FOOP! [Paperback]

Chris Genoa (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2005

Meet Joe, the ill-fated tour guide at the center of a story that beings with the death of Abraham Lincoln, at Joe's hands. There are strange happenings going on at Dactyl, Inc., the world's first and only time travel tourism company. So strange that Joe, a tour guide, is promoted to the new position of Chief of Probes. His first probe: find out who's been traveling back in time and torturing his boss in rather disturbing ways. Joe finds himself catapulted from his dull life into a surreal journey where a blind hog-tying monkey is one of the sanest creatures he meets. Traveling through a past where the only thing that changes the present is death, while dealing with the fabric of space-time slowly unraveling, Joe stumbles into the middle of events that threaten both the Earth's future and past.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Foop! is a surreal pie in the face." - CHRISTOPHER MOORE, bestselling author of Fluke and Lamb

"Genoa's first novel is a seriocomic romp through time and space as his hero tries to save the world from losing both its future and past. A procession of oddball characters, including a blind monkey and a quirky pair called Boogedy and Nibbles, adds to the humor in this tale of a reluctant hero and his call to duty." - LIBRARY JOURNAL

"Wild, fearless and wickedly clever, Foop! fireballs through time and space to find a future that is as absurd as it is heartbreaking. The more you read of Chris Genoa, the more you realize he's not content with just tickling your imagination along with your funny bone--gosh darn it if he isn't also making a play for your soul. Wonderfully dark. A terrific read. An inspired debut." - NICK SAGAN, author of Edenborn and Idlewild

"Chris Genoa is one of our authentic literary lunatics, and the irrepressible Foop! offers irrefutable proof of his salutary madness. When they lock Genoa away in the booby-hatch, I hope they give him lots of pens and plenty of paper." - JAMES MORROW, World Fantasy Award-Winning author of Towing Jehovah and Blameless in Abaddon

"For some reason, more and more young writers are producing dystopian novels. Chris Genoa rides the quest of this wave with weird humor, great characters, and descriptions of time travel so accurate that you'd think he's actually traveled through time. Well? Have you, Chris?" - NEAL POLLACK, author of The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature and Never Mind The Pollacks

"Chris Genoa's Foop! is a superbly surreal and wickedly wry rollick through the space-time continuum. With a talent for hyperbole reminiscient of the late Douglas Adams, Genoa stretches surreality to its snapping point and succeeds in delivering a hilarious debut novel." - TONY VIGORITO, author of Just a Couple of Days

"I must say this was the weirdest book I have ever read...The whole book is just crazy, bizarre, at times insane, but it is definitely something I couldn't put down...By the end of the book, I was wondering what paths I have chosen and how my choices have affected others...a definite must read." - SFFWORLD.COM

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Eraserhead Press (April 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0972959890
• ISBN-13: 978-0972959896
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (85 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #162,896 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am the author of Foop!, Lick Your Neighbor, and The Monkey & The Barrel (Eraserhead Press, 2011).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

118 of 128 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Disturbingly Addictive, September 12, 2005

By 

JP Benfield (Flemington, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: FOOP! (Paperback)

This book is the literary equivalent of a circus freakshow. Within the first few chapters, I knew that I hated the book, but I found myself unable to put it down.

This book is extremely disjointed. The writing style is awkward. The underlying theme jerks from cynicism and self hatred to blind optimism and longing. The content is often unsettling (including a few scenes that only a proctologist could read without cringing). The characters are deeply disturbed and over-the-top and the story line is held together as tenuously as the seams in Rosie O'Donnell's stretch pants.

All of that said, the book is oddly addictive and darkly entertaining. I think that if I come across another Chris Genoa book, I'll probably buy it, read it and then feel extremely guilty for having enjoyed it. In fact, I would probably feel the need to burn it and never speak of having read it.

This certainly isn't in the genre of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett (unless, of course, they have some unpublished works that were written in a turkish prison while under the influence of LSD).

If Chris Genoa isn't currently undergoing psychiatric counselling, he's depriving the mental health community of an excellent study case.

71 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cartoonish Surrealism, July 14, 2005

By 

Roger Daniels (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: FOOP! (Paperback)

It looks like it's about time for a more in-depth look at this book that goes beyond the simple "It's great!" or "It stinks!"

It seems that quite a few people are coming to this book through Christopher Moore, who blurbed Foop! on the front cover. I'm not a fan of Moore at all so I can't compare Genoa's writing to Moore's, but there's really no need to do that anyway. Like any book Foop! should be looked at on its own.

The book begins with a first chapter that is possibly the funniest opening chapter I've ever read. You can read it on Amazon through the Search Inside function. The reader is immediately thrown into the bizarre life and mind of Joe, a time travelling tour guide in the not too distant future. To sum up the plot, Joe is given an assignment to find out who has been travelling back in time and torturing younger versions of his boss in very odd ways.

Normally when the idea of "time travel" comes up people automatically expect they are in for a traditional science fiction novel. But Foop! is anything but that, and readers expecting such might be disappointed. There isn't much that's traditional about this book at all. In fact Chris Genoa and his publisher, Eraserhead Press, have aligned themselves with a literary movement calling itself Bizarro. That right there should tell you what you're in for. While this isn't experimental or hard to follow writing, Genoa doesn't reign in his overactive imagination at all when it comes to the characters he chooses to introduce--such as a blind monkey with a lasso--or their often insane actions.

Foop! does have a traditional three part structure, with Parts 1 and 3 being the strongest. Part 2, when Joe retreats to his apartment, does drag a little and could have used some more editing, but Genoa tends to throw enough humor at the reader to make up for this and get you to Part 3 which is excellent.

This book was cearly written by someone of the MTV generation, or generation X, and it will most likely appeal to readers younger than 40. I also suspect that like writers such as Chuck Palahniuk, Genoa will appeal more to men than women, but I could be wrong since there are a bunch of positive Foop! reviews on here from women. The dialogue is rapid-fire, the humor absurd and sometimes scatalogical, many of the characters are cartoonish, there is plenty of satirical social commentary, and the ending is uncompromisingly bleak.

I recommend this book for people who don't get easily offended by off-color humor--hint: if you think South Park is nothing but dumb humor, you won't like Foop!--for fans of the cartoonish surrealism of Terry Gilliam, and for people who don't mind a little bizarre chaos in their bedtime reading.

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nutty Humor with Bite, June 28, 2005

By 

Roger Ferst (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: FOOP! (Paperback)

Chris Genoa is nuts. But that's fine by me because that's how I like my humor served up--by a clever writer who's tettering on the edge of utter lunacy. I haven't read a book this funny in a long, long time. If you want a taste of what I'm talking about check out the interview Genoa did with Koko the gorilla that devolved into total madness. Just google "Koko Genoa" and you'll see what I mean.

Read this book if you like crazy as hell type humor dished out by a guy who can write like a stud.