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Enormity
Enormity is the strange tale of an American working in Korea, a lonely young man named Manny Lopes, who is not only physically small (in his own words, he's a “Creole shrimp”), but his work, his failed marriage, his race, all conspire to make him feel puny and insignificant-the proverbial ninety-eight-pound weakling. Then one day an accident happens, a quantum explosion, and suddenly Manny awakens to discover that he is big-really big. In fact, Manny is enormous, a mile-high colossus! Now there's no stopping he's a one-man weapon of mass destruction. Yet he means well. Enormity takes some odd turns, featuring characters like surfing gangbangers, elderly terrorists, and a North Korean assassin who thinks she's Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. There's also sex, violence, and action galore, with the army throwing everything it has against the rampaging colossus that is Manny Lopes. But there's only one weapon that has any chance at all of stopping his wife.
- GenresScience FictionFiction
290 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 13, 2012
So, you might think from the awesome cover and enticing blurb that this book is going to be a quirky riff on Japanese daikaiju movies, or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in reverse, plus Kill Bill: sad-sack government contractor Manny Lopes is working in Korea when he accidentally runs afoul of a brainwashed, movie-obsessed North Korean assassin in cute leggings and the two of them are somehow increased in size a thousand times (don't ask me; it involves dark matter).
But instead of the fun book I was expecting, I got a book that is not entirely un-fun, but certainly not my kind of fun. Mostly, the big joke is this: how gross are we, on a microscopic level? What if we were 6,000 feet tall, and all our various oozes and flakes and parasites were enlarged accordingly? Wouldn't that be disgusting? Yes, yes it would.
I made the mistake of reading this while eating lunch a few times, and trust me, long passages about what's going on with the mites on your scalp or how our bodies are constantly covered in a thick sheen of goopy oils don't go super well with a sandwich or a Starbucks. About half the book is this kind of gross-out body horror stuff, with a bunch of tertiary army characters and damsels in distress climbing around on Manny and the assassin's bodies, building shelters out of flakes of dandruff, installing satellite installations in gobs of earwax, rappelling down a pimpled forehead, getting mired sebum or swept away and nearly drowned in a river of piss. Or, and didn't you know this was coming, menaced by a mass (an explosion?) of surging, leaping sperm. Massive, man-sized sperm. Uh huh. Giant sex, when viewed from the perspective of an un-giant: ugh?
So on the one hand, this is certainly a unique take. And what he does with the giants themselves is fairly interesting and takes the premise just as seriously: now that Manny is huge, for example, he becomes further and further removed from the petty cares of humanity, especially once he comes to terms with the fact that every time he takes a step, he's causing massive earthquakes, toppling cities and killing thousands. The death toll in this short book is easily in the hundreds of millions, with entire cities wiped out in wrath-of-god style attacks, or maybe just an accidental footstep, and great pains are taken to make clear just how unstoppable these beasts are: a simple breath or uttered syllable creates superheated tornadoes that sweep airplanes from the sky, while bullets and bombs bounce right off their thickened epidermis. Epidermises. Epidermi. The assassin character is underused but has an interesting backstory -- stolen from her grandmother as a child and trained to be a killer for the North Korean government, she is drug-addicted, mentally unstable, and maybe she thinks she is Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (she's wearing the Wicked Witch of the East's leggings though).
But on the other: it is basically nearly 300 pages of seeing how far this particular joke can be pushed. And even before the somewhat confused and arbitrary ending (which, at least, pays off on the penis enlargement joke in the prologue), I was already pretty much done. I think it was the herd of 1000x sperm attacking the love interest that did it.
But instead of the fun book I was expecting, I got a book that is not entirely un-fun, but certainly not my kind of fun. Mostly, the big joke is this: how gross are we, on a microscopic level? What if we were 6,000 feet tall, and all our various oozes and flakes and parasites were enlarged accordingly? Wouldn't that be disgusting? Yes, yes it would.
I made the mistake of reading this while eating lunch a few times, and trust me, long passages about what's going on with the mites on your scalp or how our bodies are constantly covered in a thick sheen of goopy oils don't go super well with a sandwich or a Starbucks. About half the book is this kind of gross-out body horror stuff, with a bunch of tertiary army characters and damsels in distress climbing around on Manny and the assassin's bodies, building shelters out of flakes of dandruff, installing satellite installations in gobs of earwax, rappelling down a pimpled forehead, getting mired sebum or swept away and nearly drowned in a river of piss. Or, and didn't you know this was coming, menaced by a mass (an explosion?) of surging, leaping sperm. Massive, man-sized sperm. Uh huh. Giant sex, when viewed from the perspective of an un-giant: ugh?
