Customer Reviews

Lemur

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Spencer Sproul worships serial killers. His home is a shrine to them, and he spends the majority of his time devising ways to become the next Manson, Bundy, or Gacy. Spencer's also a dedicated employee at Lemuel's Family Restaurant, oblivious to the constant insults of his collegues. When a rival food chain opens across the street, and one of Lemuel's waitresses leaves to work for the competition, Spencer springs into action in an attempt to make Lemuel's the ultimate family dining experience.

If I'd read what I just wrote above without having read this book, I probably would have never had an interest in LEMUR (even with the funny cartoon cover art). But the amazing thing about LEMUR is that it's so normal it's strange; we see the world through the eyes of Spencer, a nobody, flake-wanna-be serial killer, friend of bums and other flakes, and by the hystercial conclusion we can't help but feel as if we'd like to hang out with him. He's an anti-heroes' anti-hero, a serial killer who devises a way to serial kill in a manner too perfect (and too real) than his idols had ever dreamed of.

Bradley's sharp writing and in-your-face social commentary make LEMUR one of the funnest (and funniest)satires to come down the pike in many a moon---or should I say, many a deep-fried chicken patty? Like a genuine cult film, this story features many crafty scenes and lines of dialogue that won't soon leave your mind (one scene inside a 7-11-type convenience store is absolutely hysterical). Don't miss this.

Spencer Sproul aspires to be a serial killer. His locker at work (he is a busboy at Lemuel's Family Restaurant) is papered with portraits of murderers both real and fictitious . His apartment is also loaded with memorabilia.

Unfortunately, he just isn't very threatening (he can't even growl convincingly), and when he breaks into a woman's apartment to kill her, he gets distracted by her book (about a serial killer, natch) and reads it till dawn.

Inspired by the machinations of a convenience store clerk (who he also originally intended to kill), an expert at luring obese people into his shop to consume even more questionable comestibles, Spencer realizes that his best potential murder weapon is the restaurant itself. So he turns his creative talents to marketing -- and especially to ratcheting up the effect of its mascot, Lemmy the Lemur (pictured on the cover) -- and rapidly moves up the ranks by capitalizing on the subliminal power of gonzo advertising.

Satire is not a strong enough word for what Tom Bradley is doing with Lemur. Every character is painted with a bizarro brush, and yet they remain relatable. Spencer can't even use English properly (Bradley calls this "oral dyslexia"), but he isn't hard to understand, and this difference actually works to make him more engaging and sympathetic.

Readers who like their social commentary wrapped up in absurdity will find a lot to like about Lemur. You can read it as a tightly written treatise on consumption in the modern age, or as the touching story of a serial killer's coming of age. Either way you choose to approach it, this darkly comic novella is sure to entertain.

Tom Bradley's LEMUR has been getting lots of attention from the most diverse places. The Advocate, which is the world's most widely read Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender magazine, says LEMUR "marks the maturity, indeed the triumph of [the LGBT] movement," that it "could do as much to raise the rainbow flag as two Stonewall Day parades," and that Tom Bradley has "introduced a type that seems new to the public eye, but has been there under our noses ever since alternative sexuality began."

The multi-media journal Unlikely Stories has observed that LEMUR "subverts the subversives by bringing us moments of such unexampled psychological strangeness that any somatic monstrosity or distortion of cause and effect would hardly be noticed."

These charms are conveyed by a technique and timing reminiscent of the best comedic talents from Aristophanes to the Marx Brothers. Tom Bradley is able to interweave scenes of simultaneous madness and parade them before our eyes like multiple burlesque ballets on a revolving stage. The braided plots proceed to a simultaneous orgasm whose inevitability you feel like a baby grand piano sailing down on your head from ten stories up.

LEMUR cries out for cinematic treatment. If only Jesus were alive so he could give Groucho, Harpo and Chico the Lazarus treatment.

"Spencer wanders past various deserted sections of the library, marked LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, and HISTORY. Eventually he comes to the Business shelves, the only ones that have any visitors." Yes indeed. Spencer Sproul lives in a world where money and power mean everything. He lacks both, of course, and he's too broken down to lash out like his serial killer idols. But this is America, folks. The land of opportunity, where the abused can become the abuser. In Lemur, Tom Bradley writes about the American Dream. This is a funny, twisted book filled with funny, twisted characters. His prose is as addictive as MSG, and the only side effect is the feeling of being smacked across the brain, and liking it.

Reading Lemur is like watching a cartoon on the inside of your eyelids after a pound of Lebanese blond. There's a realism to the story that is very close to, but not quite, the realism of everyday life. The characters, the situations are all recognizable, but as exaggerations. They move about in their blind way, but always about three inches off the ground. Bradley has a way of getting at the essence of human qualities through a peculiar satire, one that is uniquely his, and that constantly startles and shocks. When it comes to snideness, he's right up there with Pope and Swift. The fast food restaurant theme (Lemur is a cafe logo) becomes an allegory for what America (and the rest of the world) is swallowing without question. The serial killer fixation of Spencer, the "hero," reduces human brutality to the prosaic level of a French fry (or elevates the French fry to the level of a criminal act). Bradley's story of who does what to whom in the competitive world of food & beverage is the very stuff of every day life in America, but you have never quite seen it in this bizarre context. The sign of a great book is the extent to which it changes the way you look at the world. When you finally set down Lemur after reading it, take a stroll down franchise lane with its parking lots and metal signs, logos, and hapless souls in uniform smocks, and see if you don't start to feel that you're walking six inches off the ground yourself in a world that isn't a world. Better yet, read the whole book in a McPhonyFood Diner, pausing between chapters to look around. You'll never feed your brain with stuff off the sidewalk again.

