Customer Reviews

Fast Eddie, King of the Bees

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A surreal trip to a futuristic Boston. I laughed out loud when I figured out where the present-day location of the Nec was.

Fast-paced and lots of fun, with bonus giggles for anyone familiar with Boston geography. The fact that it's utterly unpredictable makes it even more fun.

Everyone likes a good dystopia, from Wells and London to Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Burgess and M. T. Anderson's Feed. In Fast Eddie-King of the Bees, Robert Arellano takes us to the dystopic Boston of the near future, where a big-footed pickpocketing contortionist becomes the leader of underground Dig City.

Eddie, the pickpocket, starts out as a street orphan mentored by Shep, the faux blind street professor who schools his rats in both grifting and the liberal arts. Eddie leaves Shep's tuteledge in search of his birth parents, but Pauly (the Mayor of Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey) and his wife Merry (as in Christmas) fall short. Eddie finds himself falling back through the rabbit hole to the underground city. There's an Oedipal subplot or two--read the title slowly and a little backward and you can get to Oedipus, King of Thebes. There's plenty of other nameplay and wordplay too (go reread Oedipus and match up the names their Greek counterparts for fun).