Description
Book Synopsis'A raucous, hilarious book . . . deadly funny.' Chicago Magazine
Script idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiancée of the main character, who has to find a way to a remote planet to save her. Title: Love Trek.
Script idea #185: Teenager discovers his girlfriend's beloved grandfather was a guard in a Nazi death camp. The boy's grandparents are survivors, but he's tantalizingly close to achieving deflowerment, so when a Nazi-hunter arrives in town in pursuit of Grandpa, he has to distract him long enough to get laid. A riotous Holocaust comedy. Title: The Righteous Love.
Script idea #196: Rock star high out of his mind freaks out during a show, runs offstage, and is lost in streets crowded with his hallucinations. The teenage fan who finds him keeps the rock star for himself for the night. Mishaps and adventures follow. This one could be a musical: Singin' in the Brain.
Josh Lev
Trade Review
Aleksandar Hemon is a gifted crafter of sentences . . . a rambunctious farce that includes zombies, a lot of slapstick, comedic violence, allusions to the Bible and Spinoza, and a climactic showdown involving a stoned Desert Storm veteran and a samurai sword . . . brilliant * Guardian *
Dreadfully, wrigglingly, antisocially funny . . . Hemon's work often crackles with humour, but it's never been this uproarious. * Spectator *
What soon becomes clear is that the jokes in Hemon's novel are not just jokes, but about something larger, whether political, philosophical, or moral. Like all the best comedy, the novel makes it impossible not to sense the melancholy beneath the sullenness and absurdity . . . A troubling, mysterious, lyrical elegy to the world in which the living struggle to maintain their fragile truce with the undead. * New York Review of Books *
Exhilaratingly astute. * Sunday Times *
What is exceptionally impressive about this novel is the deft control of different registers. It is like watching someone juggle with Sabatier knives. While wisecracking . . . Caustic and tender, enraged and forgiving, giggly and plaintive. * Scotland on Sunday *
It's not every day you read a novel that moves effortlessly between references to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, eruptions of the crazed undead, a po-faced TV image of George Bush, sidewinding literary references . . . The Making of Zombie Wars, the new novel from the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon, doesn't so much move as whizz the reader from the heights of creative whimsy to the depths of human tragedy - and back again - with barely time to draw breath. * Irish Times *
The Making of Zombie Wars doesn't have much to do with the undead, but it's a comic novel with BRAAAINS. That intellectual heft is to be expected . . . But Hemon is also a master at camouflaging the deeper elements of this novel amid its tomfoolery. * Washington Post *
Brutal but darkly hilarious . . . Hemon has always had a gift for humor, but he's never written anything as raucously funny and surreal as this . . . Endlessly entertaining . . . The Making of Zombie Wars is crazy in the best sense of the word, and very few authors could have pulled it off. * NPR *
Spinozan philosophy meets screwball comedy in this eccentric, subtly experimental novel by Hemon. * Publishers Weekly *
A fast-paced, darkly comic tale set in Chicago . . . ends with a transmutational flourish that is deeply and comically satisfying. * Chicago Tribune *
