Friday, October 5, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad by Minister Faust




Some good books are straightforward and pretty easy to review.  Bad books are also fairly easy to review (most of the time) because it's easy to point out their flaws and leave it at that.  And then there are books which are simply....out there, doing a whole lot of crazy things at once, succeeding-at least some of the time, resulting in a pretty strange reading experience that leaves you with a lot to think about and you with some confusion over whether or not the book is good or not.

The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad is one such book, if you couldn't tell from the title.  While sometimes its narrative is pretty straightforward (usually when our main hero is telling the story) for large parts of the book it is utterly all over the place - with different characters talking and describing things in very very different ways, as if the book was being spoken aloud instead of just being text (that there is no audiobook version of this book is both ironic and kind of appropriate, as it would ruin a large part of this effect).  Oh and the book is incredibly nerdy, with references up the wazoo to nerd culture - it's not exactly a Black version of Ready Player One - the nerd culture references are more incidental than a specifically important part of the plot - but I guess it's kind of close.

More after the Jump

 -------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
Hamza and Yehat, a pair of black nerds in Edmonton, are known around the area as (and call themseles) The Coyote Kings.  Hamza works as a dishwasher but used to be a pretty good poet before suffering writers block and still possesses the uncanny ability to find anything, while Ye is a brilliant, albeit nutty, engineer, and the two spend time on the side to help out the community.  But while life isn't bad, Hamza still agonizes over the end of a former relationship and wonders what went wrong.

But when a mysterious woman named Sherem shows up in Hamza's life and expresses an interest, things seem to be changing.  Sherem has it all, she's beautiful, sophisticated, and seems to be just as damn nerdy as Hamza and Ye.  But Sherem has her own agenda, one that threatens to pull Hamza - and through him, Ye - into a dangerous battle for a mysterious artifact, with two enemies from Hamza's past on one side and a dangerous gang of insane nerds on the other, armed with a powerful psychedelic drug that no one has ever seen before.

In a week, Hamza and Ye's world is about to be forever changed....in the craziest ways imaginable.  Good thing they're the Coyote Kings, ready to stand together against it all....right?
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The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (hereinafter "this book" for my own sanity) is not written in a straightforward way....as the beginning of the book might tell you, since the book begins with the "Epilogue."  The story is told from the third person perspective of at least eleven different characters, with the book putting a "Character Data" page before the first chapter a new perspective takes over the story to inform you who the new character "is."  I say "is" in quotes because these data pages are incredibly nerdy stat sheets that are pretty cute at first but get old by the time we get to the sixth or seventh such data sheet, and aren't exactly that informative - if at all.  Most of the story is written from Hamza's point of view, with Ye being the second-most common viewpoint it seems, but the other characters' viewpoints are interspersed throughout, often seemingly randomly.

And man are some of the other characters random.  Five of these Point of View characters are members of a gang (known as the FanBoys) who work for a Six Point of View character, and they are totally nuts - with the leader (known as AlphaCat)'s perspective being written entirely in a pidgen that is incredibly hard to read (for an example, see here), one character being muscle and a simpleton, one being a sociopath, one looking to move up in the world, and one just being totally out there....you get the point.  There's little rhyme or reason as to when their chapters take place, or whey their perspectives are shown instead of others in the same vicinity, and the result is....well kind of nuts.

This is not to say the perspectives of some of the other characters are less nuts - the Fanboys' leader Dulles Allen and the Meaney Brothers, the three major antagonists of the book, are blatantly kind of insane and it's not clear at times whether the things they are seeking are real or just in their heads.  The same is also true of Sherem, the mysterious woman whose arrival drives Hamza and Ye into the central plot conflict.  And Ye is somehow one of the saner characters despite being a totally insane engineer with some over the top moments that in any other story would make him look totally mad.  Hamza, who again is the main narrator and basically the main protagonist of this book, is the only character whose story is seemingly straightforward, and it's still something.

None of this is necessarily bad - I think the Fanboys' perspectives were kind of over the top and a bit too much (I'm not sure we couldn't have removed two of them?) and I had trouble telling the Meaney brothers apart, but the overall effect on the book was pretty clear and I do think it kind of works.  And I liked Hamza, Ye, and even Sherem quite a bit, through the insanity of it all, and it's pretty easy to feel for each of them, even with their own individual crazy moments.

In short this book's a trip, but it's a trip that kind of works, with some characters I actually liked and enjoyed.  I see on the author's facebook page a hint about a sequel possibly coming out, and if it ever does, well, I'll give it a shot.  And if you want a SciFi/Fantasy book that's really out there and something really different from the typical book in the genre, give this book a try:  you might hate it mind you, but it's definitely worth a shot.
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