As far as reading goes, I’ve been having a hard time with books that aren’t complete shit this year, the worst of it is, because of my RULES on having to finish books that I start I’m way behind on my minimum quota, I’m not going to even come close, unless I cheat and read a bunch of super short books. If they are good I guess it doesn’t really matter. Other than The Joy of Living – Unlocking the Secret of Happiness by, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, which I read so my psychiatrist and I could have a sort of book club therapy session on it and it turned out to be fantastic I highly recommend it. But it wasn’t a fun, easy, fancy free read. In most places it was pretty slow and took longer to read than I’d have liked. Learning to meditate and trying to meditate may cause actual meditation slowing down the reading process considerably. This meant I had to read things back over constantly.
I put out a call on Twitter, to the effect of “someone please send me something that doesn’t suck to read, this is getting ridiculous”. Ian from @atomicfez who I have met only once but made an impression and we chat on the Twitter, sent me an eBook copy of a book he’d published called The Terror and the Tortoiseshell, A Benji Spriteman Mystery by John Travis. He basically told me it was something about cats, Ian knows I like cats, an extra piece of thoughtfulness there I thought. I finished the piece of trash I was currently crawling through and with some skepticism set out to read the new book; I’m extremely picky with what I will read when it comes to fiction Mystery novels.
Benji the cat asleep on his owners legs awakens to screams, which turn out to be animals murdering humans, The Terror has started. He suddenly finds himself to be of human size and able to stand on and walk with his back paws. This has happened to the rest of the animals as well, lions, tigers, bears, dogs, with no explanation for what caused The Terror. There is also no explanation for the odd cat or dog found still living as if it were the good old days, unable to talk and just a pet. The animals fill the zoo with the last of the humans found on the streets, most finding themselves cast out of their previous homes. They are now called Humes or Sappies, barely seen for fear of being viciously slain. Even new organizations like The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Humans [SPCH] can’t stop the madness or heinous murders. Benji Spriteman takes on the roll of his old owner Jimmy, this has become commonplace for a lot of animals, if they don’t take over their jobs they still take on many defining characteristics. Benji, now a detective, sets out to solve the hume murders.
When you first start to read The Terror and the Tortoiseshell, the talking animals and their take over will cause anyone who has also read Animal Farm to try and draw comparisons. It doesn’t take long to realize you are reading a better story and one with very few similarities. I found the ninety-five page Animal Farm tedious, it felt like it took me as long to read as the just over three hundred page Travis novel did. It may be hard to imagine that a book with the word terror in the title could be funny, but you’d be wrong, from Rats taking over the newspaper and publishing it with no sentence structure, grammar or spell checking, to a restaurant that serves nothing but human dishes, there are surprises around every corner and just when you think there is nowhere for the story to go other than to be solved but you still have one hundred pages to go, Benji and his buddies will cough up even more hair balls to chase after.
Animals behaving like animals but on two paws instead of four towering over humans, feeding on humans because The Terror has happened, turned out to be just as dark as it was fun and hilarious. The writing is witty and intelligent, I was able to lose myself into the absurdity of it all while not feeling like the message of the book was being pushed in my face. I would definitely recommend it and thank my buddy Ian for giving me the eBook copy, about time I read a good book this year.
