What do you think?
Rate this book
ATOMIC BEBOP HULLABALOO
In the vein of Batman '66, The Monkees, and Pee wee's Playhouse comes Atomic Bebop Hullabaloo, a book that asks the question "What if Raymond Chandler wrote an episode of Spongebob Squarepants while jacked up on sugary breakfast cereal and Dr. Demento albums?"
When perpetually broke novelty rock singer, Lowbrow pop culture vulture, and pompadour enthusiast Dizzy Pendergrass accidentally burns down his current place of employment (a laundromat/milkshake bar called the Soapy Cow), he’s given the chance to work off his debt by locating a pair of stolen sunglasses for the eccentric billionaire owner of milk—Phineas T. Milk.
Now, racing desperately against the clock, Dizzy hits the kitschy mean streets of Zap!City, where he encounters gorgeous tattooed Mexican wrestler femme fatales, gangster clowns feuding with mobbed-up late night TV horror hosts, crooked local sci-fi celebrities, a bored teenage space god looking for entertainment, the mischievous demon spirit of Paul Lynde, and the ominous presence of the Roasting Marshmallow, a crazed vigilante waging a bloody war on petty crime, and who seems to have his sights set on Dizzy.
“Just so we’re clear, toward the beginning of Back to the Future when Marty’s band is trying out for the school talent show and doesn’t get in, it isn’t that the uptight, uncool Establishment doesn’t get his music, Marty McFly just plays guitar like an asshole.”
“Full disclosure. I’m a guy weaned on the reruns of 1970s and 80s action/adventure TV shows. You couple that with a pretty white trash upbringing that, when not down at the comic book shop and learning about the art of Jack Cole and obscure Italian crime movies from Von Rudy, translated into an inordinate amount of time spent hanging around Lemons Speedway unsupervised while my mother looked for love, and you’ll see that my convincing a broken down daredevil stuntman drinking buddy of my mom’s named No Eyes Majewsky into teaching me how to pull out of a parking space like Jim Rockford and then raise hell on four wheels seemed like the most natural thing in the world."
“Like hell! He only gave me fifteen hundred one dollar coins in a greasy Crown Royal bag with the assurance that they’d soon triple in value. They didn't.”
“We’re gonna make Dr. Ignatius Tastywiggle an offer he can’t understand.”
“This is more of a tax for being a dumbass than anything else.”
“Professor Pietro Proteus? No shit? We interned together back when we were both starting out. Good man. He still a monkey? No matter. Don’t answer that. Ain’t my place to judge.”
“Do you really think Dizzy Pendergrass could do all this? I mean look around. This is a big operation I’ve got going on here. From what I’ve seen that guy isn’t exactly busting at the seams with ambition or the ability to sign a commercial rental agreement.”
“It wasn’t Grand Canyon Tastywiggle was saying. That fucker invented a gran cannon and the bubble on R2-DMitra’s back is a hopper filled with old people that it shoots as ammunition!”
“You know what? Smurf you, mothersmurfer! Smurf you in your smurfing smurf! You know what you are? You’re a smurfing bigot and I don’t need this smurf!”
"I do it, because for every Doctor Haircut or Bubba NASCOP pristine prime-time drama that helps back-up the argument that we are in the midst of a second Golden Age of Television, there are shows about boxes of cereal turned vigilante after being framed for their wife’s murders and garbage men with Emmanuel Lewis for a leg fighting off clockwork Tom Waits zombies that need a-watchin’. Anyone can enjoy the good stuff. It takes a special kind of guy to appreciate the awful. And I like to think of myself as that guy.”
“Oh! I’m sorry. Charo was right. Never go against the coochie-coochie.”
When perpetually broke novelty rock singer, Lowbrow pop culture vulture, and pompadour enthusiast Dizzy Pendergrass accidentally burns down his current place of employment (a laundromat/milkshake bar called the Soapy Cow), he’s given the chance to work off his debt by locating a pair of stolen sunglasses for the eccentric billionaire owner of milk—Phineas T. Milk.
Now, racing desperately against the clock, Dizzy hits the kitschy mean streets of Zap!City, where he encounters gorgeous tattooed Mexican wrestler femme fatales, gangster clowns feuding with mobbed-up late night TV horror hosts, crooked local sci-fi celebrities, a bored teenage space god looking for entertainment, the mischievous demon spirit of Paul Lynde, and the ominous presence of the Roasting Marshmallow, a crazed vigilante waging a bloody war on petty crime, and who seems to have his sights set on Dizzy.
