The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad [Paperback]

Minister Faust (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 3, 2004

Hamza and Yehat are The Coyote Kings–best friends, one a disgruntled dishwasher and the other a video store clerk, but each brilliant in his own right. Yehat builds prototypes of space-age inventions in his spare time, while Hamza, a former English honors student who was kicked out of the university, writes lush, lyrical poems when he’s not blocked–which, these days, is nearly always.

When the gorgeous, mysterious Sherem shows up in E-Town decked out in desert finery, Hamza’s creative spark is ignited. Who is this sophisticated woman that speaks arcane African tongues, quotes from obscure comics and Star Wars movies, yet seems somehow too ethereal for the world Hamza inhabits? And what is the lost artifact that she and a cast of coiffed collectors and criminal cultists so desperately seek? As Hamza falls blindly in love with Sherem, little does he know that he and Yehat play the biggest part of all in the recovery of the ancient relic–and in the future of all living beings. . . .

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What do Edmonton, D&D, cannibalism, Star Wars, comic books, ancient African mythology, black culture, drugs, organic food, magic, and television shows have in common? They all play important roles in The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, a zany, stylish, and fun novel. Coyote Kings, the debut by Edmonton writer, teacher, and radio host Minister Faust, has a large cast of characters but mainly follows two roommates--Hamza, a former graduate student who's been reduced to working as a dishwasher, and Yehat, a video store clerk who invents insane gadgets in his spare time. They're stuck in a rut of self-pity and going nowhere real slow when a mysterious woman shows up and seduces Hamza by quoting his favorite comics and sci-fi films. (The only problem: she may not be human.) Before long, the three are caught up in a quest for a magic artifact, but they're not the only ones. Arrayed against them is a wide assortment of characters--including an old romantic rival of Hamza's, drug dealers who peddle a mystical high, and a former Canadian Football League player with aspirations of immortality--all with their own plans for the artifact. The action takes the cast through the streets of Edmonton and to Drumheller, where an ancient, startling secret is revealed.

The originality of the plot of Coyote Kings is only half the appeal of the book. It's also strong on characterization--the story is told entirely in first person, from the perspectives of all the major players involved--and culturally hip without being pretentious. For instance, the characters are introduced with D&D-style character sheets listing their vital stats--Hamza's alignment is "SF (general), ST (original series), SW, Marvel, Alan Moore +79." You can't help but appreciate style like this, even if you're not a geek. But if you are a geek, it doesn't get any better than Coyote Kings. --Peter Darbyshire

From Publishers Weekly

Black Canadian media personality Faust blends pop culture, Egyptology, SF and gaming in his clever and often amusing gonzo debut. Hamza and Yehat, slackers, roommates and soul brothers (aka the Coyote Kings), work respectively as a dishwasher and a video-store clerk, but Hamza also writes poetry and Ye invents things. When Hamza meets the beautiful, mysterious Sherem, even love can't blind him to her oddness. She, along with Hamza and Ye's old pals Kev and Heinz, is searching for a jar with inexplicable properties. The Coyote Kings find themselves on the side of the ancient House of the Jackal, charged with keeping the artifact safe, or at least out of the hands of Kev and Heinz. Hamza has a skill the bad guys want to literally eat his brain to get, and only he may have what it takes to find the artifact. The dense writing, the ponderings on the nature of reality and a complex plot that all comes together at the end (if thanks to long inserts that finally provide background and context) will remind some readers of Neal Stephenson. If Faust isn't yet Stephenson's equal as a stylist, he nonetheless represents a sharp-edged new voice in the genre.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 531 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey; First Edition edition (August 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345466357
• ISBN-13: 978-0345466358
• Product Dimensions: 1.2 x 5.1 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,112,717 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Minister Faust is a long-time community activist, writer, journalist, broadcaster, public speaker and martial artist in several disciplines.

A lifelong fan of science fiction, his earliest memories of the genre were watching Star Trek: The Original Series in black & white and having his mother read to him from Robert Heinlein's Red Planet.

After deciding to become a comic book writer and artist when he was ten, he secretly changed his ambition to science fiction novelist after glancing through the glossary to Frank Herbert's Dune. He'd planned to become an ecologist so as to gain Herbert's ecological depth, but before his first university class switched his entire enrollment to English Literature, having concluded that learning to write was more relevant to the career of a writer, and that going to endless lab classes at 7 am for four years would likely be hell on earth.

As a member of E-Town's anti-fascist movement in 1990, he and other youth marched on a Nazi skinhead gang house, the hub at that time of a series of violent assaults. Confronted there by skinheads with guns, Minister Faust held them back with nothing but the power of his words. Thus began a speaking career that has taken him across Canada and before of crowds in the tens of thousands.

Minister Faust taught English Literature in E-Town junior high and high schools for a decade, and later worked a mentor and trainer for the Keshotu Leadership Academy, an Africentric organisation whose manual he wrote.

A radio broadcaster from 1989 until 2012, he hosted Africentric Radio (formerly The Terrordome), for which he interviewed luminaries such as Tariq Ali, Molefi Kete Asante, Martin Bernal, Noam Chomsky, Chuck D., Austin Clarke, Angela Davis, Karl Evanzz, Tom Fontana, Glen Ford, Nalo Hopkinson, Reginald Hudlin, Ice-T, Janine Jackson, Michael Parenti, Ishmael Reed, Gil Scott-Heron, Vandana Shiva, David Simon, Scott Taylor, and many more.

As a radio and print journalist, he's gone as far as the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, DC, and to the Ain-al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, to collect stories and hear directly from people living and making history.

