Hyperlink from Hell: A Couch Potato's Guide to the Afterlife

by Lindy Moone

Murder. Mayhem. And at least one "bat" guy.

Murder haunts The Haven, celebrity James Canning's home since he lost touch with Reality TV. What's his "shrink" to do? Assign writing therapy, of course. But when the good doc reads Canning's memoir, Hyperlink from Hell, he checks into his own padded suite and Canning disappears. To save the doc from madness, The Haven's new director must analyze the hell out of Hyperlink from Hell. Is Canning's tale of kidnapping, murder, time travel and wardrobe malfunction fact or fiction, deceit or delusion? Can she solve the murders, save her boss and find Canning? Or will she need a padded suite of her own?

"Hyperlink from Hell: A Couch Potato's Guide to the Afterlife" isn't just the latest of the funny vampire books. It's the great American mystery... in hyperdrive.

493 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 8, 2012

About the author

I write, among other things, In(s)ane Mysteries: a cross-genre blend of psychological mystery and manic humor, peppered with paranormal.
My first published novel is "HYPERLINK FROM HELL: A Couch Potato’s Guide to the Afterlife," and I'm working on its sequels: "Riding the Bull" and "3 Wize Monkies." I trained as an artist but always wanted to write stories — and always did, mostly in secret. I live by the Turkish seaside with my husband (“The Great Fisherman Boo”), and a plump, cranky cat named Sammy. The charity anthology I instigated, co-edited and illustrated, For Whom the Bell Trolls, is what I'm most proud of right now -- but there’s more to my own troll story, so I plan to base a series on it.
Twitter:
@LindyMoone
Facebook:
Lindy Moone
And my in(s)ane website:
Literary Subversions
It’s a veritable loony bin of wordplay, silly pictures, and news and trivia about my books. Please stop by, especially if you know an easy way to get Sammy to take worm medicine.

Reviews

[Carol Kean · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Hyperlink from Hell" is so fresh, funny, and original, you're not going to say what so many book reviewers have said of so many other books: "I don't just want my money back; I want those wasted hours of my life back."

Reading a book is not just forking over 2.99 or 5.99 or 15.99... it's spending precious moments of your life, and we have a finite number of days to live. So, I no longer read every novel I'm asked to read and review. Lots of them are "DNR," Did Not Finish (not "Do Not Resuscitate"). This one, I not only finished - I read every page. Some, twice or more. I was shaking my puny fist of rage, then reading the author bio, then tracking down the author on social media and finding her so personable and likable, I couldn't 2-star the novel just for the elevator scene (ohhhh, my gaaaaaawd, no spoiler here, but I will NEVER FORGET.)

We've all seen “This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to real-life people is coincidental.” Well, I never did believe those disclaimers authors put up front in their novels. (But I'd certainly make the same disclaimer myself.) Several years after I first read this novel, I found out Wallace Stegner said the same thing, only he said it better. [1]

But I digress. Lindy Moone was parented by mental health professionals, and her grandfather worked in or lived near a castle-ish Georgian-style manor house on the grounds of an institution like the one in Hyperlink (this is all on the Author Bio page), so there is some real-life inspiration that gives this unbelievable novel a bizarre authenticity. The mental patients in Hyperlink are so vivid and authentic, they can only be inspired by real life people–who are, after all, are stranger than fictional characters.

I envy the reviewer who writes, “I’d nearly finished the book before I realized who Al and Jimmie represent.” I hate being obtuse! People often have to explain jokes to me, which makes me shake my fist at God for not giving me a fully operational brain. Then I get to thinking, and I shake my fist of rage at the people who try to convince me there is a God.

In other words, this book has me agitated. I dropped it cold at one point, early on, when things got naked and a boob-obsessed male couldn’t stop talking about boobs. But the author, in college --I stalked Lindy Moone on Twitter and Facebook for more than one gets in an Author Bio--the author herself was the only female in a house shared with a bunch of guys, who sound like cast members of The Big Bang Theory, so I decided to grow up, set aside my squeamish (all right, prudish) disdain for male boob obsession, and see what the suddenly naked James and his bimbo lady friend would do next.