“Just so we’re clear, toward the beginning of Back to the Future when Marty’s band is trying out for the school talent show and doesn’t get in, it isn’t that the uptight, uncool Establishment doesn’t get his music, Marty McFly just plays guitar like an asshole.”
“Full disclosure. I’m a guy weaned on the reruns of 1970s and 80s action/adventure TV shows. You couple that with a pretty white trash upbringing that, when not down at the comic book shop and learning about the art of Jack Cole and obscure Italian crime movies from Von Rudy, translated into an inordinate amount of time spent hanging around Lemons Speedway unsupervised while my mother looked for love, and you’ll see that my convincing a broken down daredevil stuntman drinking buddy of my mom’s named No Eyes Majewsky into teaching me how to pull out of a parking space like Jim Rockford and then raise hell on four wheels seemed like the most natural thing in the world."
“Like hell! He only gave me fifteen hundred one dollar coins in a greasy Crown Royal bag with the assurance that they’d soon triple in value. They didn't.”
“We’re gonna make Dr. Ignatius Tastywiggle an offer he can’t understand.”
“This is more of a tax for being a dumbass than anything else.”
“Professor Pietro Proteus? No shit? We interned together back when we were both starting out. Good man. He still a monkey? No matter. Don’t answer that. Ain’t my place to judge.”
“Do you really think Dizzy Pendergrass could do all this? I mean look around. This is a big operation I’ve got going on here. From what I’ve seen that guy isn’t exactly busting at the seams with ambition or the ability to sign a commercial rental agreement.”
“It wasn’t Grand Canyon Tastywiggle was saying. That fucker invented a gran cannon and the bubble on R2-DMitra’s back is a hopper filled with old people that it shoots as ammunition!”
“You know what? Smurf you, mothersmurfer! Smurf you in your smurfing smurf! You know what you are? You’re a smurfing bigot and I don’t need this smurf!”
"I do it, because for every Doctor Haircut or Bubba NASCOP pristine prime-time drama that helps back-up the argument that we are in the midst of a second Golden Age of Television, there are shows about boxes of cereal turned vigilante after being framed for their wife’s murders and garbage men with Emmanuel Lewis for a leg fighting off clockwork Tom Waits zombies that need a-watchin’. Anyone can enjoy the good stuff. It takes a special kind of guy to appreciate the awful. And I like to think of myself as that guy.”
“Oh! I’m sorry. Charo was right. Never go against the coochie-coochie.”
526 pages, Paperback
Published July 9, 2018
4 people are currently reading
7 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 14, 2018
I came upon this book serendipitously: the "follow of a follow" feature on Twitter brought some rando's tweet about it to my attention. Ordinarily I wouldn't give a good goddamn about something like that, okay, at least half of the writing life is hustle, every book advertised as THE BEST BOOK YOU'LL EVER READ.
Sure, Jan.
Also… This is Book 1. Book fucking 1.
Book 1 is largely a marketing tactic these days, okay, everyone has read the same How to Write a Bestseller article in the Coffee News, the same bit about writing a series to build your audience, they've Slap-Chopped it in with a pile of "trying to capitalize on the success of existing works by popular authors," spat some President's Choice chewin' teebacky juice in it for flavour, and come up with this:
The Girl Who was Seduced by Her Billionaire Shifter Stepbrother's Cocky Baby (A Fuck of Off and Die, Book 1.)
I hate you, cynical Book 1s of the world. You're bad people, and nobody likes you.
But something about this tweet intrigued me. Possibly the mention of Paul Lynde's hairpiece..? I can't remember right now. All I know is I clicked through, and even though the next red flag was "562-page debut," I bought the book without hesitation, and in the doing was plunged heart and soul into a loony alternate dimension in which women are women, and men are... basically anything, really.
(That's not me crying sexism, okay, that's me leading up to telling you that the protagonist's landlord is an avuncular blobfish named Outback Jack.)
The only way this book could've been more up my street is if I'd written it myself. It's chockablock with Weird Stuff, okay, Honey Bunches of Goats on every single page.
Lookit: Mad Libs, right?
Of course the meat and potatoes of fiction writing are such as plot, characterization, dialogue, sentence structure. But for me, strong, colourful writing also calls for as much specificity in the details as you can possibly manage without coming off like a dingdong.
Whether or not it's meaningful, get it in there, man. Do you even know how many species of trees are indigenous to your setting, Little Miss "Copse of Trees Nearby"? There's like twenty of them just on my block, and an oak is not a willow is not a cherry blossom, you lazy daughter of a whore.
