Recycling Jimmy [Hardcover]

Andy Tilley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2007

After a bungled, hilarious suicide attempt and a subsequent hospital stay, Jimmy’s life is set on a course he could never have imagined with his new best pal, fellow resident, and practical joker Kevin. Together the two form a business to assist the suicidal who, like Jimmy, couldn’t quite pull off dying the first time, with the added wrinkle of filming and distributing each case for profit. After a terrible practical joke gone wrong, Jimmy resolves to put what he has learned about human suffering to better use by helping, rather than exploiting, those desperate souls who want to end their lives. An outrageous romp through the darkest aspects of human nature, this compelling novel is told with brilliant black humor and a unique zest for life.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Jimmy is a British slacker. Overwhelmed by life's burdens, including his telly's failure minutes before the start of Manchester United's match against Inter Milan, he attempts suicide. But his already protracted adolescence is extended, perhaps for many decades, when he bungles his attempt. In the hospital, he meets Kevin, an orderly and practical joker in residence. They quickly become mates and almost as quickly develop an unlikely business plan: to assist others intent on suicide and sell DVDs of their clients' videotaped demise over the Web. Recycling Jimmy certainly isn't the most polished first novel of the year, but it is energetic, imaginative, relentlessly and unabashedly vulgar, and at times funny enough to make a cranky reviewer laugh out loud. This belongs on every eccentric fiction fan's short list of oddball black comedies, where it will share space with John Ridley's Everybody Smokes in Hell (1998), Michael Dibdin's Back to Bologna (2006), and great chunks of the works of Carl Hiaasen, Donald E. Westlake, and Barry Gifford. Gaughan, Thomas

About the Author

Andy Tilley is an author and a contract expert.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Kunati Inc.; 1 edition (September 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1601640137
• ISBN-13: 978-1601640130
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,675,841 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In Manchester there are only two serious choices that a young man has to make; which football team to support and what to wear to the match. I chose United, (wisely as it turned out) but perhaps not so clever was my fashion choice. I was a 'mod' back then, and in early eighties England , mods were an endangered species. I guess we asked for it though. I mean it wasn't ever going to look right for a fourteen year old kid to hit the streets wearing a two-tone suit, Ben Sherman shirt and shiny black brogues was it? Kids dressed as men is just wrong, like we'd escaped from a Bugsy Mallone set, and if that wasn't na've enough, we would finish the look by draping ourselves in heavy ex-NATO army parkas that served no useful purpose other than to slow us down as we ran from gangs of rockers and skins, punks and Goths. Looking back though, my lack of pace turned out to be not such a bad thing as invariably those short lived chases would give me just enough time to get my mouth into gear and talk my way out of a beating. It was a tactic that worked well and the sharp wit that I relied on then has continued to serve me well in my adult life. It earned me some life long friends at Salford University where I studied engineering and it still works today if I ever find myself cornered in the board room. Oil is my primary trade now, and at the moment I do this in the middle of Algerian Sahara. It's a job that I enjoy tremendously, but it is just a job and to be honest, one that takes me away from my loved ones for more time than I feel comfortable giving. But, like my parka, this necessary inertia to the pace of my life has its upside. In this case the pay off is the opportunity to write. Time spent alone far away needs to be filled and in my case it yearns to create otherwise it would be truly wasted wouldn't it?

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A thoroughly modern, uniquely brilliant dark comedy, May 16, 2008

By 

Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" (Shelby, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Recycling Jimmy (Hardcover)

A lot goes through your mind when you're precariously dangling upside down from a bridge - blood mostly, but also plenty of vivid insights. You might suddenly, by way of example, realize that your fiancé wasn't all that to begin with and that your best friend is really pretty annoying, so who cares if you caught the two of them sharing a morning-after kiss, and why in the world did you ever set about trying to kill yourself over the whole mess. That's just where Jimmy Gee finds himself, though, as this novel opens. While he doesn't walk away from the situation unscathed - well, actually, he does walk away, just not very far - this brush with death eventually serves as the impetus for a grand scheme that's possibly just crazy enough to work.

