Monkey droppings - Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies: you read that correctly.

Today, the shelf monkey asks: "Who would win in a fight: zombies, pirates, or ninja?"

The answer? We all do.

The second answer? The monkey. No one beats the monkey.

Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies (2012, ChiZine)

James Marshall

I look away from the TV and back to the road. I'm drunk-driving for safety, but to double up on safety, I'm driving a bulldozer. It isn't one of those puny little bulldozers you see toppling trees sometimes. No. It's an enormous mining bulldozer. It's the kind of bulldozer you'd use to push down a mountain. I find that when I get into an accident while driving a gigantic bulldozer, it doesn't really bother me. And huge bulldozers are also excellent for zombie outbreaks because there are always a bunch of abandoned cars and pickup trucks in your way. The driver's area of my bulldozer is encased in (pock-marked) bullet- and sound-proof glass, overlaid by a chain-link cage that locks in order to protect occupants (me) from the undead and the few living people who escape the Zombie Acceptance Test and fend for themselves in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

I've made quite a fuss over ChiZine Press the last little while. The Canadian publisher has introduced me to the works of David Nickle, Gemma Files, Robert J. Wiersema, Tim Lebbon, Gord Zajac, Claude Lalumière, Tom Piccirilli, Craig Davidson, Simon Logan, Nicholas Kaufmann, Douglas Smith, and Michael Rowe. Combined, these authors make up most of the top books I've read over the past three years. The worst I've ever said about a ChiZine release is, "That was pretty darn good."

So I'm habitually inclined to trust the judgment of its editors when it comes to delivering fascinating genre fiction. I've got Gemma Files' third Hexslinger book on deck, as well as The Steel Seraglio and In the Mean Time.

But even if you take ChiZine out of the equation, quite frankly there was no way I was not going to be interested in a book titled Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies (hereinafter NVPFZ). It's got three of my favourite pop culture things right in the title: zombies, ninja, and versus (you put versus in a title, you're guaranteed my attention; I'm looking at you, Godzilla versus Mothra).

Whatever I was expecting, however — battles of enormous bloodshed, adventure on the high seas, stealth kills in the shadows, some amalgam of all three — I did not get it in NVPFZ. What I got was a good old-fashioned spin-your-head-around-twice mindfu@#. Even now, weeks later, I'm not precisely sure what to make of it; I only know that I had a rollicking good time.

Ostensibly, NVPFZ is the tale of Guy Boy Man, a character whose name now goes on my list of favourite literary names, a list including Billy Pilgrim, Major Major Major Major, and Hiro Protagonist. Guy Boy Man is an exceedingly rich sixteen-year-old who sees himself as a pirate (although he wears the Pope's hat), trying to survive what appears to be a hellscape of a school populated by zombies with the help of his best friend Sweetie Honey, an African-American ninja. In addition to battling said zombies and his arch-nemesis The Principal with the help of a cadre of extremely attractive women, Guy Boy Man has fallen for a precocious pink-haired girl names Baby Doll15. Alas, he cannot proclaim his love for her, for if he does, he shall lose his trillions of dollars; so say the centaur from Fairyland who bequeathed him the money, a tidy sum which may have caused the collapse of the American financial system.

Yeah, this is weird. Quirky. Chaotic. Borderline nonsensical.

-->

It's also extremely loveable, if you can get past the sometimes-unbearable precociousness of Guy Boy Man's narrative voice. He's a pretty unlikable hero: petty, manic, narcissistic; at one point he uses disabled children to protect himself from a horde of troubled zombie teens. He plays the tough guy, complete with hardboiled quips, yet cannot properly handle a gun in a firefight. Yet James Marshall's book wouldn't work without it; the voice is precisely why the book maintains any sort of narrative thrust. Guy Boy Man never stops talking, creating a story that's almost ideal for this ADD generation. He's also one of the most unreliable of unreliable narrators I've come across; just how much is real and how much is the fevered imagination of a deranged adolescent mind. Guy Boy Man is a prototypical disenfranchised teenager, raging against everything and anything, and warping his view of thw world on a minute-by-minute basis to make it better conform to his nebulous ideology. NVPFZ plays fast and loose with the rules of its own reality, becoming a psychotropic mindscape where you cannot be surprised when a unicorn starts killing your soldiers, or a bevy of exotically beautiful Eastern European girls turns out to be genetically modified assassins. It's par for the course in Guy Boy Man's universe, and you either dig it or you don't.