Give someone Mad Libs--VERB ADJECTIVE NOUN ADVERB--and like as not you'll get back something like WASHED BLUE SOCK QUIETLY. Eh, whatever, at least you tried. But every now and again, you get someone who's like "Fuck Mad Libs and fuck YOU, fucker," and he hands you EXSANGUINATED PRETEEN SEA MONKEYS LUSTILY.
You know, or something.
The point is, they made the effort. They logged the man hours. The point is, they didn't settle for "passable."
And don't mistake me, you can run into a LOT of problems writing that way, you can create a hopeless clusterfuck writing that way, if you aren't committed, or if you're doing it cynically, or if you just aren't any good at it.
Quirk for the sake of quirk: desperate; contrived; gross buckets.
I collaborated with someone on a story once--or tried to, okay, it was never finished, we had Artistic Differences.
She was a calculating writer: the sort of person who shies away from uncommon words and "obscure" references for fear of alienating the reader, no hope or trust at all that they'll be curious and/or engaged in her work enough to look it up if they don't understand it.
It's fine for some people, I'm not knocking it (much) but me, I write what I write--or I DID, anyway, more on that in a tic--and if you don't get it, and you don't give a frig enough to investigate… tough totem, man, everyone knows you were going to bring Dollarama yak nubbins to our monthly cult potluck anyways.
For years and years now, everyone I've engaged with day to day has been conservative, populist, klassy, and/or living out their golden years. If I never said anything people might not understand, I'd never say anything full stop.
And that's… kind of how things have panned out, for me. I used to tell my stories anyway, crack my jokes anyway, but nobody ever knew what I was talking about, not ever, and honestly, I'd rather never talk to you again than have to explain a joke to you, okay, that sucks the big one.
It's hurt me as a writer in recent years, besides. The project I'm working on now is different from anything I've ever tried before, you know, I've always tried to write something Important, something lasting, something that exposes my shriveled little heart so there's more left behind when I finally croak than a mysterious collection of bread tabs and a bunch of journals I should've burned when I had the chance.
My new book has nothing to do with anything. It came to me out of nowhere while I was dying of boredom at work. It's pure story, written in an experimental (for me) style, not meant to do anything for you but keep you company for a while. I'm excited about it, because it's so different, but I worry all the time, too, uncharacteristically.
It's not Important; maybe it's TOO experimental; it's super-Canadian.
I hope this doesn't come off as a backhanded compliment to Mr. Marsh, because I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT mean it that way: his book, his goofy, grody, glorious book, has reminded me of my "tough totem" roots. This book isn't meant to be Important, it's not meant to reach a broad audience. It's a love letter, a message in a bottle, and so it IS Important, BECAUSE it's not meant for a broad audience.
It's meant for people like the woman I saw on Twitter the other day who thought nobody would get her reference about Rerun bootlegging The Doobie Brothers. I almost told her there's a whole Facebook group for that, but I decided against it, last minute. Let her find out accidentally, like I did, and feel her spirit restored to its fullest potential.
Anyway!
I guess I should say a little something about the book, hey? Like, ABOUT about it.
It's a snowballing quest story at its heart: a down-on-his-luck punk frontman/ex-launderer/milkshake delivery driver named Dizzy Pendergrass is enlisted by an eccentric dairy magnate to retrieve a very special pair of sunglasses, to the tune of 20 large.
Rent is due, Outback Jack is running out of patience, and it kind of seems like the milk man is maybe a Nicolas Cage type, spending way too much money on stuff just because he can, you know, how hard can it be to go find some sunglasses, if Dizzy's man enough for the job?
Pretty hard, actually!
No matter what Dizzy says or does in the service of his milk master, it only ever makes matters worse. He meets X and finds out he should've been talking to Y, who hates him now for not coming to them first. He finds A and not only ends up behind the starting line, somehow, but now needs to find seventy-nine other things just to break even.
It's the principle of escalating action, if that principle met with an industrial accident that gave it the superpower of being a huge pain in the bee-hind for everyone, every minute, forever. Every flip of the page takes Dizzy farther and farther away from the mythical sunglasses and his big payday, but there's so much else going on that he seems to forget about it himself, on occasion.
Talking about Weaveworld, Clive Barker once said (and I'm paraphrasing) that if you can convince your reader to accept one idea, just one, no matter how oddball, then you've hooked them, and you can do whatever you like.
Adam Marsh…
It's the difference between cooking a steak sous vide and plunging your hands into a bowl of hamburger and eggs to mix them for meatloaf. (And that's not meant as an insult. Meatloaf takes half as long and it's twice as delicious.) Everything's everywhere in this book, all the time.
Forget about accepting one strange idea, okay, there's a dozen of them on every page of Atomic Bebop Hullabaloo, and nobody's interested in waiting for you to make your adjustments. Waiting is BORING.