While recovering in the hospital, Jimmy strikes up a rather unusual friendship with one of the interns, a bloke named Kevin who can't resist playing rather sick practical jokes on patients waking up in the suicide ward, including Jimmy. A practical joker of some skill himself, Jimmy responds in kind, and a bond is formed. With nowhere else to go when he is finally released from the hospital, Jimmy moves into his new best bud's apartment and it is there - during one of their senseless brainstorm sessions - that the idea for "Quitters" is born. As Jimmy knows from experience, some people are just too timid or downright clumsy to do themselves in properly. After all, if every suicidal person did the job right the first time, there would be no need for suicide wards. Many of these individuals will just keep trying until they manage to kick the bucket properly, so what would be wrong with helping them along a bit? And if you can profit from the deal, so much the better.

Here's the deal. "Quitters" (i.e., Jimmy and Kevin) will offer assistance to anyone seriously determined to commit suicide, as long as the suicide is of a spectacular nature. Each such suicide will be filmed and eventually included on a DVD Jimmy and Kevin intend to release. Knowing full well that there are plenty of weirdoes in the world who would pay good money to watch such a morbid video, the guys expect DVD sales to earn them a right good income. Things go surprisingly well - at first - but the guys can only dance around the Kevorkian Curse for so long before things take a rather nasty turn.

Recycling Jimmy is black comedy at its best - ludicrous yet believable, and consistently funny throughout (which is not to say there isn't a serious moment here or there along the way). Jimmy's first two encounters with a potential love interest are beyond memorable, and the setting for their first official date is uniquely surreal to say the least. The one-upmanship of Jimmy's and Kevin's friendship also offers the reader a plethora of humorous moments, although I must say the increasingly extreme and seemingly non-stop pranks the two play on each other eventually grew a tad tiresome for me. Even the suicides are capable of drawing laughs, especially one in particular that puts one of Kevin's Loony Tunes-inspired theories to the test once and for all. And if you think you know how everything is going to play out in the end, think again - Tilley lays down a pretty mean literary land mine or two along the way.

We all know that the wittiest of writers in the world today tend to hail from Britain, and Andy Tilley would certainly seem to be taking some mighty self-assured baby steps in the sizable shoes of such brilliant comic writers as Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. This is only his first novel, but his unique voice and acerbically effective brand of humor bespeak a wealth of potential. I for one will be most anxious to see what he comes up with next.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars P.G. Wodehouse Meets Monty Python, October 12, 2007

By 

Art Tirrell - "The Vitaman Effect" (upstate ny) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Recycling Jimmy (Hardcover)

To say the least, in Andy Tilley's brash novel "Recycling Jimmy", antihero Jimmy's judgment is suspect. He's foolish, irreverent, and passive; just what you'd expect from a bloke whose emotional development got euthanized sometime during his teens. In the opening scene Jimmy dangles from a bridge, eighty feet above ground. Even then, he's hard pressed to do anything, anything at all, right. Still, somehow, he's just likeable enough and the situation just foolish enough, we begin to have our hopes...

Whatever the roots of author Tilley's eccentric humor, he delivers the goods with elan despite a narrative laden with passive form. It works, but repetition of some verb forms might irritate some readers. Fortunately, in the opening he's just getting his dark funnybone warm and before long at all prose issues recede. It's while in hospital after the bungled suicide attempt, after Jimmy encounters kindred spirit Kevin, that the full effect of the author's special form of humor comes to bear. Suffice it to say, in Recycling Jimmy, the unusual is commonplace, the incredible comfy as an afternoon pint at the local pub, and the unthinkable...why of course, the unthinkable is central to the plot.

Will Jimmy change his ways? Will he learn how to take responsibility for his acts? I'm not tipping over the crumpets. You'll have to read to find out. Warning: the laughs get you by surprise. If no one in the family is trained in the Heimlich Maneuver, don't get caught with a mouthful of chips.

Art Tirrell is the author of the 2007 adventure novel, "The Secret Ever Keeps", of which reviewer Joan A. said, "The first book...my significant other...and I have agreed on since 'Kafka on the Beach'." See all the reviews on Amazon at /product/1601640048

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Full of Life!, October 7, 2007

By 

R. Poole-Carter "Women of Magdalene" (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Recycling Jimmy (Hardcover)

Reading Recycling Jimmy, I felt a little like a voyeur--maybe not quite as extreme as those who'd watch a "Quitters" video of someone's suicide, the kind of audience suicide-survivor Jimmy and his buddy Kevin target. Still, I kept reading Jimmy's lively adventures with morbid fascination and appreciation of Andy Tilley's brilliant dark humor.