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Crisis Boy
From the Wonderland Book Award-winning twisted mind behind A God of Hungry Walls, Garrett Cook, comes the most offensive and inappropriate book yet released by the leading publisher of extreme horror, Deadite Press.
The news is a lie. The conspiracies are real. We all see the constant reports of mass shootings in the United States. Footage of death and panic and random citizens being massacred by terrorists or crazies. But what the viewers at home don’t see are the agendas these attacks are pushing or that those “victims” are trained actors paid to be a part of the scene. They are “crisis actors.”
John is a “Crisis Boy,” created by the secret organizations that really pull the strings behind the scenes of government and economics. He was created to be shot, stabbed, and blown-up and yet recover as no human should be able. He is used to stage massacres, assassinations, and create the kind of terror that will allow the powers that be to control the public and the world.
But on his latest assignment, John’s programming begins to break down. He begins to question his role in this massive manipulation of society. All because he’s met someone kind—a girl. Someone that he knows is supposed to die, but he’s going to do everything he can to prevent it.
Crisis Boy is an extreme horror novel of conspiracies, secret societies, and of how love and kindness can fuck-up the best laid plans.
“One of the coolest book concepts I’ve heard in years. When you read Garrett Cook, you never quite know what kind of madness you’re going to get.” —Carlton Mellick III
The news is a lie. The conspiracies are real. We all see the constant reports of mass shootings in the United States. Footage of death and panic and random citizens being massacred by terrorists or crazies. But what the viewers at home don’t see are the agendas these attacks are pushing or that those “victims” are trained actors paid to be a part of the scene. They are “crisis actors.”
John is a “Crisis Boy,” created by the secret organizations that really pull the strings behind the scenes of government and economics. He was created to be shot, stabbed, and blown-up and yet recover as no human should be able. He is used to stage massacres, assassinations, and create the kind of terror that will allow the powers that be to control the public and the world.
But on his latest assignment, John’s programming begins to break down. He begins to question his role in this massive manipulation of society. All because he’s met someone kind—a girl. Someone that he knows is supposed to die, but he’s going to do everything he can to prevent it.
Crisis Boy is an extreme horror novel of conspiracies, secret societies, and of how love and kindness can fuck-up the best laid plans.
“One of the coolest book concepts I’ve heard in years. When you read Garrett Cook, you never quite know what kind of madness you’re going to get.” —Carlton Mellick III
- GenresHorror
190 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2018
4 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
About the author
Garrett Cook
60 books243 followersWinner 1st Annual Ultimate Bizarro Showdown!
Garrett Cook was born in Wenham, Massachusetts July 19th, 1982. There are other details, but they're depressing or banal, with the exception of his haunted birthplace, his struggle with bipolar and a brief, unfortunate cancer scare. Yawn. Garrett Cook's work is far more interesting. He examines crises of faith and conscience through a pulpy,surreal or magorealistic lens to create magical, paranoid worlds that he hopes will entertain, antagonize and endear you. His books Murderland part 1:h8, Murderland 2:Life During Wartime and Archelon Ranch and Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective are available on Amazon. He is one of the creators and editors of the magazine Imperial Youth Review.
What people are saying about Murderland Part 1: H8
"Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps that meat cleaver is our best hope for salvation. Or maybe he belongs in an asylum. MURDERLAND is a brutally shocking book. Demented. Logical. Disturbing. It can be crudely powerful one moment, tenderly skillful the next, so the reader never knows what’s coming. There’s no way to prepare. No way to protect yourself. Garrett Cook’s work has an edge … and it’s at your throat."-
Robert Dunbar, author of The Shore and Martyrs and Monsters
"The offbeat brilliance of this book will freak your face off-"
Gina Ranalli, author of Mother Puncher, Sky Tongues and House of Fallen Leaves
"I have not read a debut novel this good in a long time (or as far as I could remember)"- Jordan Krall, author of Piecemeal June and Squidpulp Blues
"An intense, satirical and above all entertaining read"- Andersen Prunty, author of Zerostrata and the Overwhelming Urge
"A savage, very original satire that openly mocks the American demigod-like worship of worthless celebrity with a future where despicable murderers become our new focus of adoration. It's as farcical as Swift's "A Modest Proposal," yet no less poignant."-
bravenewworks.com
"Action! Explosions! Hot broads! Garrett Cook is two-fisted Bizarro pulp. I love his stories"-
Jeff Burk, author of SHATNERQUAKE
Garrett Cook was born in Wenham, Massachusetts July 19th, 1982. There are other details, but they're depressing or banal, with the exception of his haunted birthplace, his struggle with bipolar and a brief, unfortunate cancer scare. Yawn. Garrett Cook's work is far more interesting. He examines crises of faith and conscience through a pulpy,surreal or magorealistic lens to create magical, paranoid worlds that he hopes will entertain, antagonize and endear you. His books Murderland part 1:h8, Murderland 2:Life During Wartime and Archelon Ranch and Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective are available on Amazon. He is one of the creators and editors of the magazine Imperial Youth Review.
