| View Larger Image | Lemur | Paperbackby Tom Bradley (Author)
| List Price: | $11.95 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Raw Dog Screaming Press | | Edition: | 1st Hardcover Edst Edition | | Page Count: | 124 Pages | | Publication Date: | April 30, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 1,767,068st |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Damnation and Salvation in the American Food Services Industry! Spencer Sproul is a would-be serial-killing bus boy who can't manage to murder, injure, or even scare anybody. He longs to follow in the footsteps of his heroes, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. Who wouldn't feel murderous working in a family style restaurant with an asshole boss, sadistic co-workers and Lemmy the Lemur as a mascot? But as hard as he tries he simply doesn't have a killer's instinct. However, there are ways to do damage to far more people and do it legally. Spencer learns that a family restaurant can be an instrument of torture, and quickly becomes a rising star in the food services industry. But before Spencer can take his seat of honor at the Merchant of the Month Award Banquet, he must bumble his way past a pederastic restaurant critic, a trash-talking sex worker, a cellulite-worshiping convenience store clerk, and a police force filled with homophobes, overeducated commies and greedy homicide detectives. It's an all-American success story! |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 9 reviews)
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A perfectly twisted American Dream by Jeremy C. Shipp  5 Stars
November 14, 2008
"Spencer wanders past various deserted sections of the library, marked LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, and HISTORY. Eventually he comes to the Business shelves, the only ones that have any visitors." Yes indeed. Spencer Sproul lives in a world where money and power mean everything. He lacks both, of course, and he's too broken down to lash out like his serial killer idols. But this is America, folks. The land of opportunity, where the abused can become the abuser. In Lemur, Tom Bradley writes about the American Dream. This is a funny, twisted book filled with funny, twisted characters. His prose is as addictive as MSG, and the only side effect is the feeling of being smacked across the brain, and liking it.
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Social commentary wrapped in absurdity by Craig Clarke (New England)  4 Stars
June 06, 2008
Spencer Sproul aspires to be a serial killer. His locker at work (he is a busboy at Lemuel's Family Restaurant) is papered with portraits of murderers both real and fictitious . His apartment is also loaded with memorabilia.
Unfortunately, he just isn't very threatening (he can't even growl convincingly), and when he breaks into a woman's apartment to kill her, he gets distracted by her book (about a serial killer, natch) and reads it till dawn.
Inspired by the machinations of a convenience store clerk (who he also originally intended to kill), an expert at luring obese people into his shop to consume even more questionable comestibles, Spencer realizes that his best potential murder weapon is the restaurant itself. So he turns his creative talents to marketing -- and especially to ratcheting up the effect of its mascot, Lemmy the Lemur (pictured on the cover) -- and rapidly moves up the ranks by capitalizing on the subliminal power of gonzo advertising.
Satire is not a strong enough word for what Tom Bradley is doing with Lemur. Every character is painted with a bizarro brush, and yet they remain relatable. Spencer can't even use English properly (Bradley calls this "oral dyslexia"), but he isn't hard to understand, and this difference actually works to make him more engaging and sympathetic.
Readers who like their social commentary wrapped up in absurdity will find a lot to like about Lemur. You can read it as a tightly written treatise on consumption in the modern age, or as the touching story of a serial killer's coming of age. Either way you choose to approach it, this darkly comic novella is sure to entertain.
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Just Eat It by John-Ivan Palmer 5 Stars
May 29, 2008
Reading Lemur is like watching a cartoon on the inside of your eyelids after a pound of Lebanese blond. There's a realism to the story that is very close to, but not quite, the realism of everyday life. The characters, the situations are all recognizable, but as exaggerations. They move about in their blind way, but always about three inches off the ground. Bradley has a way of getting at the essence of human qualities through a peculiar satire, one that is uniquely his, and that constantly startles and shocks. When it comes to snideness, he's right up there with Pope and Swift. The fast food restaurant theme (Lemur is a cafe logo) becomes an allegory for what America (and the rest of the world) is swallowing without question. The serial killer fixation of Spencer, the "hero," reduces human brutality to the prosaic level of a French fry (or elevates the French fry to the level of a criminal act). Bradley's story of who does what to whom in the competitive world of food & beverage is the very stuff of every day life in America, but you have never quite seen it in this bizarre context. The sign of a great book is the extent to which it changes the way you look at the world. When you finally set down Lemur after reading it, take a stroll down franchise lane with its parking lots and metal signs, logos, and hapless souls in uniform smocks, and see if you don't start to feel that you're walking six inches off the ground yourself in a world that isn't a world. Better yet, read the whole book in a McPhonyFood Diner, pausing between chapters to look around. You'll never feed your brain with stuff off the sidewalk again.
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PURSUING KARMIC SADHANA WHILE PATTING A BUS BOY'S BUTTOCKS by Phaborinos of Arles 5 Stars
May 15, 2008
During an interview in the current issue of Unlikely Stories Magazine, award-winning novelist Tom Bradley is grilled pretty thoroughly on the issue of man-boy love. The interviewer seems to have something of an axe to grind. Which is good. The best interviews grind lots of things: teeth, nerves, egos. A modicum of bumping goes along with the grinding, too, in this case.
In the six thousand words of that strange conversation, they range all over the place, and pretty well dispense with the notion of pederasty as practiced among certain secondary characters in a sub-plot of Tom Bradley's new book, Lemur. But I find it interesting that they seem deliberately to ignore the largest presence on the pages--I refer to Spencer Sproul, the would-be serial killing protagonist--and the biggest theme: gayness itself. I mean among consenting adults, of course.
Before the reader is made aware of Spencer Sproul's erotic orientation--indeed, before even he himself becomes conscious of it--a sympathy has been established in our hearts. Affection for Spencer is sturdy enough to remain unshaken by any sexual revelations and the phobic reactions they might spur in all but the most reptilian subcortex. And the beauty is that the sympathy has been engendered in a most venerable manner: via the expedient of the Bildungsroman.
We have followed Spencer Sproul all the way to the top of his profession, from the bottom-most menial trench to the middle-managerial stratosphere. We have ascended with him to psychic wholeness, from deep in an unhealthy serial killer infatuation. This obsession is nonetheless unwholesome for its self-delusion: it would be hard to imagine someone with less of a killing knack than Spencer. His lack of self-awareness is even sicker than the collections of splatter shots which paper the walls in his "lair"--actually just a squalid duplex.
We have gone along with him as he rises to the rare level of individuation that permits real work to be performed, where creativity comes within one's reach. And the fact that his canvas is a crass family-style restaurant only adds piquancy, for he has clearly done what the Hindus have always considered the point of manifest existence: he has found out what his karmically determined Sadhana is, and has managed to arrange circumstances, both external and internal, so he can pursue that work which his inner nature predetermined for him at the moment of incarnation.
And, this being a classically structured comedy (even though a tragic chorus of bums sings in the dumpster out behind the restaurant), he comes to the point of being able to feel and express love. Spencer Sproul achieves the capacity for tenderness, which is signaled in the patting of a special pair of buttocks at the very end. His face, which in all the previous pagination has been distinguished only by its incapacity for expression, smiles patronizingly at his favorite employee, his "special-best bus boy," namely Spud.
Never has a love story been told so effectively in a less likely setting. Tom Bradley has pulled off an astonishing, hilarious feat here.
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Bizarro Satire in the form of a bad Anthony Hopkins impression by Jordan Krall (Noir Jersey, USA) 4 Stars
May 14, 2008
LEMUR is a bizarre journey into fast-food hell with a serial killer wannabe named Spencer.
First, I'll say that if you are looking for a weird, fast-paced satire with crazy "mental-patient" dialogue, you should buy this book.
When I started reading, LEMUR reminded me of one of those independent movies in which the main setting is banal (in this case, a fast food restaurant) but the characters talk in unrealistic and exaggerated ways. That's neither a positive nor a negative statement. However, usually when I start watching one of those movies, I turn it off.
Luckily, Tom Bradley's prose is so well-written, so smooth and clever that it overshadows any problem that I personally have with the dialogue. This book is in the Bizarro genre so it's not a shock that the characters speak in weird/funny/unrealistic ways. It isn't that Bradley can't write realistic dialogue but rather that he chose not to for the sake of this story. By the end of the book, however, the dialogue seemed less awkward and I was fully immersed in the story.
I fear that this is starting to sound like a bad review. It's not. Bradley is a talented writer who satirically explores many social issues in LEMUR. Consumerism, murder, corporations, communism, the food-service industry, bad Anthony Hopkins impressions. All are fodder for Bradley's sharp wit.
Bradley ventures into Vonnegut territory (though maybe not as deftly in the dialogue department). Overall, that's my impression of LEMUR: a more obscene version of a Vonnegut novel but with enough originality to not make it a rehash of old ideas. There are some laugh-out-loud parts in there, too.
Personally, as far as Bizarro fiction is concerned, I much prefer the style of Carlton Mellick III. However, that isn't meant as an insult to Bradley and his work. LEMUR will no doubt please most bizarro readers as well as those who have never read a "bizarro" book before.
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