Red Meat Cures Cancer [Paperback]

Starbuck O'Dwyer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2004

What would you do if you were a few months from collecting early retirement—a pension for which you’d sucked up and sycophanted almost twenty years—when your obscenely overweight and extremely crass boss told you that if you didn’t raise the company’s market share by the end of the year, you’d be out on your ass without a dime?

If you’re Sky Thorne, Senior V.P. of Tailburger—a fringe fast food chain whose specialties are batter dipped, deep-fried meat patties and 96-oz. beef-flavored shakes—you’ll get to work on as many harebrained, desperate schemes as you can think of. And if that means launching a marketing campaign that asks the public, “Why just abuse your body when you can torture it?” then damn it, that’s what you’ll do! Because Sky Thorne is ready to fight dirty and do anything necessary to earn the pension he sees as the reset button on life, liberty, and the pursuit of unadulterated deep-fried happiness.

Red Meat Cures Cancer is a hilarious and poignant romp through a world of excess, and marks the arrival of a great new satirical voice in American literature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

O'Dwyer certainly picks a rich target for his satiric debut novel, but this sendup of the fast food industry has a lot of empty calories, including enough sophomoric humor to make many readers gag. Sky Thorne is the 46-year-old director of corporate communications for Tailburger, a fast food outfit whose primary product is a waistline-busting fried burger slathered with mayonnaise. Faced with the prospect of selling the product in a world of low-fat, slimmed-down fast food choices, not to mention a class-action law suit, Thorne ditches the high road and concocts a new ad campaign that emphasizes the raunchy, hedonistic culinary excess of the Tailburger. The campaign draws ire from several quarters, notably the comely but strident Muffet Meaney, leader of the antimeat lobbying group S.E.R.M.O.N. (Stop Eating Red Meat Now), whom the widowed Thorne is trying to bed. Thorne's comically unscrupulous boss, CEO Frank Fanoflincoln, is threatening to fire him, and that possibility only becomes more likely as public relations catastrophes pile up: a gargantuan Belgian pro basketball player, who's just signed an endorsement contract but who dies of a heart attack after bingeing on Tailburgers ("Belgians in body bags don't sell burgers, Thorne"); a scandal that ensues when Thorne runs Tailburger ads on a porn site; a legal setback from an E. coli incident and a bribery fracas with a legislator named Plot Thickens. O'Dwyer's humor is considerably less sophisticated than Christopher Buckley's, but there are some undeniable gutbusters buried here. And with plot twists like these, he deserves points for sheer chutzpah.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

“Deep fried comic genius.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Red Meat Cures Cancer is wildly irreverent and wickedly funny.”—Terry Hummel, former Publisher, Rolling Stone magazine

“One funny novel.”—The Knoxville News-Sentinel

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400034817
• ISBN-13: 978-1400034819
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,574,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Starbuck O'Dwyer, a native of Rochester, New York, is a graduate of Princeton, Oxford and Cornell. His critically-acclaimed novel, Red Meat Cures Cancer (Random House/Vintage Books), won two national writing awards for humor and was a featured selection of the 2007 One Book One Vancouver reading program. He has appeared on over 350 radio and television programs including guest spots on ESPN, Voice of America and NPR, and his writing, which has been described by Kirkus Reviews as "comic genius", has been featured in publications and forums as diverse as Entertainment Weekly, Flaunt, Toro, Japanophile, the Journal News, PW Daily and the Boston Globe. His latest books, How To Raise A Good Kid, a collection of funny stories about parenting, and Goliath Gets Up, a novel about a group of underdogs who try to rise up and do something great, are now available.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Laughter is the Best Medicine, March 29, 2004

By 

Michael Duranko "Author of 'Bootism: a shoe ... (NYC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Red Meat Cures Cancer (Paperback)

Outrageous and smart humor makes this book an enjoyable read. The story starts so far from reality and coherently spins out of control, I found myself searching for real-world parallels. This is an effective technique making the story work and the characters memorable.

Like a recurring, well done Saturday Night Live sketch (Will Ferrell as George W. Bush or Darrell Hammond as Chris Matthews "Hardball") the caricatures follow the subject and continue to entertain far into the future. Red Meat will no doubt have the same result for the many stereotypes O'Dwyer weaves into the book.

I love stories set in familiar places and I think this is the first book I have ever read set in Rochester NY, where I grew up. The many popular landmarks from upstate NY added to the story

md
Michael Duranko
www.bootism.com

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Culture of Meat, February 25, 2004

By 

Todd M. Bunker (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Red Meat Cures Cancer (Paperback)

This review from NadaMucho.com, which features book reviews focusing on contemporary fiction...

"Red Meat Cures Cancer" tackles the world of fast food corporate culture - although not quite the way we'd expect - with the story of Schuyler "Sky" Thorne, a sort of everyman executive hoping to coast through his last year of work so that he can collect retirement. A threat from his grossly obese, good ol' boy boss to raise market share "or else" triggers a series of outrageous events that threaten Sky's chances of finishing off his career in peace.

As Senior V.P. of Tailburger, an underdog burger chain whose target audience is convicts and other assorted lowlifes, Sky's life takes a turn from bad to worse as he realizes his morals are slipping away in a wash of increasingly desperate marketing ploys, most of which have gone horribly awry. The books shines in this aspect - by presenting the story from an intimate, first person point of view, "RMCC" puts a personal spin on the otherwise terribly inhumane world of corporations.

Additionally, this angle allows O'Dwyer to tackle the many gray areas and personal conflicts that are all part of survival for people in positions of power. Successfully balancing an insane boss, political alliances that shift with the daily news, and a personal life gone terribly awry, Sky becomes an improbably sympathetic character. It's refreshing to read about an executive-type who is portrayed as much more human than the stock, heartless "The Man" (read: aging white guy) character, which would be the obvious choice for a story such as this.

This is O'Dwyer's greatest strength. He understands that competent satire requires a blend of absurdity and subtlety, and that the obvious choice (which in this case would've been a McDonald's executive) is not always the funniest. He deftly walks the fine line between archetype and stereotype, delicately balancing an outrageous cast of familiar characters that might have come across as stale in lesser hands.

A penchant for silly names (a Texas beef council member named Traylor Hitch, for example) and superfluous characters, a tendency to throw in a few too many absurd and unnecessary situations, and an all-too-abrupt and poorly conceived ending are the few missteps in an otherwise purely American satire. Super mad props to the author for self-publishing the hardcopy edition before Vintage picked it up for larger distribution in paperback. It may not be the benchmark for contemporary corporate satire, but "RMCC" is a double bacon burger with extra cheese: delicious and enough to satisfy.

5.0 out of 5 stars Steve from MA, August 14, 2006

By 

Steve O (Haverhill, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Red Meat Cures Cancer (Paperback)

This is the funniest novel/farce/satire that I have read in a long time. I hope Starbuck is not a one book author.