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38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Relentlessly entertaining., April 30, 2005
I'm not even sure where to begin. I picked up this book in the bookstore cause I liked the cover, opened it up and next thing I know I'm still STANDING in the aisle and I'm three chapters in. I buy the book, go home and read it straight through! I've never done that in my life (besides "The Giving Tree"), but I couldn't put it down. Who is this A. Lee Martinez? Does he have any other books?
The story is simple: two kinda friends - one a vampire, one a werewolf - agree to help the owner of an all-night diner with her zombie problem. Yea, that sounds simple, but somehow Martinez has crammed more imagination, originality, action, smiles and endearing characters in 272 pages than most writers would in 10 books or their whole career. I am truly impressed.
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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Warped and funny, with greasy food, October 1, 2005
This review is from: Gil's All Fright Diner (Alex Awards (Awards)) (Paperback)
Earl is a vampire who wears overalls; Duke the werewolf wears jeans and a leather jacket but no underwear. Duke used to be a truck driver, till he ran over a werewolf. So these are not your debonaire, suave, bow-tied and caped supernaturals. They do not drink... wine - but they sure do drink beer. In a pick-up truck.
There are so many funny bits in the book that I was constantly reading a line here, a paragraph there, aloud to my spouse.
We have old gods with far more consonants in their names than Cthulhu (and possibly even more tentacles), not only ghosts but a ghost Scottie, and of course, the zombies. We have cows and chickens, and we also have the latest edition of the Necronomicon, which includes a spell for getting a three-picture deal with any major studio.
There is despair in this diner, but it's not Edward Hopper's despair, that's for sure. Late nights in this diner are downright lively, or at least, undead-ly (though occasionally deadly - which contrast certainly points out some of the weaknesses of the English language.)
Speaking of language, I do have one nit to pick: the author almost randomly uses "you're" for "your" and vice versa; sometimes he's right, sometimes not. A good copy editor would have caught this. Either our publisher needs to hire a copy editor, or our writer needs to brush up on some grammar, because I find it very distracting, and un-funny, to bump into mistakes like this so often.
That said, I have two more words for y'all: Pig Latin.
Optional family reading alert: scattered showers of four-letter words, casual teenage sex (not graphic) and blood and gore (sometimes graphic). They're all very funny, but some parents might not want their teenagers dipping into this, even though it's a light and funny read overall. Personally I had heard and read lots worse by the time I was 15, but it might be a little mature for a 13-year old. So call it a PG-13 book. As vampire books go, that's quite light!
The plot is somewhat reminiscent of Tanya Huff's "Summoner" series, and I think people who enjoy Huff's fantasy would like this book. Likewise, if you read this and are then looking for something else to read, you might check Huff out. There seem to be some odd similarities between Huff's urban Canada and Martinez' rural desert south!
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Funny, Up to a Point, May 12, 2006
This review is from: Gil's All Fright Diner (Alex Awards (Awards)) (Paperback)
Gil's All Fright Diner... what can I say about this book? I know when I first cracked the covers and started wading into the introduction, I found myself reeling with the folksy dialogue and abrasively Texan characters. The book is just overflowing with what I suppose could be characterized as 'Southern Charm', but until your brain adjusts it can be pretty headache-inducing.
I'm glad I stuck with it though, as there are some genuinely interesting characters and ideas contained in this novel. As the cover-plugs indicate, this is the story of a werewolf and a vampire, traveling companions through the deeply weird American Southwest, who are eventually called upon to fight the undead hordes and apocalyptic plans of a teenage cultist determined to bring the oldest of the old gods back to the world, plunge the human race into perpetual hellish darkness, so on and so forth.
If that sounds both overly complicated and overly simple at the same time, you're getting the idea. This book is meant as a satire, as a laugh-out-loud parody of the burgeoning horror genre, a Douglas Adams for the nuevo-Lovecraftian set. You won't find a lot of actual chuckles here, though, and at times things the author thinks are clearly very witty are in fact dull and repetitive. You never get a very good look at the world these characters inhabit, and you never feel completely immersed in that world, the way you would in a Douglas Adams book, or Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, et al. Few people can write in that league of course.
If you can get past the shallow world and sparse setting, however, you'll find some interesting characters half-hidden by the author. No one in this book is quite as boring or as simple as they appear at first, and there are some genuinely thoughtful portrayals, of people who are caught up in a world that's quite strange and dangerous, and find that their seemingly enviable immortality might in fact just mean an endless life of alienation and abnormality. In spite of that, there's happiness and friendship, and enough of a start to hope for a better fleshed out sequel or two.
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