Customer Reviews

HELP! A Bear is Eating Me!

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Marv Pushkin is a jerk. He is a greedy, drug-addicted, nature-hating, member of middle-management who cheats on his wife. He is also pinned beneath his SUV, loaded up with pain-killers, while a bear is eating him alive. So begins Mykle Hansen's comedic bizarro novel, "Help! A Bear is Eating Me!"

The ambitious premise of the book is that it takes place totally in the mind of Marv Pushkin while he is being eaten. There is very little action that takes place during the story but the character of Marv makes the book completely absorbing. Marv may be a jerk, but he is a charming, talented story-teller. This is a difficult literary trick to pull off, but Hansen succeeds with impressive ease.

Hansen has a strong and engrossing writing voice. In the hands of a less talented author, a book with this premise would totally fall flat. Instead, Hansen tells an addictive story that the reader will not be able to put down.

Hansen also gives the reader a lot to think about. Marv is a caricature of one of those corporate losers that everyone encounters. Using this kind of person as a main character, Hansen satirizes many aspects of modern living. Be it money, sex, or friendship, Marv is never satisfied with what he has and is completely consumed with a desire for more material wealth.

"Help! A Bear is Eating Me!" is a unique and memorable work of absurd humor. Mykle Hansen has crafted a fascinating character study of a thoroughly unlikable person. While the reader may not sympathize with Marv, it is hard to pull away from his plight.

Ironically I just bought this book at Powell's while on a trip to Portland. The title caught my eye, and after a quick flip through the pages I decided to buy it, and I am glad I did.

The story concerns one Marv Pushkin, slimy executive and all-around jerk, who has taken his team of underlings, the wife he hates, and the woman he's having an affair with on a Team Building trip to the wilds of Alaska. He is also trapped under his majestic and very expensive SUV. Oh, and he's being eaten by a bear.

The story is basically a stream of consciousness from the mind of Marv as he is eaten by a bear, consumes massive quantities of drugs and painkillers washed down with beer, suffers from withdrawals from his material world of success, imagines and reimagines his life as it has happened, and very slowly starts to slide into plain insanity. He describes his circumstances in a wonderfully outraged self-absorbed tone, and you slowly begin to learn that what Marv has convinced himself of is not necessarily what really happened, but it's done in a convincing way. The entire section where he is obsessing over his feet is priceless.

The book works as a very broad satire - Marv's voice is very original and very funny and resounds with the echoes of every scumbag executive you've ever seen or read about - but given how funny and creative the majority of the book was, I was disappointed in how it ended. It did fit the tone of the book, but it seemed a little rushed.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and I have already lent the book out to a friend. It's on my recommended reading list.

Yes! I love my books! I love them more than I love my own cat!

Some authors are cruel to their books. They ignore them, or lock them in closets, or give free copies of them to awful people. I am not like that. Every single copy of every one of my books is my favorite book in the whole world! And with this new Kindle edition of HELP! A BEAR IS EATING ME!, my love can now transmit itself effortlessly across space and time, like a tiny silver thread that runs from the center of my brain out my window, into the sky, flying up to Seattle, snaking through the Amazon server farm, rippling out to a cell tower, shooting through the aether, plunging into your new Amazon Kindle's non-volatile memory, slithering up through its gorgeous e-ink screen and stabbing directly into your eyeballs. That's why, when you blink, my leg twitches! And I call that love.

Let me start by saying this is not a bad book. It is short which makes it easy to go through in a single sitting, it has a distinct sense of humor (presented by our victim and narcissist main character Mr. Pushkin) that borders at times on more than just simply disturbing, and it contains a distinct voice. When so many books leave the reader wondering how the main character thinks and feels about a situation because the author uses the setting for most of the storytelling we are never without the optimistic, slightly inebriated, and caustic opinions of the bastard under the car being eaten by a bear.

I enjoyed reading this book, I found it a very funny and very honest portrayal of what someone of Mr. Pushkin's particular character flaws would do in such a situation. Presented as a man who believes that his image (and not Image Team) is everything, we aren't disappointed when his thoughts turn to suing the car company and drift to the lazy people who didn't detail the underside of his very expensive car. The language of the book radiates with the character and not an outside voice (the author) which makes it all the more unique.

