Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free

Randy Henderson Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free (2016)
I couldn't make it past page fifty-three, which at least disqualifies Bigfootloose from having been the worst thing I've ever read. It's an urban fantasy and sequel to some other thing I'd never heard of, which amounts to magic, elves, and fairies in a contemporary setting cunningly juxtaposed with sardonic references to episodes of Star Trek. The author refers to Tolkien and others on his blog, which is to be found on the interwebs - tee hee - and yet this novel reads as though his literary foundation was rooted in watching a shitload of television and hanging out with people who dress up as wizards. The narrative is almost all dialogue interspersed with faintly sardonic commentary from the narrator.

Pete removed the customised embalming tubes with the kind of delicateness one might expect from a Jedi manscaping his nethers with a lightsabre.

I think you probably meant delicacy, although I'm sure there's a better term. As author, it was your job to come up with one, yeah?

Elsewhere our man exclaims shazbot in homage to Robin Williams' character from Mork & Mindy, and surprise-fucking-surprise, each page is spattered with extraneous fullstops in the usual attempt to recreate the portentous mood of a cinematic voice-over, instead simply breaking the flow with clumsy sentences lacking subject or action. Like this one. Or beginning with and.

And then we come to:

Oh absolutely. We plotted to replace George Lucas with one of our changelings and have him create movies so terrible they would destroy all hope. We called it Operation Pandora's Jar Jar. And it almost worked.

Ha! Ha! Do you see? He called out George Lucas, dude!

My twenty-five years exiled in the Other Realm had been spent in the wildlands outside of the shaped Demesnes, confined to a pocket of space not unlike a holodeck where I could re-experience any memory but not create anything new, nor control my own appearance or apply imagination.

Yes, you see I can't help noticing how we're now discussing imagination within a sentence dependent on the reader having watched Star Trek: the Next Generation, which is interesting. Reviews quoted on the cover praise Henderson's allegedly ripe sense of humour, and yet aside from a sasquatch engaged in knitting - which is really only an absurdist juxtaposition, albeit a comic one - the only humour I can find is the sort of deal passed off as such in episodes of the Big Bang Theory, references to pop culture and something which once happened in an issue of Green Lantern; which isn't humour. It's button-pushing. It's culty dog-whistling. It's a list calculated to bring smiles of recognition to the faces of readers, with the comedy, such as it is, sprung from the incongruity of someone in a fantasy novel making a reference to Star Wars, a joke which actually isn't that side-splitting after the first few hundred iterations and particularly not if that's all you know how to do.

So, it's mostly dialogue, pop culture references, sentences which were probably suffixed with dude prior to editing, assuming there was editing, and let's not forget chapters named after eighties pop songs, and mostly fucking awful eighties pop songs; and what I could follow of the story is incomprehensible. Henderson attempts to fill us in on the background by describing his characters watching an instructional video called So, You're a Feyblood Now, which itself is reduced to a meaningless information free gag by the wearying MST3K style interjections of its viewers. This is fiction for people who dress up as characters from television shows. I don't know how it got published.