Great Philosophy

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go..."-Dr. Seuss

Friday, November 12, 2010

Wormfood by Jeff Jacobson

This ARC was sent to me by Fresh Fiction for review.

Arch Stanton is living with his crack-shot Grandmother in a trailer that is owned by the local restauranteer, Fat Ernst. Arch lost his parents and grandfather and he and his grandmother are having a hard time making ends meet. Arch works for Fat Ernst as his busboy, cook, janitor, errand boy.
Fat Ernst has sent the Sawyer brothers, Junior and Bert, to pick Arch up for work on Friday. Junior and Bert are the definite bad boys in town. They drive a truck that has a bull-head ornament on the front and the back is full of dead animals that they get paid to collect. 
On the way to the restaurant, they come upon the funeral procession for Earl Johnson, the town's richest farmer. The Sawyer's get so mad at all of the Stetson-wearing, rich farmers in the line, that they decide to one-up them and start throwing dead animals at the cars in line. This causes an accident with the hearse, which causes the coffin to come out of it's berth and land in the mud at the side of the road.
This book takes a real hilarious turn at this point and doesn't look back. We spend the next 2.5 days with these characters and experience humor and horror in a well-packaged mix. This really would make a funny horror movie, in comparison to any of the "Scream" movies. Although I found this funny to read, there were some real instances of physical horrors. One of them really made me cringe, and it takes a lot to do that, being the huge Stephen King fan that I am. 
The only down side to this is that I thought the title should be different. The worms are in the story, but don't play the most major role in it. Jeff Jacobson has a great way with words, again being very visual. You can just picture a lot of what he writes.  

1 comment:

Joanna St. James said...

It sounds really Hilarious