So on the one hand, this is certainly a unique take. And what he does with the giants themselves is fairly interesting and takes the premise just as seriously: now that Manny is huge, for example, he becomes further and further removed from the petty cares of humanity, especially once he comes to terms with the fact that every time he takes a step, he's causing massive earthquakes, toppling cities and killing thousands. The death toll in this short book is easily in the hundreds of millions, with entire cities wiped out in wrath-of-god style attacks, or maybe just an accidental footstep, and great pains are taken to make clear just how unstoppable these beasts are: a simple breath or uttered syllable creates superheated tornadoes that sweep airplanes from the sky, while bullets and bombs bounce right off their thickened epidermis. Epidermises. Epidermi. The assassin character is underused but has an interesting backstory -- stolen from her grandmother as a child and trained to be a killer for the North Korean government, she is drug-addicted, mentally unstable, and maybe she thinks she is Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (she's wearing the Wicked Witch of the East's leggings though).
But on the other: it is basically nearly 300 pages of seeing how far this particular joke can be pushed. And even before the somewhat confused and arbitrary ending (which, at least, pays off on the penis enlargement joke in the prologue), I was already pretty much done. I think it was the herd of 1000x sperm attacking the love interest that did it.
July 3, 2012
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
This technothriller by W.G. Marshall posits a well-worn idea at its core (a freak accident turns a couple of people into six-thousand-foot-high giants, at which point all hell breaks loose), but easily elevates itself above most other stories of this kind by taking an ultra-realistic and scientifically accurate look at just what such an occurrence might actually be like in the real world; so not only are our normal-sized heroes battling the giants themselves, but also the now human-sized and unstoppable bacteria that was on these people's skin when the transformation took place, the airplane-crashing waves of superheated air that come with each exhalation by the giants, not to mention the simple challenge of trying to communicate with a creature whose ear alone is the size of a skyscraper, making even the most powerful amplifier ever made effectively non-comprehensible. So as such, then, readers shouldn't expect anything above Jerry Bruckheimer level in terms of characterization and plot; but I have to admit that I found this to be a real rollicking delight anyway, merely from the pure audaciousness of its mundanely disgusting details (ugh, igloo-sized piles of dandruff, UGH) and the breakneck speed in which it introduces these details. A strong contender for CCLaP's Guilty Pleasure Awards at the end of this year, it comes strongly recommended to Michael Crichton fans and other lovers of simply-told but fantastically imagined what-if stories.
Out of 10: 8.8
This technothriller by W.G. Marshall posits a well-worn idea at its core (a freak accident turns a couple of people into six-thousand-foot-high giants, at which point all hell breaks loose), but easily elevates itself above most other stories of this kind by taking an ultra-realistic and scientifically accurate look at just what such an occurrence might actually be like in the real world; so not only are our normal-sized heroes battling the giants themselves, but also the now human-sized and unstoppable bacteria that was on these people's skin when the transformation took place, the airplane-crashing waves of superheated air that come with each exhalation by the giants, not to mention the simple challenge of trying to communicate with a creature whose ear alone is the size of a skyscraper, making even the most powerful amplifier ever made effectively non-comprehensible. So as such, then, readers shouldn't expect anything above Jerry Bruckheimer level in terms of characterization and plot; but I have to admit that I found this to be a real rollicking delight anyway, merely from the pure audaciousness of its mundanely disgusting details (ugh, igloo-sized piles of dandruff, UGH) and the breakneck speed in which it introduces these details. A strong contender for CCLaP's Guilty Pleasure Awards at the end of this year, it comes strongly recommended to Michael Crichton fans and other lovers of simply-told but fantastically imagined what-if stories.
Out of 10: 8.8
November 15, 2012
What a great book.
Many Lopes is a lonely, miserable American working a government job in Korea. He hasn’t seen his wife in two years, and she finally gives up on their long-distance relationship and leaves him. Manny chose to work in Korea partly to experience another culture, but as a dark-skinned American he tends to be treated as either a celebrity or a freak by the locals, who are fascinated (and sometimes disgusted) by black people. To add to the list of things that make Manny feel like crap, he’s a puny 5 feet 3 inches tall – a “creole shrimp” as he suggests. But that’s about to change…
Also in Korea is Fred Isaacson, a particularly loopy religious fanatic who believes it is his personal mandate to pave the way for Yahweh’s return. Apparently the Lord has chosen the Korean people as the instruments of Armageddon, so Isaacson tries to sell them some experimental quantum technology – a “Little Big Bang” contained in a metal egg. But the deal goes wrong and results in several accidental quantum explosions – one of which turns poor diminutive Manny into a 6000-foot tall colossus. Manny is so massive he doesn’t even realise what’s happened. At his size (he’s far, far bigger than the figure on the cover), humans are microscopic and the landscape looks alien. For the people on the ground however, every one of Manny’s steps causes catastrophic damage. The army does everything they can, first to stop him, but then to use him as a weapon of mass destruction. Manny isn’t really susceptible to that kind of manipulation, but the Americans gain leverage over him when a second giant is discovered – a North Korean assassin.
Read the full review on my blog Violin in a Void
Many Lopes is a lonely, miserable American working a government job in Korea. He hasn’t seen his wife in two years, and she finally gives up on their long-distance relationship and leaves him. Manny chose to work in Korea partly to experience another culture, but as a dark-skinned American he tends to be treated as either a celebrity or a freak by the locals, who are fascinated (and sometimes disgusted) by black people. To add to the list of things that make Manny feel like crap, he’s a puny 5 feet 3 inches tall – a “creole shrimp” as he suggests. But that’s about to change…
Also in Korea is Fred Isaacson, a particularly loopy religious fanatic who believes it is his personal mandate to pave the way for Yahweh’s return. Apparently the Lord has chosen the Korean people as the instruments of Armageddon, so Isaacson tries to sell them some experimental quantum technology – a “Little Big Bang” contained in a metal egg. But the deal goes wrong and results in several accidental quantum explosions – one of which turns poor diminutive Manny into a 6000-foot tall colossus. Manny is so massive he doesn’t even realise what’s happened. At his size (he’s far, far bigger than the figure on the cover), humans are microscopic and the landscape looks alien. For the people on the ground however, every one of Manny’s steps causes catastrophic damage. The army does everything they can, first to stop him, but then to use him as a weapon of mass destruction. Manny isn’t really susceptible to that kind of manipulation, but the Americans gain leverage over him when a second giant is discovered – a North Korean assassin.
Read the full review on my blog Violin in a Void
January 20, 2012
ENORMITY should come with a warning: THIS IS NOT A TOY. The book is an action spectacle, but is also an over-the-top parody of action spectacles - and it runs roughshod over whatever G-rated notions of propriety one may be expecting from such a cartoonish concept. Some readers may be squeamish about this; to them I suggest a quick reread of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, another hilariously graphic critique of the human condition.
April 20, 2012
Although the back cover text makes it sound like a self-aware satire, the best thing about ENORMITY is that it's actually a fairly serious science-fiction disaster novel about a ridiculous (but apocalyptic) situation. The book mostly plays it straight with the idea of two people -- a schmoe-y military man and a North Korean assassin -- transformed into mile-high giants by an experimental Dark Matter weapon. (They're also toughened up at the atomic level, so as to simply be able to support their own weight.) They've still got normal human motivations, but at 1000x scale they're literally too big to even see ordinary human beings, their skin parasites and athlete's foot have enlarged alongside them into slimy bio-monsters, and the mere proximity of these mountains of warm flesh (despite, in one of the few mercies for humanity, slowed reaction time which causes them to move and perceive the passage of time much slower than normal-sized folk) causes destructive weather patterns and hurricane-force winds which flatten everything their feet don't trample (whether accidentally or intentionally).
Most of the book follows the US military's attempts to deal with the giants, and stop the North Korean giant from destroying America. Can anything stop her, including her American counterpart? Can anything stop them? While there is humor, as well as a tendency by Marshall to use (almost) every possible kind of giant bodily fluid, the book plays this absurd situation fairly straight, allowing the deadpan humor (and the occasional side trips into just plain fantasy) to stand out. I didn't think this giant-people scenario would be so compelling, but there's plenty of delicious imagination food here for anyone who enjoys colorful depictions of mass destruction, as well as entertainingly flawed (and sex-driven) main characters.
Most of the book follows the US military's attempts to deal with the giants, and stop the North Korean giant from destroying America. Can anything stop her, including her American counterpart? Can anything stop them? While there is humor, as well as a tendency by Marshall to use (almost) every possible kind of giant bodily fluid, the book plays this absurd situation fairly straight, allowing the deadpan humor (and the occasional side trips into just plain fantasy) to stand out. I didn't think this giant-people scenario would be so compelling, but there's plenty of delicious imagination food here for anyone who enjoys colorful depictions of mass destruction, as well as entertainingly flawed (and sex-driven) main characters.
December 18, 2011
An interesting addition to the science-fiction genre, Enormity tells us of something made of nightmares. What would happen to our world when through some kind of quantum disaster, a completely normal person would blow up to the size of a mountain?
The answer to that is quite simple. Massive destruction of apocalyptic proportions. Every footstep will cause a tsunami. A sigh turns into a whirlwind. And not to mention satisfying a giant's hunger...
What I liked about Enormity are the epic proportions of the story. Every single detail is considered, and consequently clarified. By this I mean that ever aspect of the giants life is explored. From his dander to his sweat, his bacteria, to the effects of his movements and voice.
What I didn't like that much was that at times there was an information overload. Especially when talking about political situations or the different divisions in the army, it just went past me. More often than not I had no idea what they were on about, so I just started skipping these parts. Luckily it doesn't matter that much for the story, but I would like to have a little more explanation at times.
At times the story was pretty gross (especially when it involved giant bodily fluids) but it was an interesting and engaging read. The characters all had their distinct personalities. They might not all be that likeable, but they are understandable. If the premise interests you, be sure to check Enormity out!
ARC received through Netgalley, will be published February 2nd.
The answer to that is quite simple. Massive destruction of apocalyptic proportions. Every footstep will cause a tsunami. A sigh turns into a whirlwind. And not to mention satisfying a giant's hunger...
What I liked about Enormity are the epic proportions of the story. Every single detail is considered, and consequently clarified. By this I mean that ever aspect of the giants life is explored. From his dander to his sweat, his bacteria, to the effects of his movements and voice.
What I didn't like that much was that at times there was an information overload. Especially when talking about political situations or the different divisions in the army, it just went past me. More often than not I had no idea what they were on about, so I just started skipping these parts. Luckily it doesn't matter that much for the story, but I would like to have a little more explanation at times.
At times the story was pretty gross (especially when it involved giant bodily fluids) but it was an interesting and engaging read. The characters all had their distinct personalities. They might not all be that likeable, but they are understandable. If the premise interests you, be sure to check Enormity out!
ARC received through Netgalley, will be published February 2nd.
February 20, 2012
This is a wonderful example of what happens when an author allows his imagination to run riot. This is not just weird. It's so far off the weirdometer readings as to be delightful insane. I loved every minute of it and unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in science fiction or fantasy.
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July 13, 2019
This was a solid two out of five stars for most of the novel, all its weirdness, grossness and undeveloped characters included. However, that lamely executed and vastly unclear ending kinda killed any happy feelings I had for Enormity. I know I've been saying this a lot lately (see also: Various Positions and Imaginary Girls), but this was one weird, and often quite disgusting, book.
Full review to follow, if I can stomach it.
Full review to follow, if I can stomach it.
January 14, 2012
Fasten your seatbelts. This is one wild ride of a book! Just finished reading it and can't wait for more from W.G. Marshall!
April 30, 2025
This book is a B-Movie through and through. It goes to great pains to make the science and "reality" of the plot as accurate as possible but completely gives up on story. The end is a confusing mish-mash with no real resolution or even explanation that leaves the reader hanging as to what even happened.
April 1, 2016
I truly appreciate off-the-wall concepts, but the problem usually lies in the execution: a weird idea often ends up generating an unsatisfyingly pretentiously head-scratching 'literary' work. That isn't the case here. Loved this book, it's a kaiju film gone mad, equal parts satire and black comedy and yet with some seriously cool ideas and well-executed action sequences. Perfect blend of elements into a very readable, fast-paced b-movie SF romp.
Read
January 26, 2012??? done.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews