Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way (2005)

     Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way (2005) marks Bruce Campbell's first venture into humorous fiction (his first book being a memoir on how a guy from Michigan ended up a B-Movie icon with not a lot of extra money to show for it).  Knowing that Campbell's humor runs not just towards the lowbrow but to the most repetitive slapstick the Three Stooges ever performed, I didn't have high expectations for this.  Sure, Campbell is a literate guy – he has at least been reading scripts in all that time as an actor and director – but I did not expect him to be able to build a compelling narrative without dedicating some serious time to honing this new craft.
     In fact, there is not really much of a plot to Make Love!; it really is composed around a handful of recurring ideas.  Rather than tell the story in a conventional manner, Campbell intersperses his supposedly focal idea – he has been cast as the third major character in an A-list Hollywood movie (filming in New York) – with sketches that really have nothing to do with the story except to show how wacky Campbell's fake life is.  These asides (for the most part) end up being better than the story about Campbell destroying Mike Nichols' movie. 
     The best part of the book – sorry, Bruce – are the worked-up photos and gag visuals.  These were what led me to laugh out loud repeatedly.  Not so much for Campbell being inserted into numerous alternate personae but the fake signs and such.  So much better than the disasters that came out from Jon Stewart (and The Daily Show writers) that one has to wonder if Campbell and Craig "Kif" Sanborn have struck a rare kind of comic gold by working together.
     The only part of the book that I actively didn't like was when Campbell confused Dungeons & Dragons with hide and go seek.  For a guy who has appeared at numerous gaming conventions (and game fairs), and who would be age appropriate for AD&D's heyday, this was a real letdown.  I was also surprised that in his acknowledgements Campbell didn't thank (or even acknowledge) Richard Gere, Renée Zellweger, or Mike Nichols; if one is going to use real people in ficticious situations – like having Gere happily cheat on his wife – that person should probably give them some mention or thanks.
    I don't know that anyone who isn't a fan of Campbell-the-actor who would ever find reason to read this, but it isn't bad.  It just isn't very mature.  Maybe that is part of Campbell's charm, that he can be fake smarmy while retaining his innocent immaturity.  It works, for the most part, here.

A Murder, A Mystery, and a Marriage (1876*)

     There are those who have a deep and abiding love of Mark Twain as a hateful, mean-spirited critic of humanity.  I am not one of them.  I did not have much familiarity with Twain before embarking on the Reading Projects – I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1976) in the 5th grade and a handful of his essays before reading 11 short stories and two novels (this includes re-reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) – outside of his quips on American politics popping up in various TV shows and documentaries I had seen.  I have more affection for the Twain who didn't hate humanity than the one who has been canonized as the patron saint of curmudgeons.  (When I get more familiar with H.L. Mencken, I can reassess which one really deserves the title.)
     The best part about A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage (written in 1876 but not published until 2001) is not the bare bones story that Twain wrote.  It is passable, easily recognizable as Twain but caught somewhere in between the hope and promise of his earlier works and the nastiness that would come to characterize his more mature works.  But Peter de Sère's artwork does much to soften the darker impulses Twain had a mind to impart to his story, helping keep the experience light and the story fun.  Until the end (more on that later).  No, the best part about the book is the short history of Twain and 1876 provided by Roy Blount, Jr. – how Twain's writing forever changed after the election of Rutherford B. Hayes (and the resulting corrupt administration).
     I am sure that anyone who has bothered to do any research on Twain is well aware that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was written in two sections, with an eight year break between them.  In my mind, this time accounts for the break from the well-written, worthwhile, deeply affecting first third (maybe a little longer) of the book – the part of the book that warrants consideration amongst the best American novels ever written – and the hateful, bitter, let's forget that Tom Sawyer was a kickass character and make him a spoiled dick who wants to abuse a slave for sport majority of the book that starts when the Duke and the King hop aboard the raft.  Anyway, I was not aware that there was a large break, nor that the style difference is one that is easy to trace as Twain's opinion of his country is transformed in the wake of 1876.  Blount does a great job of condensing the history of Twain while keeping it very interesting.
     As for the actual story, it really is a 'skeleton of a novel' more than a novella or short story.  It also, unfortunately, works towards an unprovoked attack on Jules Verne (Twain and Blount both mistake Verne as the father of Science Fiction and of balloon tales).  There is not enough meat to the story for it to merit its own book except that it wasn't allowed to be published for...well, almost forever.  But I am more enthusiastic about the background material on the story – Twain's effort to get multiple writers to write different versions of the same concept of a story – and the man than what ends up being his polemic against Verne.

The Sword of Samurai Cat (1991)

     Well, it seems that most of Mark E. Rogers' Samurai Cat books are out of print.  Maybe that is as it should be.  The best part of the humorous tales of Miaowara Tomokato and his gun-toting pint-sized nephew, Shiro, were always the illustrations.  By the time 1991's The Sword of Samurai Cat came along, Rogers was trying his hand at telling the stories with a minimum of pictures (or at least the version I read was).  All that did was show just how unpleasant his attacks on others for not being creative were (especially given that his entire stock and trade was in satirical parodies of other properties, history, and/or myths and legends).
     The way I view it, The Sword of Samurai Cat consists of five connected short stories – all but the first like a half-novella – that do the disservice of having the entire thing be both part of the ongoing absurdist story and part of a shared dream spanning planets.  I'm not sure what bothered me the most – "Red Dawn of the Dead" with its pointlessness, "The Dead Lot" with its constant attack on Stephen King (I'm not a fan, but I certainly don't rank him as one of the most derivative authors of all time) while trying to make a case for Lovecraftian horror (excuse me while I yawn), or how poorly punny names translate when making endless appearances on the page.  It goes from not quite clever to maddening as the non-words stand in for real words in a mildly humorous way (at first).
     There is really only one good story in the collection, "Invasion of the Kitty Snatchers".  Actually, it is a better take on the well-told story of space plants that replace people.  Better than The Invasion (2008), by every measure.  Unfortunately, Rogers is too long in getting to a decent story.  He also feels the need to reference himself as the author, a way before Community (2009-present) omnipresent level of meta-referencing, but almost always just to point out his failings as an author.  Here's a note, Mark: if you know the story needs work, fix it – don't just bitch that others have failed in the same manner.
     The first two Samurai Cat books are, at least as I remember them, more friendly and more appreciative of the sources being spoofed.  It doesn't feel that way by this, the fourth book (the third book is not available via my library system and lists on Amazon.com at over $100).  It may be for some, but The Sword of Samurai Cat did not suit my tastes.  Stick to the The Adventures of Samurai Cat (1984) and More Adventures of Samurai Cat (1986).