Seattle Weekly waxes wryly over Hello Devilfish!
The
Seattle Weekly
chooses my reading of Hello Devilfish! at Elliott Bay Books (11/06 at 7 pm) as a "Pick List" event--and also sneaks a rad review in.
"Tokyo is burning, and Devilfish is laughing. He’s a kaiju, one of those fake-looking rubber monsters running amok—a giant blue manta ray, in this instance—and the very amusing narrator of Dakron’s Hello Devilfish! (Three Rooms Press, $15.95). Devilfish claims to be an enemy not just of Tokyo, where he gleefully topples power lines and elevated trains, munching on their passengers, but also of the novel itself. “Join us in plot-maiming fun!” he exclaims in Manglish, a comic lexicon made up of odd advertising slogans, poorly translated Japanese, LOL-speak, and I Can Has Cheezburger grammar. Destruction is this manta ray’s mantra. Yet the more his sting-tailed protagonist inveighs against Big Lit, local writer Dakron begins to sneak in some structure and literary mischief. Devilfish has an unwanted paramour in pursuit of him: another kaiju he calls Squidra, a giant pink kraken with tentacles and laser beams that shoot from her eyes. So there’s a bit of a love story in Hello Devilfish!, and a chase through the city’s smoldering rubble, an abrupt transformation (hello, Doug!), and flourishes of humor that recall Mark Leyner. Quoth the Devilfish, “I spit on realism and all its cunning henchmen!” Here’s a creature intending not to enter the literary canon but to destroy the library." Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., 624-6600, elliottbaybook.com. Free. 7 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
"Tokyo is burning, and Devilfish is laughing. He’s a kaiju, one of those fake-looking rubber monsters running amok—a giant blue manta ray, in this instance—and the very amusing narrator of Dakron’s Hello Devilfish! (Three Rooms Press, $15.95). Devilfish claims to be an enemy not just of Tokyo, where he gleefully topples power lines and elevated trains, munching on their passengers, but also of the novel itself. “Join us in plot-maiming fun!” he exclaims in Manglish, a comic lexicon made up of odd advertising slogans, poorly translated Japanese, LOL-speak, and I Can Has Cheezburger grammar. Destruction is this manta ray’s mantra. Yet the more his sting-tailed protagonist inveighs against Big Lit, local writer Dakron begins to sneak in some structure and literary mischief. Devilfish has an unwanted paramour in pursuit of him: another kaiju he calls Squidra, a giant pink kraken with tentacles and laser beams that shoot from her eyes. So there’s a bit of a love story in Hello Devilfish!, and a chase through the city’s smoldering rubble, an abrupt transformation (hello, Doug!), and flourishes of humor that recall Mark Leyner. Quoth the Devilfish, “I spit on realism and all its cunning henchmen!” Here’s a creature intending not to enter the literary canon but to destroy the library." Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., 624-6600, elliottbaybook.com. Free. 7 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
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