Jim Giraffe

by Daren King

Scott Spectrum is being haunted by a ghost giraffe named Jim. Scott thinks he’s a man how has everything — a high-speed internet connection, alien-shaped slippers, and a beautiful wife called Continence. But Scott hasn’t touched her in years and she’s been left furiously polishing the sideboard, dreaming of black stallions. According to Jim, Scott’s days are numbered, and to save himself from certain death from sexual repression he must quickly perform every act in the lovermaker’s lexicon.

Jim Giraffe knows a lot about sex, luckily. He also loves pizza and beer and has breath that smells of tree-tops. The prudish Scott is at first shocked by this profane, perverted ghost giraffe, but he accepts his help. Little does Scott realize that Jim has his own agenda and that his suburban idyll is about to be well and truly buggered up.

Following on from the cult classic Boxy an Star , Daren King has written another extraordinary highly original and linguistically ingenious, naïve and knowing, utterly charming, filthy, and very, very funny.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, British Literature, Comedy

225 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Regine · Rating 3 out of 5]

You won't like this book if:

1) You don't like ghost giraffes
2) You don't like ghost giraffes acting as sex therapists
3) You don't like ghost giraffes with big boners
4) You don't like ghost giraffes perfoming cunnilingus
5) You don't like ghost giraffes impreganating your wife

I you happen to be partial to ghost giraffes, and you also happen to be a pervert, this will be your cup of tea. Three stars.

[Craig Wallwork · Rating 2 out of 5]

You enter this novel believing it may be a re-working of Dickens’s Scrooge. Sexually repressed Scott Spectrum is visited by the ghost of a giraffe called Jim, a horny foul-mouthed apparition determined to point out Scott’s short-comings in the bedroom by showing his past and future via the means of video. While puerile banter and derision forms the surface level of the relationship between Jim and Scott, as the novel progresses both characters appear as insecure as the other. And it’s these moments that should have been explored more. Instead, King drifts from the absurd to the surreal, forging a world where reality slips into a sub-reality of dream and metaphor. In truth, by the end of the novel you’re not too sure what really happened. Like a dream, the detail and bizarreness is only interesting to the individual and not the audience. Had King grounded the novel in the real world, and focussed on a man being haunted by a ribald giraffe, then the novel would have worked better for me. Instead, king decided to write a novel of a dream he had of a man being haunted by a ribald giraffe. I’m sure there are those who will accept the subtext and metaphor as a wildly brave and clever viewpoint of a man who has lost his wife due to repression, and while there are moment of hilarity found in the conversations between Jim and Scott, I felt the novel lacked any form, similar to the spectre of the main character.

[Joe Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious and utterly mental. If you can cope with the absolute nonsense, it's a rewarding book.

[AriBa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another odd-ball book about a giraffe. What is it about giraffes that they are fodder for weird stories? Is it their comically long neck? Their orangey-brown crackle pattern? Those weird stubby horn things on the top of their head?

The subject matter is just plain weird. In a nutshell an arrogant, foul-mouthed ghost giraffe called Jim gives sex advice to Scott, a geeky television writer and in the process ruins his life. Hmm.

The wordplay in here is repetitive, for example:

"I follow Nurse Matron down the corridor, down another corridor, down another corridor, down another corridor, then, finally, down another corridor. She knocks on a door, a great oak door built of solid oak, opens the door, pushes me inside, and closes the door."

What?

There's also a lot of back and forth nodding and shrugging.

I nod.
He shrugs.

The situations that Jim and Scott get into are just so surreal, it's difficult to describe. The banter between them is fast-paced (bordering on badgering), sometimes witty, but mostly silly. In fact most of the book feels really silly but I found it somewhat endearing. I did laugh out loud in quite a few places, despite the humour being overly sarcastic, sexist, childish. The ending however was a kick to the nads. A bit anti-climatic but, I guess in keeping with Jim's sense of self.

Reading this was like reading one really long fart joke. I think I just needed something that didn't take itself seriously. This fit the bill.

[Michael Allen Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. I really did. It's weird, that's for sure. There are some imaginative and bizarre happenings in these pages. Giraffes are sort of inherently funny. There's definitely an internal bizarre logic here, in the world of Jim giraffe. But, so much of the writing here is so unnecessary. It's rambling, unfocused, feels like when a person describes a dream they had, and it's so much more interesting to them than it is to the person hearing the story. The ending isn't an ending. It just sort of falls in the path of the book, and you have to step over it.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jim (the ghost) Giraffe haunts/becomes sexual therapist for 29-year-old Scott Spectrum, who has never fucked his wife. If stories of alcoholic ghost giraffes with massive, dripping boners don't phase you, you might find this book to be incredibly funny.

[Erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Is it possible for a book to be too funny? No. Is it possible for a book to be too silly? Yes. And this book is a good example.

Jim Giraffe is a foul mouthed, morally bankrupt, ghost giraffe who is haunting a man named Scott Spectrum and generally making his life miserable. It's all very humorous except when it's not. The plot is so silly, so chaotic, that it's like a fun house mirror. It intrigues you at first, but then it just becomes annoying. You're not willing to invest yourself in the characters if they insist on living in a bizarro world like this. It doesn't feel worth it.

However, I did finish this book, so it must've appealed to me on some level.

[Dusan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Utterly ludicrous.

[LiteraryWhore · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t enjoy this book at all.

Well, that isn’t true. It was entertaining for the first 50 or so pages, but then it just became relentlessly boring.

This is an absurdist comedy, intended to satirize suburbia. It’s attempts at being edgy with the use of sex, race and class fall limp. It’s too boring and predictable to be offensive.

There’s a repetitive style to the writing that fails to provide rhythm or atmosphere. Instead things become monotonous. There are long scenes that have no real point to them. I think they’re intended to be funny, but it’s just meandering nonsense. I pushed through and read to the end out of bewilderment, but found it challenging to work through more than 20 pages at a time because it was so dull.

If you must give this book a go, read the first quarter, then move on.

[Cindi Kelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this wins the reward for the weirdest book I've ever read. You think it's about getting Scott to become less of a prude but no it's all about Jim. The ending was weird. Weird, weird, weird. Very quirky to use another word. lol

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious!

[Paula Aho · Rating 1 out of 5]

Waste of time. Period.

[Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

A laughable and uncomfortable romp through this sad sack of a man's weird life. Enthralling, but with no payoff at the end.

[Arty Spoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jim Giraffe is one of my all-time favourite books. I've read it a number of times and have gifted it to several people.

Wonderfully surreal, irreverent and hilarious. Read it if you like all those things; don't read it if you favour traditional novels, don't like surrealism or are offended by expletives.

I regularly say: You think you're funny, Jim, but you're just a cunt."

Write more stuff like this, please Daren King. And what happened to the Jim website?

[Freddie Bonfanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know what I just read, but I’m giving the damn book four stars because It’s mad and wild and made me laugh out loud.

[Monica Irvine · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had a hard time reading this book. I thought it would be funny, but found it very vulgar and disappointing. Couldn't finish it for the life of me...

[Catherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to reading this, having remembered enjoying Boxy an Star, but was aware from the start that there were things that would make it quite different and not to everyone's taste. The blurb does not hide that it is a story preoccupied with sex, the explicit language could not be as unrelenting as that in many playgrounds or pubs, and, given that the title character is a ghost giraffe, the surreal was only to be expected. I reckoned could cope with all of those and that it might even be quite fun, but it just didn't work for me. I can see why other reviewers sympathised with Scott - Jim isn't the only person/being taking advantage of him and turning his life upside down - but I never quite did and I couldn't work out why. It wasn't his geekiness or naïvety - they were more appealing than exasperating - and he did try to put up a fight at several points, so he wasn't a two-dimensional wimp: I think I just found it all rather ... puerile.

[David Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like most of my reading material, I picked this up at a second-hand book sale. I find it difficult to say what I think about this unusual little book. The story is bizarre and surreal, as if taking place in a dream. For wit and originality I am giving it 3 stars, although I can imagine that many readers would not appreciate the offbeat humour or the occasional vulgarity.

[Payson Harris · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's not as clever as it thinks it is, and it's rather hard to reconcile Spec with most Sci-Fi nerds, who are quite sexually liberated.

It tries to shock, but to a modern audience, the shock value isn't there—I've seen and read much worse.

In the end, it's just... boring.

[Alan · Rating 1 out of 5]

some people find this funny, but i found it unfunny and a waste of (valuable)reading time. Apparently his first novel's better but can I be bothered?

[Grant · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unreadable. Period.

[Sploder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny! Almost thought Jim was his subconscious.

[Bec Adams · Rating 2 out of 5]

Odd

[Lilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it loved it loved it. The most bizarre book I have read for some time, but I didn't think of work once. That's got to be good.

[Drrn Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird Weird Weid