Having booklogged two heavy and confusing books already today, let’s throw in something light. A. Lee Martinez’s debut novel Gil’s All Fright Diner is a comic fantasy featuring a couple of redneck-y guys named Duke and Earl, who stop by a diner in rural Texas for a quick bite to eat. Of course, Duke is a werewolf and Earl is a vampire, and when the diner gets attacked by a horde of zombies, they find themselves caught up in some odd and supernatural events.
There’s really not a lot to say about the book other than that. If the idea of white-trash undead battling zombies to prevent Lovecraftian creeping horrors from overwhelming a Texas diner sounds amusing to you, well, it is. It’s not especially zany, but it’s plenty entertaining. If the concept doesn’t appeal to you, the execution doesn’t do anything special that would make it work in spite of that.
I took this book with me on the day I was scheduled to undergo a medical test that required me to lie on my back in an imaging machine for about three hours, while they took occasional pictures of my stomach. It was pretty much ideal for those purposes– amusing enough to provide a diversion from the unpleasant circumstances, but not so high quality that I would’ve felt bad about reading it in such a sub-optimal condition.
And that’s pretty much that.