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Review Now Now
Apr. 27th, 2015 02:54 pmHey,
The other day I finished up Apocalypse Now Now by Charlie Human. Mr. Human is a short story author who lives and works in South Africa and this is his first novel.
The book focuses on Baxter Zevcenko, a young high school student living in Cape Town. He and his small circle of friends make good money selling porn to the student body. Baxter has a plan to expand his little ring and bring peace to the warring factions in his school when his girlfriend gets kidnapped. Given that there's a weird serial killer going around carving an eye-symbol into their victim's foreheads, this is pretty worrying to Baxter.
Finding a weird glowing tooth in his girlfriend's room starts Baxter on a long trip that finally introduces him to Jackie Ronin and from there it's a tour through the supernatural underbelly of Cape Town. The external weirdness starts to line up with Baxter's internal weirdness as he's seized by odd dreams and visions. Eventually, it all comes to a head as Mantis God fights Octopus God for control of the world.
The book was pretty fast-paced and fun. Mr. Human has a different frame of reference for his fantasy and mythology to draw from and takes advantage of that to introduce some novel features to Cape Town's occult world. Baxter's internal dialogue is generally pretty amusing and there are lots of fun dialogue bits. It's not super-deep and while it sets up for the next book in the sequel it completely stands on it's own so full marks for that.
later
Tom
The other day I finished up Apocalypse Now Now by Charlie Human. Mr. Human is a short story author who lives and works in South Africa and this is his first novel.
The book focuses on Baxter Zevcenko, a young high school student living in Cape Town. He and his small circle of friends make good money selling porn to the student body. Baxter has a plan to expand his little ring and bring peace to the warring factions in his school when his girlfriend gets kidnapped. Given that there's a weird serial killer going around carving an eye-symbol into their victim's foreheads, this is pretty worrying to Baxter.
Finding a weird glowing tooth in his girlfriend's room starts Baxter on a long trip that finally introduces him to Jackie Ronin and from there it's a tour through the supernatural underbelly of Cape Town. The external weirdness starts to line up with Baxter's internal weirdness as he's seized by odd dreams and visions. Eventually, it all comes to a head as Mantis God fights Octopus God for control of the world.
The book was pretty fast-paced and fun. Mr. Human has a different frame of reference for his fantasy and mythology to draw from and takes advantage of that to introduce some novel features to Cape Town's occult world. Baxter's internal dialogue is generally pretty amusing and there are lots of fun dialogue bits. It's not super-deep and while it sets up for the next book in the sequel it completely stands on it's own so full marks for that.
later
Tom