James is an idiot, but so are millions of real-life men. Win the lottery, buy yourself a reality TV show, become a celebrity. Oh, and have some weird, Aspie-like gift of remembering every arcane fact and trivia ever known to humankind. Again, I am jealous. My memory is wretched. Why do jerks win the gift of good memory AND a winning lottery ticket?

The opening chapter of this novel is riveting, eerie, beautifully written and compelling. I sampled Chapter One and bought the book because of it. Then the novel morphed into a madness of men fighting over the remote, only this isn’t an ordinary TV remote, it is literally a UNIVERSAL remote. I like the pun so much, I had to keep reading, in spite of potty humor and tongue-in-cheek references to other novels and TV shows, both things that I find off-putting in fiction and film. Lindy Moone writes so well, her prose is so polished and error-free, I had no choice but to keep reading like some helpless crack addict.

Also, in spite of all the murder and mayhem, things I tend to avoid in fiction, the tone is light. A killer cuts someone up into little pieces, and I’m not slamming the book shut? Something unusual is afoot here. My sister in real life was murdered. Deep down, I really love what Lindy Moone does in Hyperlink, and deep down, I hate hate hate the way we can’t know if we’ll ever be reunited with our lost loved ones in some afterlife or some other dimension.

Do my personal biases and bitterness make me fail to appreciate novels that hit my triggers? No doubt. Niels Bohr said some things are so serious you can only laugh at them, and Lindy Moone is the champion for making light of a thing like death without coming across as someone making light of murder and death. This is no small achievement.

This is a clever, original, witty novel. I’m just annoyed that I still don’t know, at the end of it, if James is alive or dead, or both. Parallel universe James#1 versus James#2 and all the other cast of in-between characters torture my already feeble synapses and neurons. Fans of movies like Inception are sure to love a novel as challenging as this one. Fans of satires like Spaceballs are also sure to love it. (I confess: I do love that awful movie Spaceballs.)

Fans of the twisted and deranged, buy with confidence. This has the potential to be a cult classic like that Venus flytrap movie (Little House of Horrors, if my dreadful memory serves me at all. I saw it in college–not telling how many decades ago.)

Indie Author John L. Monk (see my blog post on his novel “Kick”) led me to Lindy and to Thomas A. Mays (I reviewed his novel in the June 2014 issue of Perihelion Science Fiction ezine). Go, awesome indies!

[1] "Wallace Stegner...says, ‘The greatest piece of fiction ever written is the disclaimer at the beginning of each book that says none of the characters in this book are based off of anyone alive or dead.’ What a crock, I mean that’s what you’re supposed to do — find interesting people and populate your novels with them.”
--Craig Johnson, "Longmire" author

[2] Hmmm, when I created footnote [1], I thought I'd footnote links to John Monk, whose novel "Kick" was a "Free Today" long, long ago, so I downloaded it, fell in love with it, stalked the author on social media, bought and read both sequels to Kick, and... well, Amazon and Goodreads aren't letting me post URLs here, so just hunt down John L Monk and read him yourself and see if he isn't as hilarious and witty and dark-humored as Lindy Moone.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hyperlink from Hell is witty, complex, profane, inane and insane. Its author, Lindy Moone, gives fair warning of this on its title page:
“Caution: In(s)ane Mystery ahead. If you have any sense, or sensibilities, this senseless novel will surely offend some or all of them. Just put the book down, and back away. (Now).” The italics are mine.
This book is for readers who crave something truly original.
It has two narrators. The first is female, the acting director of The Haven, an insane asylum. Already you may guess where this is going, though I didn't. The second narrator is an inmate who’s gone missing, Jimmie Canning, a former TV reality show star. Jimmie has left behind a first-person account of his activities since his disappearance/murder. He’s left this document, “Hyperlink from Hell” in the possession of Al, the former director of the asylum.
In his autobiographical account, Jimmie does not understand what’s happening to him, and the reader doesn’t either. But hey, maybe this is what insanity feels like (or reality, to some). I’d nearly finished the book before I realized who Al and Jimmie represent. Both are crazy.
Jimmie's narrative is chock full of altered references to television characters and shows, plus Shakespearean allusions and potty jokes. I kept thinking of “a tale told by an idiot” (Macbeth). Because the characters are lovable, the story never feels dark nor the satire harsh.
Hyperlink from Hell could become a cult classic. It’s substantial enough, and poses abundant questions for analysis in college literature classes. I envision term papers, theses, dissertations, bull-sessions. In a few locations, a “banned book,” because some will take offense.
My experience: In the beginning, I kept wanting more of the first narrator-- the sane one--and a traditional-type story. That desire, too, may be part of the message. We want the universe to make sense. I skimmed some of the manic scenes (the book is long) and grew a little tired of farce, but by the end, I loved how the author puzzled the pieces together, and I was ready to read again from the beginning.
Contemporary fiction seldom presents such a challenge, or such fine writing. Kudos, Lindy Moone!

