Plague Monkey Spam
Steve Vernon
Bad Moon Books
Signed/Limited 200 soft cover $15.00
Signed/Limited 26 copies hard cover (including bonus short story) $75.00
Reviewed by Nickolas Cook
“Deer Reedur,
I am most happiness to inform you of ur chance to reed this most excepted of tails … Plague Monkey Spam. If you only send yur social sucrity number and bank accounting information.”
Just kidding.
No, this isn’t one of those incredibly weird spam letters you receive in your inbox a million times a day. Funny sometimes; annoying most of the time; and down right confusing.
Steve Vernon can sympathize.
He understands how difficult it is to know if you’ve won a million dollars from the Scottish lottery or if you’re to be crowned King of Micronesia for a paltry down payment of a thousand dollars good faith money.
And he has found an answer for our collective spam woes.
Written with a wry sense of humor and an adroit understanding of the human condition – its glorious strengths and burdensome weaknesses – Steve Vernon has tapped the strange fiction vein like never before with Plague Monkey Spam, his forthcoming novella from Bad Moon Books (due out in February).
Not truly horror or fantasy, his tale sits somewhere between the two – a place where Vernon’s talent is most effective. In this clash between the old and new gods, Vernon weaves a clever web, connecting the ancient and the modern, to mold a believable mythos of our vast and complicated internet world (and our dependency on a technology that most of us can barely fathom). Here is a writer steeped in his own personal hilarious (and sometimes pretty perceptive) philosophy of the world, with its inevitable machinations. His humor and vision are accessible to even the most jaded, world weary of readers, as he throws us into the inner world of circuitry and tribal legend, to take us for a wild ride beyond the web. Novella is the perfect size for this aerodynamic tale of blue monkeys, talking spider gods, and sentient webs.
So read it, enjoy it, and make sure to spam someone you know with Plague Monkey Spam.
Who knows?
They might even send their checking account information and date of birth in appreciation.
