Skipping the prologue helps. A scattershot of half sentences, erratic behaviour and tics spraying across the page to cover up your eyelids in a sickly saliva of frenetic something. Crashing from a high or scratching off the spiders, it's no smooth introduction.
There's such a stark difference in pattern between the skittish prologue and the first chapter proper that on the page before the turn it doesn't even read like the same book. But then it quickly shifts back into perspective, making it clear that we're in the mind of a white collar junkie.
The stink was stripping the stars from my eyes.
Happy Mutant Baby Pills is crazed in a deliciousness of raw execution of language that's vivid but so oddly deranged. Logic flows naturally between the scenes, but sometimes you have to jump back a few to re-read and find that no, it's happening and it's an earnest calamity of "what the hell is going on here?" moments.
Shooting up at work looks a reasonable way to deal with writing copy for a Christian singles dating website. The twisting of words to sell disparate souls to one another, pushing them to hook up and latch on to that release of companionship. This is where the protagonist, Lloyd, works, spliced with a back story of copywriting those side-effects labels on medicines and pharmaceutical advertisements. (The ones that warn you that the drug you're taking may cause things such as paralysis, insomnia, violent mood swings, bladder infection, vomiting, hair loss, etc.)
Lloyd, though, is much a floater for the whole of the story as events and happenstance push him in directions. Not much is of his own engine after the first few chapters. When he meets Nora, who deals or doesn't deal in greeting cards, Lloyd's position as a mere conduit is apparent.
Nora starts off as this paranoid woman, balling up in a gothy/artsy/bohemian posture on a coach as it heads into the night. The more we get to know her the more we don't really want to stay, yet there is a strange attraction in watching a train wreck of militant activist behaviour unfold. That's what keeps Lloyd there, that's what keeps us reading.
I wanted to breathe her fumes like they were carbon monoxide coming out of a '73 Camaro and I was in a garage trying to off myself. In a good way.
We're at war here between the drugs and chemicals and it's a brash unfiltered voice that guides you on this tale. On one side, the drugs that run up through your veins via needles or those that cook your brain through smoking sessions. On the other, the chemicals and toxins from big pharma and industry regulated through its unregulated seepage, leeching into every part of the environment.
Corporate America is the target here and it has nowhere to hide. The attacks on the establishment are vicious, cruel and painfully true. Dash it with pangs of hysteria and it's cooking up a brass ring.
It peters out toward the end as it finds a way to push things to a close. A little anxious and too neat. But, those chapters heading into the darkness are rich in a flavour of comedic haywire where it manages to stack itself over and above the top of ludicrous and abhorrent.
"Can you smell those scorched pubes?"
It's not a novel for the easy to quease, or those who want some kind of normal in their lives. The world that exists around Happy Mutant Baby Pills may not be a fun one, but the writing is, and how the author paints the visuals is strong and renders a bright satirical novel.
Reviewed on Tuesday, 18 March 2014