Selfies Part Two

I’m talkin’ about self published books. I just KNEW they couldn’t all be heavily flawed, get-me-an-editor-who-wants-serious-OT-STAT tales. 

I’m now two for two in the self published book racket. On the good side, there was Kevin Tudish’s health, happiness, LOVE, longevity, peace, prosperity, SAFETY  and now David Bowen’s Hell On Earth.

I’m only halfway though chapter four and am totally  enjoying the fuck out of it.

What’s it about/
 In part:

When staunch trade unionist Reg Hallsworth gets relocated to Hell few can imagine the trouble it will cause. Certainly not Death Third Class number 221 of the Human Transition Department, who hides him there to cover up his own clerical error.

So, Hell’s on strike and there's a long queue of sinners—what to do, what to do?!

With a disaster of biblical proportions just around the corner it is up to these unlikely heroes to save the day and find a suitable location to build a new Hell... on Earth. (source)

Where’s a suitable Hell on Earth? Florida but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

09.32 Death had had a lie in. It’d been a late night, playing poker with the boys. The boys, in this case, were the Four Horsemen of Everyday Life, lower profile than their Apocalypse counterparts, but still very important in the regulations of the human population. They were Casual Violence (a lot more sensitive than the name implied and generally quite a nice guy), Suicide (the joker of the pack, he always had a good story to tell about work), Negligence (the Romeo of the group and also the outright winner of last night’s game, he cheated both with women and cards) and Accidental Misadventure (his friend usually referred to him by his nickname: Oops) He was in charge of accidents and always brought his work home with him.

Coco wants me to drop the book and
 pay more attention to her NOW!

Yes, the book’s highly irreverent. Not for everyone but's def for me.

Unlike D.M. Guay's unedited and wildly inconsistent Graveyard Shift and that forgettable other one (whose author and title I no longer remember), both of which went into the recycling bin, this one’s a keeper. I’ll probably pick up his second book, The Eleventh Plague. Seems timely, no?

My only wee quibbles with Hell On Earth are the occasional awkward word and ellipsis spacing (in order to achieve hard left to right justification) plus the double space after a period. These all seem intermittent and piddling, not egregiously distracting.

Is Bowen an, as yet, undiscovered Scalzi?