Rating: 4 stars

Imagine this: You're a sixty-year-old author of seriously under-rated, largely unread, dusty, dry historical tomes. You're broke, jobless, license-less, and forced to reside with four college-aged boys who think beer bonging should be an Olympic event. What do you do? If you're Pontius Feeb, you sit down and write the most trite, ridiculous adventure story you can muster, and try to sell it to a major publishing house.

Still have your imagination cap on? Well, now you can imagine what you would do if said publishing house informed you that you're passed over because you're a sixty-year-old author of dry historical tomes. Your book is "unmarketable" because you just don't look like an Indiana Jones stand-in. Your last hope, your attempt at salvation, has just been flushed down the drain, forcing you to take a minimum-wage position flipping burgers and squirting condiments under the command of snotty twenty-somethings. What's left? If you're Pontius Feeb, you latch on to a truly charismatic under-employed actor and beg him to come along on one of the most bizarre, harebrained, get-rich publicity schemes to ever be overran by Murphy's Law.

I can't go into too much detail without giving away everything. The best summation I can provide is that Mike Nelson's Death Rat! is the literary equivalent of Return of the Killer Tomatoes meets Fargo. The characters are more caricature than anything else. The plot is as twisted as it is twisting. It's a cheese-pulp fest that would qualify for a Tromaville screenplay if only it included more blood, guts and grotesque body malformations. (Really. All it needs is some radioactivity-induced mutations and random slaughtering of tertiary characters.)

If you were ever a fan of USA's Up All Night back in the 80's, you can appreciate this book. It has everything from vicious six-foot-tall rats, to a state governor who apparently has a bad case of hero worship for Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now. There's a religious revival held by an insane funk musician who may well be the unholy love-child of George Clinton and Prince. The bowhunting of wild turkeys is brought into play, as well as the antics of incompetent Danish would-be assassins. There is even a place in this story for an overly-competitive, narcissistic author who may have listened to too much Prairie Home Companion, and the judicious application of atomic wedgies.

Although I enjoyed Mike Nelson's Death Rat!, I was a bit bemused by it until I bothered to read the "about the author" blurb at the end. Everything made much more sense after learning that Michael J. Nelson, the author, is also the writer and host of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Simply put, if you're looking for something serious, educational, or otherwise enlightening, this is not the book for you. If, on the other hand, you want something mindless, humorous, deranged or easily understood while Under The Influence, Mike Nelson's Death Rat! may be just the ticket.

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Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Pub. Date: March 2003
ISBN-13: 9780060934729