Marshall promises that this is only book one in the How to End Human Suffering Series, with Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos soon to come. I just don't know where else this story can go, but I have confidence Marshall will bring his A game.

Verdict: Monkey really enjoyed, once he screwed his brain back in

Critical Monkey entry #6 - Treasure Island - “The secret has been told to the parrot.”

Having suffered mightily at the hands of James Patterson and his abysmal King Tut “non-fiction” meanderings (I still don’t have peripheral vision in my left eye), the Critical Monkey had to take a well-earned rest for a bit. But time heals some wounds, although not altogether cleanly. There is still a scar on my soul, and I find I cannot bear to try and conquer another bottomless pit of despair just yet.

So instead, I’m going old-school. 19th century old, to be precise. I’m taking to the high seas to read a youthful classic I have somehow avoided up to now:

Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

Why I might like it: As per the rules, I have never read Stevenson, nor have I watched any of the cinematic adaptations of Treasure Island (not even the Muppets version). I have, however, greatly enjoyed the movie versions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the Frederic March version in particular) and The Body Snatcher. And there must be something to it; Treasure Island is a novel that has withstood the test of time and has entered the lexicon and popular culture. You may not have read the book, but if you haven't heard of Long John Silver, you must be living in a cave or something, and should really get out more.

Why I might hate it: I hold no particular affinity for pirate stuff, or novels about seafaring. This doesn’t go for films: I enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean (all three movies, actually), I can watch The Sea Hawk endlessly, I love submarine films, I'll never get tired of Gregory Peck battling giant whales, and I consider the movie version of Master and Commander to be one of the great ignored classics of the 21st century. But reading and watching are entirely different things, and frankly, I find most of my readings to date on naval goings-ons to be as dull as dirt (and I include pretty much half of Moby Dick in this). I claim no expertise on the matter, I do not mean to malign artists or their craft (I really should read at least one Patrick O’Brian), and I fall back purely on my own ignorance of the genre.

The verdict: Fun. Not earthshattering, not spectacular, but a decent-enough adventure novel for the younger set.

The plot is standard adventure story boiler-plate, but considering the age of the text, I’ll give it a little leeway for a lack of originality. Jim Hawkins is a young lad bound for adventure, chosen by circumstance to join a gang of buccaneers on their search for buried treasure. While consumed with the headstrongedness of youth, he’s also savvy enough to survive many scrapes that would kill lesser boys. Or men. I admit to being unprepared for Stevenson’s body count, quite high considering the novel’s reputation as a classic of young adult literature. I thought this might be because it was written more for adults, but as it was apparently written first as a serial for Young Folks magazine, I guess that people gave kids a little more credit than they do now. Still, I rarely hear of challenges to Treasure Island, but I guess that’s because killing is fine, but finding love among one’s own gender, now that's unacceptable (sorry, editorializing).

For a young adult novel, Treasure Island has a surprisingly malleable take on morality, embodied through Silver's handling of events. Most of the pirates take rather a bleak view of mankind; as the two-timing Israel Hands eloquently puts it:

For thirty years...I’ve sailed the seas, and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o’ goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite; them’s my views—amen, so be it.

Silver, however, twists and turns all people to his advantage, but somehow still ends up on top. He's not all evil, just opportunistic, which is some instances is even worse. At least with evil, you know where you stand. It is this flexibility of moral coding, as well as the theory that a gentleman's word is his bond and honour, that adds a weird ethical ambiguity little seen to such an extent in young adult literature.

Yet as the pages flipped by, I admit to a fair degree of boredom on my part; this despite the presence of copious amounts of pirates and pirate-related mayhem. Jim may be a daring avatar for a younger reader, but to an adult he reads as woefully one-dimensional; shrewd and capable, yes, but as a character he's rather flat. The adults are either upper-class English types or roguish layabouts, and while the latter is infinitely more preferable to read about, neither group (outside of Silver) is much fun. I also am perplexed by the reputation of some of the characters; I had heard of Blind Pew before, and on the rear cover of the book jacket Pew is described as being evil incarnate. But he's barely in the novel, he's dead long before the actual seafaring begins, and while he's undeniably unpleasant, I fail to see why he has garnered any reputation at all.

I'm glad I read it, though, even if I was underwhelmed, and I'll put Dr. Jekyll on my list, as I'd like to see how Stevenson wrote for adults.

THE MONKEY IS SO-SO, BUT HE SURVIVED, SO LET'S CALL THIS ONE A WIN