I don't even want to give examples of the extravagant madness in this book, because saying this or that plainly would diminish the impact of it if were the latest thing to troutslap you in the brains while you were reading it, and also, I don't want to ruin it for you. Not one single thing among the hundreds of thousands of things.
The plot is not important. It's so not important that it's tied up neatly by the end even though it's BOOK 1, as aforementioned. The dialogue is incredible. The characterization is mental. The setting is fantastical, and the lion's share of the pop culture references are from the 60s and 70s. (I so want to tell you my favourite! But I won't. Buy the book, nerdhole.)
Here's how much I loved this book: I noticed that it only has one female character of any consequence, and I didn't care. I noticed that it's riddled with homophones, outright misspellings and assorted typos, and I DIDN'T CARE. Ordinarily those kill a book for me at least a little bit, but I found it charming this time--even came to think of it as a "two scoops of raisins" sort of situation. You can't spell "kitsch" to save your life, but you use it constantly anyway? Delicious!
Soon I'll buy Atomic Bebop Hullabaloo again, in paperback, because I need it for my illustrious Permanent Collection, but I'm skint at the moment, and nobody ever asks me to find anything, for any amount of money.
Then I'll wait impatiently for Book 2.
Sure, Jan.
Also… This is Book 1. Book fucking 1.
Book 1 is largely a marketing tactic these days, okay, everyone has read the same How to Write a Bestseller article in the Coffee News, the same bit about writing a series to build your audience, they've Slap-Chopped it in with a pile of "trying to capitalize on the success of existing works by popular authors," spat some President's Choice chewin' teebacky juice in it for flavour, and come up with this:
The Girl Who was Seduced by Her Billionaire Shifter Stepbrother's Cocky Baby (A Fuck of Off and Die, Book 1.)
I hate you, cynical Book 1s of the world. You're bad people, and nobody likes you.
But something about this tweet intrigued me. Possibly the mention of Paul Lynde's hairpiece..? I can't remember right now. All I know is I clicked through, and even though the next red flag was "562-page debut," I bought the book without hesitation, and in the doing was plunged heart and soul into a loony alternate dimension in which women are women, and men are... basically anything, really.
(That's not me crying sexism, okay, that's me leading up to telling you that the protagonist's landlord is an avuncular blobfish named Outback Jack.)
The only way this book could've been more up my street is if I'd written it myself. It's chockablock with Weird Stuff, okay, Honey Bunches of Goats on every single page.
Lookit: Mad Libs, right?
Of course the meat and potatoes of fiction writing are such as plot, characterization, dialogue, sentence structure. But for me, strong, colourful writing also calls for as much specificity in the details as you can possibly manage without coming off like a dingdong.
Whether or not it's meaningful, get it in there, man. Do you even know how many species of trees are indigenous to your setting, Little Miss "Copse of Trees Nearby"? There's like twenty of them just on my block, and an oak is not a willow is not a cherry blossom, you lazy daughter of a whore.
Give someone Mad Libs--VERB ADJECTIVE NOUN ADVERB--and like as not you'll get back something like WASHED BLUE SOCK QUIETLY. Eh, whatever, at least you tried. But every now and again, you get someone who's like "Fuck Mad Libs and fuck YOU, fucker," and he hands you EXSANGUINATED PRETEEN SEA MONKEYS LUSTILY.
You know, or something.
The point is, they made the effort. They logged the man hours. The point is, they didn't settle for "passable."
And don't mistake me, you can run into a LOT of problems writing that way, you can create a hopeless clusterfuck writing that way, if you aren't committed, or if you're doing it cynically, or if you just aren't any good at it.
Quirk for the sake of quirk: desperate; contrived; gross buckets.
I collaborated with someone on a story once--or tried to, okay, it was never finished, we had Artistic Differences.
She was a calculating writer: the sort of person who shies away from uncommon words and "obscure" references for fear of alienating the reader, no hope or trust at all that they'll be curious and/or engaged in her work enough to look it up if they don't understand it.
It's fine for some people, I'm not knocking it (much) but me, I write what I write--or I DID, anyway, more on that in a tic--and if you don't get it, and you don't give a frig enough to investigate… tough totem, man, everyone knows you were going to bring Dollarama yak nubbins to our monthly cult potluck anyways.
For years and years now, everyone I've engaged with day to day has been conservative, populist, klassy, and/or living out their golden years. If I never said anything people might not understand, I'd never say anything full stop.
And that's… kind of how things have panned out, for me. I used to tell my stories anyway, crack my jokes anyway, but nobody ever knew what I was talking about, not ever, and honestly, I'd rather never talk to you again than have to explain a joke to you, okay, that sucks the big one.
