I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: February 3, 2024] Starter Villain

My wife and I have relatively different tastes in books, but we have a large section of overlap.  And since she is a much faster reader than I, she brings home all kinds of books that I think I’d like to check out.

And this was, obviously one of them.  I mean, blah blah, books by their covers, but come on, of course I’m going to at least look at this one.

She confirmed that it was good and I jumped in.

I must say right off the bat it’s not what I thought it was going to be.  The cats are not the villains, despite how obvious that seems. Rather, the cats are helpers to the villain.  But we’ll get to that.

Charlie is down on his luck.  He’s a substitute teacher.  He’s recently divorced–this hurts even more because his Uncle Jake sent him a pair of berry spoons as a wedding present with a note that said 18 months, which was exactly as long as his wedding lasted.  And the house he’s living in was his only inheritance.  But he has three half siblings who are all owed a part of the house.  But it’s the only place he has to go.  And he’s got this stray cat that he recently brought home…

His last hope for a semblance of success is to buy a local Irish pub that is for sale.  But it costs a few hundred thousand dollars more than he has–and the bank isn’t fooled by his lies.

When he gets back from the bank, there is a woman waiting on his porch.   She tells him that his Uncle Jake (the one with the spoons) has died and left him a substantial sum.  He just has to go to the funeral and say a few words on his behalf.

Charlie hasn’t seen his Uncle since he was like five years old and has no idea what to say about the man.  The man owned parking garages.  How could he have a substantial sum?  But whatever, he has not much else going on.

The funeral home is hilarious because all of the bouquets has curses and threats on them–beautiful flower arrangements with sashes that say things like “See You In Hell.”  And when the funeral actually starts one of the men takes out a knife to make sure that Jake is dead.

It was weird.  But as Charlie was about to get to his house, it blew up.

Then things start to happen pretty fast.  Charlie learns that his cat has her own house a few doors away.  And that she can communicate via computer.  And that she is very smart.  And that she has been spying on him for Uncle Jake for the past few months.

That’s when the woman from his porch returns to explain that Uncle Jake did indeed own Parking Garages, but he also owned a lair under an active volcano.  Oh, and he “created” the intelligent cats.  And he does all kind of work in and around villains the world over.   And now that Charlie has taken over Jake’s enterprise, Charlie has been invited to a convention of villains with the express intention of making sure Charlie joins (or re-joins) and pays the group a lot of money.

Charlie is naïve and doesn’t know much about how all of this villain business works.  But he is no fool.  And all of his dealings with the other supervillains are hilarious.

The Zoom call alone is worth reading the book for.

Not to mention intelligent dolphins (who are really such assholes), the Pitch and Pitch, and more double crosses than on a shoelace and you get a very funny (and yet still violent) novel with a serious threat of real danger to our protagonist.

Good thing the cats like him (even though he only feeds  them Meow Mix–but they like it’s it like potato chips, you can’t just eat one).

I had not read anything by Scalzi before and I am making sure I read more by him.  It seems like most of his other books are serious, so I think I need to go for Redshirts next.