Tuesday night I attended the choral concert at my daughter’s middle school. Stylistically speaking choral arrangements of 20-30 year old popular songs and show-tunes are not my cup of tea. Before the concert I began, at long last, reading Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys and am now about a 1/3 of the way into the book. “Bad Monkeys” we discover is the short-hand phrase for the place on the org chart of the secret “evil fighting” society of which Thiour main character was(is?) a member.

  • The Department for Optimal Utilization of Resources and Personnel — Cost-Benefits
  • The Department of Ubiquitous Intermittent Surveillance  — Panopticon
  • The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons — Bad Monkeys. Bad Monkey’s are the “assassins” who remove from circulation people who are, well, irredeemable. A common weapon used is an NC gun, NC stands for “Natural Causes,” this gun works at short range and has two settings, MI and CI which stand for myocardial and cerebral Infarction respectively.
  • The Department of Organizational Counterintelligence — Catering

Our narrator is a young girl who is being interviewed by a doctor in a criminal psychiatric ward. She is recounting how she became a Bad Monkey and some of her exploits. Anyhow, judging from the cover the rest of the story is going to have its share of twists, turns and weirdness.

Related posts:

  1. And Her Army of Flying Monkeys
  2. An Ethics Question
  3. It’s Official; Pedophilia Will Now Be Mainstreamed [Updated]
  4. Super Tuesday Results
  5. President Obama Overexposed?

Filed under: Book Reviews • Books • Mark O.

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