It's hurt me as a writer in recent years, besides. The project I'm working on now is different from anything I've ever tried before, you know, I've always tried to write something Important, something lasting, something that exposes my shriveled little heart so there's more left behind when I finally croak than a mysterious collection of bread tabs and a bunch of journals I should've burned when I had the chance.
My new book has nothing to do with anything. It came to me out of nowhere while I was dying of boredom at work. It's pure story, written in an experimental (for me) style, not meant to do anything for you but keep you company for a while. I'm excited about it, because it's so different, but I worry all the time, too, uncharacteristically.
It's not Important; maybe it's TOO experimental; it's super-Canadian.
I hope this doesn't come off as a backhanded compliment to Mr. Marsh, because I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT mean it that way: his book, his goofy, grody, glorious book, has reminded me of my "tough totem" roots. This book isn't meant to be Important, it's not meant to reach a broad audience. It's a love letter, a message in a bottle, and so it IS Important, BECAUSE it's not meant for a broad audience.
It's meant for people like the woman I saw on Twitter the other day who thought nobody would get her reference about Rerun bootlegging The Doobie Brothers. I almost told her there's a whole Facebook group for that, but I decided against it, last minute. Let her find out accidentally, like I did, and feel her spirit restored to its fullest potential.
Anyway!
I guess I should say a little something about the book, hey? Like, ABOUT about it.
It's a snowballing quest story at its heart: a down-on-his-luck punk frontman/ex-launderer/milkshake delivery driver named Dizzy Pendergrass is enlisted by an eccentric dairy magnate to retrieve a very special pair of sunglasses, to the tune of 20 large.
Rent is due, Outback Jack is running out of patience, and it kind of seems like the milk man is maybe a Nicolas Cage type, spending way too much money on stuff just because he can, you know, how hard can it be to go find some sunglasses, if Dizzy's man enough for the job?
Pretty hard, actually!
No matter what Dizzy says or does in the service of his milk master, it only ever makes matters worse. He meets X and finds out he should've been talking to Y, who hates him now for not coming to them first. He finds A and not only ends up behind the starting line, somehow, but now needs to find seventy-nine other things just to break even.
It's the principle of escalating action, if that principle met with an industrial accident that gave it the superpower of being a huge pain in the bee-hind for everyone, every minute, forever. Every flip of the page takes Dizzy farther and farther away from the mythical sunglasses and his big payday, but there's so much else going on that he seems to forget about it himself, on occasion.
Talking about Weaveworld, Clive Barker once said (and I'm paraphrasing) that if you can convince your reader to accept one idea, just one, no matter how oddball, then you've hooked them, and you can do whatever you like.
Adam Marsh…
It's the difference between cooking a steak sous vide and plunging your hands into a bowl of hamburger and eggs to mix them for meatloaf. (And that's not meant as an insult. Meatloaf takes half as long and it's twice as delicious.) Everything's everywhere in this book, all the time.
Forget about accepting one strange idea, okay, there's a dozen of them on every page of Atomic Bebop Hullabaloo, and nobody's interested in waiting for you to make your adjustments. Waiting is BORING.
I don't even want to give examples of the extravagant madness in this book, because saying this or that plainly would diminish the impact of it if were the latest thing to troutslap you in the brains while you were reading it, and also, I don't want to ruin it for you. Not one single thing among the hundreds of thousands of things.
The plot is not important. It's so not important that it's tied up neatly by the end even though it's BOOK 1, as aforementioned. The dialogue is incredible. The characterization is mental. The setting is fantastical, and the lion's share of the pop culture references are from the 60s and 70s. (I so want to tell you my favourite! But I won't. Buy the book, nerdhole.)
Here's how much I loved this book: I noticed that it only has one female character of any consequence, and I didn't care. I noticed that it's riddled with homophones, outright misspellings and assorted typos, and I DIDN'T CARE. Ordinarily those kill a book for me at least a little bit, but I found it charming this time--even came to think of it as a "two scoops of raisins" sort of situation. You can't spell "kitsch" to save your life, but you use it constantly anyway? Delicious!
Soon I'll buy Atomic Bebop Hullabaloo again, in paperback, because I need it for my illustrious Permanent Collection, but I'm skint at the moment, and nobody ever asks me to find anything, for any amount of money.
Then I'll wait impatiently for Book 2.
May 17, 2019
If you like not knowing what the hell is going on then this book is for you!!😁 Comic book characters that have come to life. A mystery of sorts and a main character who is lovable in his own quirky way!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews