Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!
I’ve never quite been able to get into Dennis Etchison’s work. I’ve always ending up liking the anthologies he’s edited more than the actual fiction he’s written. The same goes for GOT TO KILL THEM ALL & OTHER STORIES, Cemetery Dance’s new collection of his short stories – some new, others dating back to the birth of his career in the ’60s. To me, his fiction seems a little fill-in-the-blank, as if not everything he needs to say is said, leaving this reader feeling like either every other sentence has been removed or that I just don’t get the joke. This is a shame, because KILL THEM sports a number of intriguing premises … that just didn’t pay off for me. I’m in a minority there, I know.
Perhaps no one deserves a ribbing as much as the Nazis, and New Yorker cartoonist S. Gross gives them 120 pokes in WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU LAUGH: 120 FUNNY SWASTIKA CARTOONS. This rectangular hardback takes about five minutes to read, with one drawing per page. The entries fall into two categories: deliberate barbs at the Nazi party, and largely nonpolitical ones where the swastika merely takes the place of a random object, like a lamp or a Slinky. Despite the subtitle, not all 120 are funny (I’d say half are at least humorous), but you have to love the fairy waving a wand at a Nazi and saying, “Poof! You’re circumcised!” and the cactus who asks its armband-wearing owner, “Are you my mother?”
Every year, sorority girls wanting to get back at their dads pose nude for Playboy’s college issues, which may or may not later become a sticking point with prospective husbands. But imagine the explaining the coeds pictured in BOINK: COLLEGE SEX BY THE PEOPLE HAVING IT will have to do. Edited by Alecia Oleyourryk, Christopher Anderson and Vanessa White, this collection of articles and pictorials from the collegiate sex mag is most notable for featuring no-imagination-needed photo spreads of higher-ed student couples – same- and opposite-gender – playing around with themselves and one another. But like Playboy, you might want to read it for the articles, which include true confessions of a guy who’s still a virgin and a girl who’s a serial masturbator. Interesting to say the least, even if it leaves you wondering why.
Move over, Sudoku! Now there’s YUBOTU. You might known it better as Battleship. Peter Gordon, Mike Shenk and Conceptis Puzzles (the firm behind SNAKES ON A SUDOKU) here assemble 200 of these “addictive” pencil games for the armchair torpedo commander in you, divided into different skill sections like “petty officer” and “admiral.” As with the Milton-Bradley game, the object is to find – and sink – the fleet floating in a visually pleasing grid. Unlike Battleship, it’s not so simple. In fact, it takes about 15 pages of rules up front to explain. Because of that, the impatient among us won’t even make it to the first round. –Rod Lott