What people are saying about Murderland Part 1: H8
"Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps that meat cleaver is our best hope for salvation. Or maybe he belongs in an asylum. MURDERLAND is a brutally shocking book. Demented. Logical. Disturbing. It can be crudely powerful one moment, tenderly skillful the next, so the reader never knows what’s coming. There’s no way to prepare. No way to protect yourself. Garrett Cook’s work has an edge … and it’s at your throat."-
Robert Dunbar, author of The Shore and Martyrs and Monsters
"The offbeat brilliance of this book will freak your face off-"
Gina Ranalli, author of Mother Puncher, Sky Tongues and House of Fallen Leaves
"I have not read a debut novel this good in a long time (or as far as I could remember)"- Jordan Krall, author of Piecemeal June and Squidpulp Blues
"An intense, satirical and above all entertaining read"- Andersen Prunty, author of Zerostrata and the Overwhelming Urge
"A savage, very original satire that openly mocks the American demigod-like worship of worthless celebrity with a future where despicable murderers become our new focus of adoration. It's as farcical as Swift's "A Modest Proposal," yet no less poignant."-
bravenewworks.com
"Action! Explosions! Hot broads! Garrett Cook is two-fisted Bizarro pulp. I love his stories"-
Jeff Burk, author of SHATNERQUAKE
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 21, 2018
Holy wow. This book was as horrifying as it was hilarious (yes, it's very funny!) and was as transgressive as it was straight-up gonzo bonkers. Trigger warning on pretty much everything you can put a trigger on, but underneath it all, there is a giant ugly heart beating at the center of this thing. This is a book about the insanity of the world at this moment in time, and no doubt, one of my favorite reads of 2018.
October 23, 2018
After several novels — most prominently “Murderland,” “A God of Hungry Walls,” and the bravura “Time Pimp” — Garrett Cook (interest declared- a friend of mine and I once rescued him from Punxsutawney Pennsylvania, true story) has established a distinctive horror voice. This comes through most clearly in his latest, a story about a boy who can survive gunshots and explosions, who is deployed to the sites of terrorist attacked and mass shootings to be killed, over and over again. He’s a crisis actor, except he actually gets hurt, and the events he undermines actually happen.
Cook comes to us from the “bizarro” horror scene, a sort of dada/pop-surrealist offshoot of extreme horror. Truth be told, I don’t get much out of the genre- a lot of strikes me as try-hard edginess. I’m hardly the target audience- I always cocked a snoot at horror in general. I was reading about the Holocaust at six and spent years of my life with Vietnam war documents. I play board games about bloody counterinsurgency wars for fun. Serial killers don’t mean that much to me.
So needless to say I was square enough going in that, friendship with Garrett aside, I was unsure about the premise. “Why,”said the reviewer, like a square, “would they need crisis actors if the massacres happen, in gruesome detail?” Well, because fuck you, that’s why, Cook tells us. Because the world is run by monsters of every conceivable type and they just want to fuck with people, get people online convinced that what they see isn’t real, and squabble over which parts are or aren’t.
John the Crisis Boy decides to try to turn the tables because he meets a pretty girl. Of course, it gets all messed up, and even though he kills the monster — a slasher villain turned patriotic superhero, a nice touch — he winds up demonized as the sort of killer who has killed him numerous times, and in a crumbling reality to boot. It’s hard to tell what exactly goes on in this crumbling reality and whether his existence is real or a projection of the sort of damaged psyche his existence is meant to inflame. That’s something of a problem with this sort of fiction- endings. Especially if you’re not going to go with a nihilistic copout, which Cook generally refuses to do.
