Review: Jack and Mr. Grin by Andersen Prunty

Jack Orange was a normal guy, albeit a normal guy with a strange job. He packed dirt into small boxes for shipping to places unknown. One Sunday, his only day off, Jack went out for breakfast. When he came back his girlfriend, Gina, was nowhere to be found. He received a disturbing phone call from a man claiming to have Gina. He was given a deadline of 24 hours to find Gina, with the condition that he would have to kill her captor or else be killed by him.

Jack & Mr. Grin was my first bizarro fiction book. This book is the August group read for the Horror Aficionados group over at Good Reads. I have to admit I was not sure what I had gotten myself into when I first decided to order this book. It arrived fairly quickly, especially considering this is a print on demand title. It is a rather small book, only 195 pages. There are several pages of advertisement at the end for other bizarro books.

The first thing that really caught my attention was the quality of the writing. I think I had convinced myself that the writing would be very cheesy and not technically accurate due to the "weird" factor surrounding the book. But I was completely wrong in thinking that. Andersen Prunty is a very capable writer, his style very easy to read yet compelling.

I enjoyed the characters in this book, especially the interaction between Jack and Gina's brother Sam. The chemistry there was just right. In one scene, Sam is duct taping feminine pads to Jack's bleeding wounds. This bit of comedy amidst the trauma was great.

One thing that took away from the book, at least for me, was the lack of "weird" throughout most of the story. Being that this book is classified as bizarro, I expected the whole story to be really out there. The first two thirds of the book could easily have been from a popular mystery or detective novel. There is nothing wrong with that, I love mystery novels. I just expected the story to be more strange. There is strange or bizarro towards the end and I realize that the parts of the story preceding that helped set the stage.

At the end of the day, this was a good book. I will check out some more bizarro titles as well as keep an eye out for more works from Andersen Prunty.