[Lorinda Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Bored God Plays Games with Those Who Created Him

Hyperlink from Hell is a difficult book. On a superficial level, it’s a bawdy, raucously funny, offbeat fantasy, but it’s a lot more than that. The beginning grabbed me because the author is such a skillful writer, establishing the situation, setting, and characters with smooth realism. Then with the onset of Jimmie Canning’s book-within-a-book, I was plunged into the kind of story I don’t usually read – overloaded with sex, nudity, and bathroom humor. However, I just kept plowing through and that element tapered off as the story continued and expanded into speculative fiction, including an investigation of the afterlife and the nature of god. It’s saturated with puns (and I happen to love puns), and it’s also loaded with references to popular TV and movie entertainment from the past thirty or forty years. I never watched a lot of those shows, so I’m sure I missed some zingers, but I got enough of them to appreciate the effect.
When I finished the book, I reread the beginning and the concluding sections and I have to say, while some of my questions were answered, I felt just like Dr. Stapledon – I still didn’t fully understand what really happened. It’s a book that should be read at least twice because the plot is not the most coherent or self-explanatory. There are two sets of the same characters, who exist in alternate realities, and the relationship among these two sets can get really confusing.
Three of the characters die early on and the quirkiest of gods, who loves pop culture and game shows as much as Jimmie does, steps in to play games with his creations’ afterlife, testing and teaching them in a sort of mad, mad, mad, mad reality show purgatory. It includes shapeshifting (flying monkeys, to say nothing of walking pineapples), a stinky but lovable invisible dog, Frankenstein’s monster, giant T. Rexes, vampires ... the list goes on and on. God appears first as the Wizard of Oz – the Man behind the Curtain – but he also takes the form of the Cheshire Cat, the snake in the Garden of Eden, a tiny devil wielding a pickle fork ... and finally as the Master of Ceremonies in the ultimate game show, which soon morphs into a major battle between good and evil (complete with weapons provided by a purple case reminiscent of the walking box in some of Terry Pratchett’s books.)
But a pivotal element is when god discusses who he really is, and this calls for a quotation:

“Check out those books of yours, again. All of them. My favorite line is ‘Man created God in his own image.’ ... I think I was willed into existence.”
“Who could do such a thing? How? Why?”
“YOU PEOPLE, WHO ELSE? How, I can’t say. I’m sure you had your reasons – lots of reasons – but when it all comes down to it, you just want someone to blame and a Twinkie. I’m sick to death of you, but I’m stuck.”

So this cynical, bored god plays with those who created him in order to alleviate his boredom, but this doesn’t negate the processes of good and evil. “Thou shalt not kill” still applies and so do the Seven “Dudleys,” the Seven Deadly Sins. And the wonder of it is, the antihero Jimmie grows as a character, until by the end he becomes a real hero, defeating evil with a visual pun in a delightful plot twist. Jimmie also refuses to kill and has learned how to forgive and how to care about his fellow human beings. A hero also has to give up something in order to do the right thing (part of my own definition of the hero) and that surely happens in Jimmie’s case. All of this comes out of his own mental processes, which aligns this book with humanism – that your ability to be good comes out of yourself and not from an external command from a god who may not even have an independent existence.
I could write a lot more about this book, but I’ll just end by again praising the author’s writing skills, which are capable of keeping the reader mesmerized even when the plot is at its most confusing. I should also say that the ebook is carefully formatted, with no aberrations to distract the attention and no typos that I caught. That’s yet another plus. The only reasons I’m giving it four instead of five stars are the excessive use of bawdy humor and the confusing elements of the plot.
And at least at the moment, the book is only 99 cents. You’ll get a lot of pleasure and an intellectual workout for this 99 cents, and I strongly recommend that you pick up a copy right now.