| The Fat Man is a hilarious send-up of holiday & noir |
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The Fat Man: A Tale of North Pole Noir by Ken Harmon
c.2010, Dutton
$19.95/$25 Canada
275 pages
Sometimes, you imagine the fun you could’ve had.
Every Christmas, you missed out on mayhem, hid from hassles and avoided all agitation while your partners in crime had a good time without you. Dreaming of piles of presents, you dialed down the mischief to ensure that Santa would be generous, but in the end – come to think of it – your pals always got just as much loot as you did.
Don’t blame Santa, though. He only brings toys, and as you’ll see in the novel The Fat Man: A Tale of North Pole Noir by Ken Harmon, it almost kills him to do it.
About 1,000 years ago, give or take, back when Gumdrop Coal started the Coal Patrol, Santa was reluctant to punish bad kids with bad presents, but Gumdrop was persuasive. Kids who found lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings had nobody to blame but themselves, according to Gumdrop.
For 1,000 years, Gumdrop was proud of the program he started and the job he’d done. At least, he was until he was fired and replaced by his nemesis, Charles “Candy” Cane, who never liked the Coal Patrol.
Being out of a job gave Gumdrop a chance to think, and he began realizing that parents were just as guilty of raising naughty kids as the kids were for being naughty. Maybe it was parents who needed the punishing.
But Santa didn’t look too fondly upon one of his elves physically assaulting a human. He scolded Gumdrop. And then things got worse: Raymond Hall Senior, Gumdrop’s first punishee, was found dead in his sealed trophy room and Santa started looking kind of sick himself.
Since everyone knew about Gumdrop’s little escapade, fingers in Kringle Town pointed straight at the disgruntled former elf-ployee. Fleeing by ferry to the Island of Misfit Toys, Gumdrop knew that he had to vamoose until he could clear his own name. He also knew that there were a lot of people who wanted to see him framed for something he didn’t do.
With the help of his best friend, Dingleberry Fizz and beautiful Marshmallow World Gazette reporter Rosebud Jubilee, Gumdrop Coal tried to solve the crime before his chestnuts were roasted.
What do you get when you add together a 1,300-year-old curmudgeonly elf, a “monster nutcracker” named Tannenbomb, several disenfranchised toys, a Red Ryder BB gun and a Frank Capra movie? You get The Fat Man, and it’ll make you ho-ho-ho.
With definite Raymond-Chandler-ish flair and every Christmas cliché and character you can think of, author Ken Harmon brings a dark and darkly funny world to life in this un-holiday-like holiday book. I loved that Harmon surprised me with pop-culture references of Christmases past and that he put images in my head for Christmases future.
Seriously, I’ll never think of Santa’s reindeer in quite the same way again.
If you love to skew tradition a little, or if you’re having a blue post-Christmas and need a few laughs, you need to find this book. The Fat Man is more fun than any reindeer game.
Terri Schlichenmeyer has been reading since she was three years old and never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 11,000 books. She is also a contributor to the new book Armchair Reader: Vitally Useless Information, available through Amazon.com
Readers with questions or comments may write to Terri in care of this publication. |
| 12/29/2010 |
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