a whole new level. E-town, here I come!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I want to be a Coyote Queen, February 15, 2005

By 

Adora Nwazota (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (Paperback)

I love, love, love this book. Its incredibly entertaining, funny as hell (who actually lol? i did, by the time i reached the tenth page i had laughed about three times and was starting to get strange looks from my fellow commuters but i couldnt help it), and just a lot of fun to read.
I've started pacing myself now that i'm in the final few chapters of the book because I dont want it to end. What other book is gonna give you a desert princess/assasin, a slew of psycho Fan Boys part of a drug ring that induces telepathic ability, two quirky best friends with a ton of issues and a suit of R-mer (lol), vendettas, a romantic story line, murders, caniballism...this book has a little something for everyone.

I can't really do Mr. Faust justice though, because the strongest part of the book is his writing ability/style. It's obvious he is a poet because the way he strings words together on a page, and some of the actual words he comes up with...are singular. his style is great, the story is entertaining, and i guarantee that you'll be singing this book's praises too by the time you finish the second chapter.