A maverick novelist increasingly described as one of the finest voices of his generation, Minister Faust is the author of the critically acclaimed The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad, The Alchemists of Kush, and the Kindred Award-winning Shrinking the Heroes. His latest is War & Mir, Volume I: Ascension.

Minister Faust refers to his sub-genre of writing as Imhotep-Hop--an Africentric literature that draws from myriad ancient African civilisations, explores present realities, and imagines a future in which people struggle not only for justice, but for the stars.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Canadian Geek Homiez Grok Multiversal Jimpification January 26, 2006

By doomsdayer520 HALL OF FAME

Format:Paperback

I was not aware that Edmonton, Alberta features a vibrant black and immigrant community (my own poorly-traveled ignorance), and that's the setting for this riotous fantastical pop-cultural novel. Minster Faust gives us a fast-moving, brainmelting story populated by a wide variety of multicultural geeks and goons in E-Town. The events rotate around two excellent main characters, Hamza and Yehat, a moody writer and a brainy engineer respectively, who are down-and-out working dead-end jobs and reveling in a realm of comics, movies, sci-fi nerd TV, role-playing games, and all other forms of geekitude. The brokenhearted Hamza soon falls stoopid in love with the beautiful and mysterious Sherem, who claims to be an archeologist just returning from an expedition to Egypt where she learned about ancient languages and old African kingdoms, hence blowing poor Hamza's mind with exotic trivia. It turns out that Sherem wishes to recruit Hamza and train him, a la Obi Wan and Luke, to fight a millennia-old archeo-narcotic cannibalistic conspiracy. Faust's construction of this eviltacular nogoodnikery gets a little bit out of hand, and some dark passages in the build-up to the story's climax don't mix too well with the lovable humor of the rest of the novel. However, rest assured that Faust is a master of bodacious language, with a lot of heart and hipness and laughs, and his characters are uniformly fascinating. This especially applies to Sherem's true nature and the deep, complex friendship between Hamza and Yehat as the self-styled Coyote Kings. This has gotta be the most creative and offbeat debut novel to come along in a while. [~doomsdayer520~]

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Not quite unreadable, with flashes of brilliance March 9, 2008

By Torah Cottrill

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

There are so (comparatively) few science fiction books written by black authors, and the title is so good, that I really wanted to like this book. And for the first 200 pages, I did. Faust is wildly inventive, and has a real gift for creating unique characters and letting you hear their voices. But his editor did him a huge disservice by not insisting Faust trim 150 or 200 pages out of "Coyote Kings." The hook of writing at least one chapter from the POV of every major and minor character was taken much too far (some characters, like Frosty and the Mugatu and Heinz Meaney, are more interesting in the third person), trying to tie the Rachel character back into the end didn't make any sense, the mystic backstory bogged down in pretentiously arcane poetry and superfluous detail, and entire chapters written in the verbal-tic-ridden voices of two of the characters --- Alpha Cat and Digaestus Caesar --- are incredibly frustrating to read, barely comprehensible. I wanted to put it down, but I didn't. Look at the characters' names! For that alone, and for the snap-crackle-pop dialogue between roommates and brother Coyote Kings Hamza and Yehat, this book is saved from my give-away pile.

"Coyote Kings" is tremendously flawed, but also has more than a few moments of brilliance. When I finally got to the end and read the acknowledgments, where Faust mentions the "Coyote Kings" screenplay workshop and video shoot, and then read in his author's biography that he's a prolific broadcaster, the puzzle of this book started to make sense to me. The book reads like it was meant to be spoken; the pages of dialogue that are almost impossible to read would make sense to hear. The incessant shifting of POV is a real detriment in a book, but would make for very interesting video. Essentially, "Coyote Kings" would make an amazing movie or radio play. But as a book, almost all of its appeal is lost in translation.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars clever, fun, somewhat dissappointing ending September 7, 2004

By D. McAlester

Format:Paperback

i picked this book up for no other reason than the opening sentence starts out "first off shut up." how can you not like a book that tells you to shut up on the very first page (not to mention that first page is the epilogue).

the characters are extremely refreshing for a science fiction novel, and knowing the target audience all the in-jokes and tip of the hat references to geekdom will leave you laughing out loud, while your uninitiated friends will just shake their heads silently at your new found depths of nerdiness. i was also pleasantly surprised by the characters unabashed affection for each other, it came over as very genuine and a trait severely lacking in science fiction.

the author employs a first person narrative that switches from character to character. in an interesting change of pace he doesn't hold your hand through this change and make it immediately obvious who's speaking, as you begin to get comfortable with characters you start to recognize the "voice". though at times you have to go back and re-read the first couple of pages of each chapter as it can take a while to cotton on to which character is talking. it isn't always successful, but the only time this character switch fails totally is when alpha-cat takes over and the author chooses to write phonetically the character's jamaican accent. it is frustrating to read and knocks you completely out of the narrative as you focus on comprehending the words and not the story. fortunately other than a couple of small chapters, alpha cat's dialog is limited to a few sprinkled throughout the book.

my only other complaint is the last act which had two major problems. there is essentially a rehash of the fight between the two main protagonists (yehat and hamza), with the same conclusion. it was redundant and out of character considering how the initial fight concluded. i also found the ambiguous ending, was too ambiguous without enough information to really come to a conclusion. there were also some pretty loose ends that were never tied up. i suppose that those could be set-ups for a sequel, which the author does hint at, but doesn't seem to have enough set-up to really make me desperate to read the further adventures of hamza and yehat.

still the characters, the very easy to read, cheeky prose, the interesting little details on african culture more than make up for the few small complaints.