During an interview in the current issue of Unlikely Stories Magazine, award-winning novelist Tom Bradley is grilled pretty thoroughly on the issue of man-boy love. The interviewer seems to have something of an axe to grind. Which is good. The best interviews grind lots of things: teeth, nerves, egos. A modicum of bumping goes along with the grinding, too, in this case.

In the six thousand words of that strange conversation, they range all over the place, and pretty well dispense with the notion of pederasty as practiced among certain secondary characters in a sub-plot of Tom Bradley's new book, Lemur. But I find it interesting that they seem deliberately to ignore the largest presence on the pages--I refer to Spencer Sproul, the would-be serial killing protagonist--and the biggest theme: gayness itself. I mean among consenting adults, of course.

Before the reader is made aware of Spencer Sproul's erotic orientation--indeed, before even he himself becomes conscious of it--a sympathy has been established in our hearts. Affection for Spencer is sturdy enough to remain unshaken by any sexual revelations and the phobic reactions they might spur in all but the most reptilian subcortex. And the beauty is that the sympathy has been engendered in a most venerable manner: via the expedient of the Bildungsroman.

We have followed Spencer Sproul all the way to the top of his profession, from the bottom-most menial trench to the middle-managerial stratosphere. We have ascended with him to psychic wholeness, from deep in an unhealthy serial killer infatuation. This obsession is nonetheless unwholesome for its self-delusion: it would be hard to imagine someone with less of a killing knack than Spencer. His lack of self-awareness is even sicker than the collections of splatter shots which paper the walls in his "lair"--actually just a squalid duplex.

We have gone along with him as he rises to the rare level of individuation that permits real work to be performed, where creativity comes within one's reach. And the fact that his canvas is a crass family-style restaurant only adds piquancy, for he has clearly done what the Hindus have always considered the point of manifest existence: he has found out what his karmically determined Sadhana is, and has managed to arrange circumstances, both external and internal, so he can pursue that work which his inner nature predetermined for him at the moment of incarnation.

And, this being a classically structured comedy (even though a tragic chorus of bums sings in the dumpster out behind the restaurant), he comes to the point of being able to feel and express love. Spencer Sproul achieves the capacity for tenderness, which is signaled in the patting of a special pair of buttocks at the very end. His face, which in all the previous pagination has been distinguished only by its incapacity for expression, smiles patronizingly at his favorite employee, his "special-best bus boy," namely Spud.

Never has a love story been told so effectively in a less likely setting. Tom Bradley has pulled off an astonishing, hilarious feat here.

Bradley's Characters are enjoyable people. Spencer the would be serial killer, just does not have the guts to spill some. Reads all about his idols; Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, etc. He works in a dinner as a bus boy.

Overall I like the authors character development, but the plot was missing something or maybe it needed more. I have to point out that the cover artwork is great will look awesome on my book shelves.

Lemuel's Family Restaurant's loser bus boy Spencer Sproul longs to be a serial killer like his heroes but just doesn't have the aptitude for it, until he determines that he can use the restaurant itself to torture his victims...

When I saw the demented drawing of Lemmy the Lemur on the cover, I knew I had to read this book. Not only did Tom Bradley make me care about a loser sociopath like Spencer Sproul, he gave me a few laughs along the way.

The main attractions of this story to me were the setting and the charcters. Spencer's job as a bus boy made me reflect fondly on my day as a dishwasher... when I quit after one shift! Spencer's lack of skill at serial killing was hilarious. Having a hooker come over and not clubbing her with a potato masher as she looks at your favorite serial killer book? Breaking into a house with murder on your mind and getting distracted by the book about serial killers your victim fell asleep reading? Priceless! Spencer being completely inept at chit-chat really made the story for me.

The supporting cast was good as well; Spencer's wood-be apprentice Spud, Raleigh Standish, Detective Furtwangler, Spencer's co-workers, they were all pretty well done. I even like the lady cop, the fat cop, and the reading cop as a team. The hellish restaurant setting, and even Spencer, to an extent, reminded me of James Steele's Felix and the Sacred Thor quite a bit.

Any gripes? It was way too short. It's 118 pages and the type was pretty big. Other than that, it was a very enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half.

Working at Lemuel's Family Restaurant as a busboy, Spencer dreams of nothing more than to be the next infamous serial killer. Instead of idols like Jesus or Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., his idols consist of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. He soon discovers that, while we may hold dreams for ourselves, life doesn't always turn out as we planned. As much as he wants to be a cunning murderer, he realizes it is not his cup of tea. Once a competing restaurant opens across the street, Spencer uses the opportunity to change the course of his life.

This story had a lot of potential and just didn't follow through. The book spent too much time on unimportant characters that went nowhere and not enough on the one character that could have and should have been great. I didn't hate it...and I really tried to get into the story and like it more, but it just wasn't happening.

The world of "Lemur" is at first glance as seemingly banal in it's detailing of wage slavery and small town numbness as our own, except that Bradley has peopled it with such an unbelievable parade of grotesques that it becomes a horrifyingly distorted reflection. The prose sketches Scarfe like portraits which then become animated by bizarre purposes to produce... an idiot savant bus boy who is attempting to become a serial killer; a cellulite worshipping store clerk who views his hyper-obese customers as "God-babies"; a paedophile restaurant reviewer; a trio of cops that includes not only an uber-Marxist but a female who wishes "to become the toughest creature on the planet"; and the various vicious co-workers, holocaust survivors, and mascot worshipping dumpster divers that you would expect.

A savage satire of the fast food trade with zero fat content and complete free of literary MSG.