[book review]

Smashed Squashed Splattered
Chewed Chunked and Spewed

a new novel by Lance Carbuncle

(VBW Publishing, 267 pgs.)

Review by Celeste Hollenbeck

This lengthily-titled book, being self-published (with a bold admittance to it as the first task in its Foreword), has surprisingly fewer blatant grammatical errors than one would expect from a self-published book. But it is certainly not perfect.

Although S.S.S.C.C.S. is speckled with bizarre characters, footnotes, and profanity, its most painful flaw is its lack of any thoughtfully crafted deeper meaning or unifying theme. Within the first thirty pages, our hero–an outright unlikable guy who is mostly concerned with his physical state of being (be it eating, puking, or rolling on ecstasy)–fails to provide us with a point as to what, exactly, he is trying to accomplish with his narrative.

It must be noted that randomness, shock and absurdity are not illegitimate literary tools–when used to express some deeper, bigger idea. Even if it might be possible to make a bombardment of nonsensical and rather unrelated first-person sentences entertaining enough to carry a full 200-page novel, that isn’t quite accomplished in this book. Rather, the whole story comes off as a big string of the narrator’s self-indulgent little anecdotes, all poorly tied to each other. Even the book’s humor, which alternates between mostly the deprecation of the narrator versus the deprecation of those around him, seems to be more entertaining for the protagonist himself than his readers.

Maybe it can’t be said that Carbuncle ever had any dreams of mass recognition in writing a story which is supposedly about a strange man trying to recover his strange dog. To be fair, it also cannot be said that S.S.S.C.C.S. was completely without any talent or redemption. If this particular story, however, is ever to be able to compete outside of the self-publishing industry, some greater amount of focus and significance will be required.

CH

[According to his myspace, http://www.myspace.com/lancecarbuncle, signed copies of Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed are available at LanceCarbuncle.com, and at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and at Haslam’s bookstore in St. Petersburg, Florida. ~Ed.]