That all having been said, there are several glaring errors in the books grammar (including the spelling) that should have been caught before publishing. Within the first pages they jump out at you and can disrupt the flow of the book. In the beginning I was willing to overlook these as possible quirks of the character but it became obvious by a quarter through that this was not intentional. It actually reminded me of when someone just runs through their spellcheck program and never looks at the suggestions to see if they make any sense. That was very disappointing and the only thing that kept me from giving this book five stars.

Ultimately my litmus test is whether I will read the book again (I will gladly) and if I will suggest it to friends (I already have). I am looking forward to sampling some Mr. Hansen's other works.

This is a refreshing, interesting, and just really different book than anything I'm betting you've read for a long time. What an idea! Write a story about a guy lying trapped underneath his 4WD while a bear gnaws at his exposed legs. Even better idea, make the guy (Marv Pushkin) a total self centred jerk who even though you are just an imaginary person in his mind, still tells you off while narrating his mind diary account of his situation with an adversary he calls Mr Bear. Marv also tells you what led up to him being trapped under a 4WD, "I wasn't always being eaten by a bear" in Alaska in the first place, as well as his opinions on nature and the natural order of things. As he awaits rescue by his underlings, you won't like him, but you'll admit he is damn entertaining, knows how to tell a tale, and you won't be able to put this book down. Underlings which are so going to be fired for not getting there quicker pretty much sums up the type of guy Marv is.

It's only 129 pages, but Help! a Bear is Eating Me is a classic and very funny read!

I don't know that Hansen's next book will make it into the public libraries with the title Rampaging F rs of Everything on the Crazy S ing Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere, so you'll probably have to buy it. I will be! (Note after repeated attempt after attemp Amazon ridiculously does not publish this review with Hansen's actual second book title's words. So I have had to just use the initial letter for some of those words, but the title does display in full on that Amazon product's page).

I have to say, the only reason I bought this book was seeing the author's own review down here. After reading his own comments on the book I knew I could enjoy his writing style so I downloaded a sample to my Kindle and sure enough... I was hooked about 5 pages in.

The interaction between this depraved man and a bear who is using him as a snack bar is just phenomenal. The author is constantly playing with the English language and concepts of our reality that challenge normal thinking. I have always loved this in a book and it's what makes me gravitate to other authors like Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde who do the same out of bounds literary gymnastics. You can truly feel him devolve as the days go by, and by the end the book is just insane...

There were points where I actually found myself a bit disgusted, but I think that was the aim of those passages. They never took away from the fun of the story as a whole, however, and I haven't found myself laughing out loud at a book this much in a very long time. It seemed like every other page had me going back and rereading passages and giggling. I do have to say I recommend this book and I don't write too many reviews for them.

Normally I'm not beguiled by first-person narratives, especially when the voice is that of an obnoxious boorish narcissist. Mykle Hansen's HELP! A Bear is Eating Me! is an honorable exception. Despite having a protagonist of unparalleled loathsomeness, unblemished by even a hint of concern for others or a scintilla of self-awareness, this book charmed the pants off me. The title is sheer genius, and completely accurate. As the story opens, its truly despicable antihero, Marv Pushkin lies pinned under his all-terrain vehicle somewhere off-road in Alaska. The rest of the 120-page story is structured as an ongoing monolog from Marv to the reader.

If you think about it for a second, you realise that Mykle Hansen set himself a nearly impossible challenge. A first-person narrative in the voice of a complete jerk that still manages to engage the reader is a pretty tall order. I'm happy to report that the author rises to the occasion, magnificently. I read the book in a single afternoon. It was hilarious, and written so smoothly that you ask yourself "how did he do that?"

Lying trapped and helpless isn't the only trial Marv has to survive. There's that angry bear whose cub he ran over with his Range Rover who takes revenge by gnawing off his extremities. He also suffers several hallucinatory visitations, both human and ursine, as he self-medicates to counter the mounting pain. This makes him the quintessential unreliable narrator.