All of this — the crumbling reality, John’s teenaged angst, and the scenes of gore and extreme depravity — are carried along by Cook’s voice, which makes everyone a knowing but predetermined actor in the grand guignol of life in a Garrett Cook story. The narrator and most of the characters accept the absurd dream logic of their given scenarios and speak them aloud. This helps avoid letting things get too cute or too melodramatic, a difficult balancing act. Whatever you want to say about this sort of horror as a whole, Garrett’s provocations are part of something larger he’s doing, and the last thing he ever was was a try-hard. ****
Cook comes to us from the “bizarro” horror scene, a sort of dada/pop-surrealist offshoot of extreme horror. Truth be told, I don’t get much out of the genre- a lot of strikes me as try-hard edginess. I’m hardly the target audience- I always cocked a snoot at horror in general. I was reading about the Holocaust at six and spent years of my life with Vietnam war documents. I play board games about bloody counterinsurgency wars for fun. Serial killers don’t mean that much to me.
So needless to say I was square enough going in that, friendship with Garrett aside, I was unsure about the premise. “Why,”said the reviewer, like a square, “would they need crisis actors if the massacres happen, in gruesome detail?” Well, because fuck you, that’s why, Cook tells us. Because the world is run by monsters of every conceivable type and they just want to fuck with people, get people online convinced that what they see isn’t real, and squabble over which parts are or aren’t.
John the Crisis Boy decides to try to turn the tables because he meets a pretty girl. Of course, it gets all messed up, and even though he kills the monster — a slasher villain turned patriotic superhero, a nice touch — he winds up demonized as the sort of killer who has killed him numerous times, and in a crumbling reality to boot. It’s hard to tell what exactly goes on in this crumbling reality and whether his existence is real or a projection of the sort of damaged psyche his existence is meant to inflame. That’s something of a problem with this sort of fiction- endings. Especially if you’re not going to go with a nihilistic copout, which Cook generally refuses to do.
All of this — the crumbling reality, John’s teenaged angst, and the scenes of gore and extreme depravity — are carried along by Cook’s voice, which makes everyone a knowing but predetermined actor in the grand guignol of life in a Garrett Cook story. The narrator and most of the characters accept the absurd dream logic of their given scenarios and speak them aloud. This helps avoid letting things get too cute or too melodramatic, a difficult balancing act. Whatever you want to say about this sort of horror as a whole, Garrett’s provocations are part of something larger he’s doing, and the last thing he ever was was a try-hard. ****
April 10, 2020
“He lay on the ground surrounded by figures laid out like the bomb was a petulant child and the marathon its toybox. He still sort of wanted an iced coffee.”
When a book is released on my birthday, it gives me certain expectations. I’ve read enough bizarro at this point to know that the only things I should expect from a new book is to be weirded out, entertained and maybe even a little unsettled - and thankfully, Crisis Boy delivers.
Like a lot of great weird fiction, this story takes the “run over you with a steamroller”- approach to strangeness instead of keeping its bizzarities subtle, though is anchored to our reality by a core of normalcy (some of the best parts involve awkward teenage conversations).
What’s more, the author’s brave enough to respect the reader’s intelligence, confident that the audience will get the tone of the satire; instead of defending or apologising for itself, this book dongs left-leaners over the head with language and imagery that all internet stereotypes would suggest that they’re supposed to find offensive. This story is proof that fiction can be “politically incorrect” while still upholding progressive values if the writer’s savvy enough to pull it off. It feels wrong how much of this novel I laughed at, but, well, I did laugh.
A few reviews I’d read before buying this book cautioned that there were frequent typos throughout, and while it mostly wasn’t enough to disrupt the story’s flow, it definitely could’ve used another edit. I’m pretty sure at least two minor(ish) characters had their names change midway through a chapter. On that note, I also would’ve split most of the later chapters up into about three smaller chapters each. It’s easy to forget about the flaws during the book’s stronger moments, such as the action phase of the climax, where the hero is pitted against the book’s primary terror and every savage hack and slash and gunshot has you rooting for them as if you were watching the fight from within a cage nearby.
This has been listed as extreme horror, and there’s gore aplenty between these pages, but the best horror comes from the moments when this story hits too close to reality. Toxic characters discuss school shootings on Reddit like it’s all a game, and the darkness of the human mind is displayed around like Christmas ornaments. We also do see the fragile goodness of humanity in the thoughts of the two protagonists, and their characterisation is one of the book’s great strengths.
