Aftertaste
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
An undead monster hunter must track down a killer, trailer-park-havoc-wreaking were-frog in this outrageous mash-up of Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy and George Romero’s zombie horror.
Before he died, Saelig Zilch was a chef. Now, posthumously recruited by a shadowy agency for reasons still unknown, tasked with keeping the public safe from things that go bump in the night, he hunts monsters.
Zilch scrabbles out of a North Carolina grave in someone else’s body. Someone recently dead. He only has a few days to find his bearings and carry out his latest mission, before the precious few nanobugs in his corpse shell are exhausted and he’s forced to start all over at the beginning. As he trudges down the main thoroughfare, he runs into Galavance. More accurately, she runs into him with her pink Chevy Cavalier.
A case of unfortunate timing? Maybe not. Turns out the critter Zilch has been dispatched to dispatch of—a murderous were-frog—squelches uncomfortably close to the trailer Galavance calls home. And come to think of it, Galavance's boyfriend Jolby has been spending a lot of nights out lately . . .
Stuffing gross-out humor, greasy fast food, and psychedelic amphibians into a blender on high, Aftertaste is a wild ride through life, afterlife, and the American South.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Post (Knuckleduster) serves up a succinct, frequently disgusting creature feature that will make readers laugh and gag in equal measure. Saelig Zilch is dead, and has been for a while, but working for a strange organization killing monsters gives him a new lease on life. Nanobugs with his essence are injected into a dead body, and he's assigned to track down a werefrog who's terrorizing a North Carolina town. Galavance Petersen isn't happy with her job at Frenchy's restaurant or her lazy boyfriend, Jolby Dawes, but she never could have imagined how Jolby has really been spending his free time, and her regional manager gives new meaning to the concept of the nightmare boss. After Gal hits Zilch with her car, they team up against a terror from the swamp that's turning more murderous by the minute. Some balancing pathos is provided in the form of Zilch's memories of his wife, Susanne. Readers may grow weary of Gal's opining that Jolby the jerk really isn't that bad (he is), and details about Zilch's employer are slim, but all in all, this darkly funny novel will appeal to readers who like gross-out humor balanced with just the right amount of existential angst.