The character of Marv works as a (hilarious) caricature, but the thought does occur that Hansen may have sacrificed the potential for greater emotional impact by making him so relentlessly loathsome. Most readers will be ambivalent on whether to root for the bear or for Marv. Scrooge's four ghostly visitors ultimately cause him to undergo a change of heart. Lear's misadventures in the storm teach him compassion and effect a reconciliation with Cordelia before he dies; Gloucester learns to see more clearly as a result of his blinding. HELP! A Bear is Eating Me! is not a story of growth and redemption. But so what? It's brilliantly realised and genuinely hilarious.

While I did not read this book, I did listen to it as read by the author. I'm sure the book is funny to read, but listening to the reading by Mykle Hansen takes it up a notch. The different voices used for Marv, Edna, and others, as well as the background nature sounds, makes this a very enjoyable listen. I would have given this a 5 star rating, but I wasn't wholly satisfied with the ending. -note: after reading Hansen's short story in The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, I realized that his writing style and use of language is, I think, what made this book so enjoyable.

Mykle Hansen has channeled the irritating, delusional, despicable, self-centered, corporate stereotype and inserted into his protagonist a personality half way between Mad Men and a tad less pyscho American Psycho (slightly ironic since I write this while wearing a tie). Narrative driven, HELP! A Bear is Eating Me! guides readers down a path of despair, anger, frustration, and eventual psychosis. All seen through the eyes of Marv Pushkin.

In Alaska for a bear hunting expedition and team building excursion, Marv and the subordinates he bears with set out to find the office accoutrement that will make him the envy of others. An interesting dynamic develops as the team, and Marv's wife, are all along for the trip, and most of the men, who he hates, bear arms. An accident forces him to bear the brunt of his SUV's weight, where he is trapped. His influence is brought to bear and exposed as his precarious situation and lack of power result in demands that do not bear fruit. Stuck, he must grin and bear it while keeping hope alive and planning revenge.

Bear in mind, this is a comical dialogue-heavy tale of an anti-hero. An aspiring executive manager who would sooner step over a dying hobo than get his name brand watch dirty, Marv Pushkin is the epitome of the type of soulless people who have ruined the lives and futures of others while positioning themselves for million dollar buyouts and golden parachutes. Pushkin is the crass narcissist we all hate. That's why it is hilarious at times, but also barely upsetting when he's forced to bear down while a bear eats his barely exposed legs.

For a book of less than 150 pages, you'd think the shtick would carry throughout. Unfortunately, the reader also has a slight cross to bear during the repetitive portions that make this book a longer read than it should be. Overall, however, I was pleased, laughed out loud multiple times, and enjoyed reading the tragic tale of the Marv Pushkin.

I can't even describe what a scumbag Marv Pushkin is. He is the product of everything wrong with modern civilized human beings. His life is defined by corporate wealth, mind-numbing pharmaceuticals, and chauvinistic douchebaggery. He is the epitome of consumerist arrogance. He's built himself a colossal ego decorated with material possessions, each more vulgar and expensive than the last. Marv Pushkin is an arrogant, self-absorbed, self-righteous, and downright horrible man.

But does he deserve to get eaten by a bear? That's Mykle Hansen's take, and I have to admit that it's really really brilliant. Hansen does a perfect job showing us the absolute worst sort of human being that our consumerist culture can produce. The entire story is told by Marv, who's trapped under his SUV in the wilderness of Alaska when he and his corporate underlings are on a team building exercise. Marv hates nature, by the way, just like he hates everything else. Everything that happens to him is rationalized so that it becomes someone else's fault. Marv's mental gymnastics always prove him to be the exceptional hero, and the people around him the idiots who bring him down, victimizing him with their stupidity.

Do you want to kill Marv Pushkin yet? There were moments when I sure did. But Mykle Hansen, just to prove how awesome a writer he is, makes Marv sympathetic. As the story goes on, Marv remains stuck under the SUV, getting dirtier and smellier, slowly being eaten by a bear. But Marv and the bear bond through their time together. Slowly but surely, Marv goes from hating the bear and everything around him to going on a weird psychedelic spirit quest that shatters his twisted thinking and allows him to actually empathize. He's knocked down from his high horse, and it's quite beautiful to watch him fall. And this awakening is all thanks to a hungry smelly bear. Read this book. Give it to your friends. It'll make you think of bears in a totally new way.