Like in a lot of bizarro - and similar to the issue of real life terrorism in the USA - there are no easy answers in the ending. But if you want a story that’ll leave you with food for thought, Crisis Boy will deliver a gunshot of it to your face.
When a book is released on my birthday, it gives me certain expectations. I’ve read enough bizarro at this point to know that the only things I should expect from a new book is to be weirded out, entertained and maybe even a little unsettled - and thankfully, Crisis Boy delivers.
Like a lot of great weird fiction, this story takes the “run over you with a steamroller”- approach to strangeness instead of keeping its bizzarities subtle, though is anchored to our reality by a core of normalcy (some of the best parts involve awkward teenage conversations).
What’s more, the author’s brave enough to respect the reader’s intelligence, confident that the audience will get the tone of the satire; instead of defending or apologising for itself, this book dongs left-leaners over the head with language and imagery that all internet stereotypes would suggest that they’re supposed to find offensive. This story is proof that fiction can be “politically incorrect” while still upholding progressive values if the writer’s savvy enough to pull it off. It feels wrong how much of this novel I laughed at, but, well, I did laugh.
A few reviews I’d read before buying this book cautioned that there were frequent typos throughout, and while it mostly wasn’t enough to disrupt the story’s flow, it definitely could’ve used another edit. I’m pretty sure at least two minor(ish) characters had their names change midway through a chapter. On that note, I also would’ve split most of the later chapters up into about three smaller chapters each. It’s easy to forget about the flaws during the book’s stronger moments, such as the action phase of the climax, where the hero is pitted against the book’s primary terror and every savage hack and slash and gunshot has you rooting for them as if you were watching the fight from within a cage nearby.
This has been listed as extreme horror, and there’s gore aplenty between these pages, but the best horror comes from the moments when this story hits too close to reality. Toxic characters discuss school shootings on Reddit like it’s all a game, and the darkness of the human mind is displayed around like Christmas ornaments. We also do see the fragile goodness of humanity in the thoughts of the two protagonists, and their characterisation is one of the book’s great strengths.
Like in a lot of bizarro - and similar to the issue of real life terrorism in the USA - there are no easy answers in the ending. But if you want a story that’ll leave you with food for thought, Crisis Boy will deliver a gunshot of it to your face.
February 13, 2019
The story of CRISIS BOY is powerful and disturbing and full of meaning especially relevant in our current era of conspiracies and shootings. It would easily deserve five stars if not for the atrocious editing. It reads like a first draft: clunky sentences, a multitude of typos, and other glaring errors like mixing up character names. If you can look past all this, it’s an amazing book and one I’d recommend.
March 15, 2019
John is a crisis boy who is at the scene of every shooting or terrorist attack, but he wants more then that. Can he figure out how to achieve that and become a normal person? Cool book
December 13, 2024
Quick spoiler-free review: the story is dark, complex, and thought-provoking. Well worth the read!
March 6, 2019
Garrett Cook is a genius, and this book is further proof of it. I don't want to spoil it, but if you're tired of those fucking right-wing conspiracies like chemtrails, Illuminati, reptillians, etc, you're shit out of luck. Garrett mocks all of them, nothing is spared.
Conspiracy nuts are a joke, and this book rams the joke into the ground. I loved it.
Conspiracy nuts are a joke, and this book rams the joke into the ground. I loved it.
April 6, 2021
Ineffable and Weird
This is one of the strangest books I have ever read. It is like a conspiracy theorist took lsd and mescaline and played the card game Steve Jackson Games's Illuminati while reading Hunter S Thompson and Robert Anton Wilson.
Warning NSFW big time. Not my normal cup of tea but I had to finish it to stop Dracula and the 'Gay Agenda' and save Crisis Boy from not getting closure. It is strange on a whole other level. Wish I could have edited it to fix the typos though.
This is one of the strangest books I have ever read. It is like a conspiracy theorist took lsd and mescaline and played the card game Steve Jackson Games's Illuminati while reading Hunter S Thompson and Robert Anton Wilson.
Warning NSFW big time. Not my normal cup of tea but I had to finish it to stop Dracula and the 'Gay Agenda' and save Crisis Boy from not getting closure. It is strange on a whole other level. Wish I could have edited it to fix the typos though.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews