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Roo Kickkick & the Big Bad Blimp - Softcover

 
9780340828328: Roo Kickkick & the Big Bad Blimp
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Barguss may be just another tiny town somewhere to the west of middle America, but it's also the setting for an unexpected and bloody accident involving a runaway blimp that becomes so notorious that a Hollywood production company simply has to make a movie about it. How will the Bargussians respond to their sudden celebrity status? And what happens when it all goes horribly wrong?





'Roo Kickkick & the Big Bad Blimp' is by turns wildly funny and warmly affectionate. Peopled by characters such as Raoul de los Dios, Monroe Mister Promised To, Doctor Dinner and Florence Mink, not to mention our hero Roo Kickkick, this book is an utterly brilliant and unpredictable story of the boredom and comedy of small-town life, and the bizarre effect of its unexpected encounter with sudden fame.





Ryan is an exceptionally talented writer and this astoundingly original novel reveals his ability to blend the comic and the poignantly tragic to brilliant effect.

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Review:
Exuberant ... very funny ... Senseless and sensational, violent, silly and unashamedly trashy ... I highly recommend it (Independent)

Always zany, frequently surreal and occasionally veering towards magic realism ... Who could fail to delight in the likes of Doctor Dinner, an otherwise exemplary physician given to abandoned displays of foot fetishism? Intense madness (Time Out)

Full marks for panache, black humour and staying power (Guardian)

Bubblegum snappy with a nasty artificial sweetener aftertaste ... kinda quirky, kinda silly,


kinda cool

(Elle)

Pretty damn great .... plenty of unhinged panache (The List)

Always zany, frequently surreal ... Intense madness (Time Out)

Think South Park with a good dose of DBC Pierre thrown in and you'll get the picture (Tatler)
From the Author:
Let me just begin with a true story that’s fun for the whole family: when I was seventeen years old and a junior in high school in Colorado Springs, USA, a big teenager nicknamed Lump—tripping on acid in our student council class—swung his elbow into my nose at such an angle that it tore all the cartilage out of my nasal bone; in short, my nose was smacked right out of my skull. Technically, this was a break, even though what was left of my nose was curved onto my cheek at a right angle. The prom queen jumped over a row of desks and held up her hands as blood poured out of me like a faucet. Enveloped in a haze of shock, I found it somewhat funny that she tried to ‘catch’ my blood. Why would someone do that with liquid? Only later, when I was standing in front of a mirror, did I realize that she might have been trying to catch my loose nose. But then, the star running back dashed to the bathroom to get a King Kong-sized wad of toilet paper for me to stop the bleeding while the teacher/baseball coach screamed at me: "You better not have AIDS or something!" More than two hours later, a Swedish doctor was shoving a thick metal rod up my nose without proper anesthetic, bracing his muscular frame against a filing cabinet and pushing all his weight into the half-moon thing on the side of my cheek that used to be my nose. It cracked repeatedly and I bled more than I thought it was possible for a non-dying human to bleed. The nurse had placed a bib around my neck but my blood soaked that, then through my jacket, then my shirt before pooling at the waist of my trousers, strangely cold. The closed reduction surgery was unsuccessful. I was lucky though. My open reduction facial reconstructive surgery two days later went so well that I don’t have any recognizable scars, just slightly bent cartilage. But even today, eight years later, I can look in a mirror and remember how it felt to have the thought that part of my face would never be whole again. So really, the scar-faced character of Roo Kickkick reached fetal status back then, conceived in blood, 1996.

Truly, the book doesn’t deal in my real-life gore; it’s fiction (sorta). In fact, very little of it deals with violence, although there are violent incidents that shape the lives of the twin brother narrators. Speaking of brothers, my brother, Brandon, did all the illustrations for the book at my squealing behest. That's right, it has cool pictures! The novel is funny as well (or so I’m told) and also sad, in parts. I suppose it’s a dark-spotted comedy, really. In many ways, the fictional town of Barguss is not all that different from a certain section of my own hometown. More importantly, it’s got an incident with a blimp, a neighborhood restaurant called The Taco Coleslaw Hamburger Hot Dog Apple, a pseudo-famous electric/acoustic band named Autistik/Artistik, a Hollywood film crew re-enacting said blimp incident, and an on-stage prank pulled on ‘The King of Las Vegas’ Mr Wayne Newton, that shamelessly employs a comatose boy once-thought dead from an overdose. It has all that, and a tenacious villain known only as ‘The Scarlet Pimp, Arnell’. Oh yeah, and my editor says I'm supposed to tell you that it has heart, a big, BIG heart, and some kissing. Bon appétit!

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  • PublisherSceptre
  • Publication date2004
  • ISBN 10 0340828323
  • ISBN 13 9780340828328
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages256
  • Rating

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9780340828335: Roo Kickkick & the Big Bad Blimp

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ISBN 10:  0340828331 ISBN 13:  9780340828335
Publisher: Sceptre, 2004
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