I first encountered Matt Ruff on Usenet, as a poster on rec.arts.sf.written. When I found out he had books published, I picked up Sewer, Gas, and Electric, which was good enough to put him on the buy-immediately list. Of course, that hasn’t cost me a great deal of money, as he’s only written two books since then, Set This House in Order back in 2003, and the new Bad Monkeys, which I bought and read on the way to St. John.
Bad Monkeys is the story of Jane Charlotte, a woman who is in prison for a murder that she cheerfully admits committing, who has a remarkable story to tell. She claims to be a member of a super-secret organization, part of a division known as “Bad Monkeys,” charged with disposing of irredeemable persons. In a series of interviews with a prison psychiatrist, she spins out a bizarre tale of muder and mayhem spanning decades, which may or may not be real.
The story alternates between chapters that described her interviews with the psychiatrist, and chapters in which Jane tells her own story. It’s not a complete split– there are occasional interjections from the shrink during her story, but that’s the basic structure: Jane tells the story of some strange events, and then there’s a chapter in which her interviewer confronts her with the facts, which mostly match her story, but are off in some of the details.
The question is, is her story real, or is it a delusion?
In an essay at Powell’s, Ruff describes this as his Phillip K. Dick novel, and that’s a good description. Reality is sort of fluid in Jane’s world, with the organization she serves having strange and remarkable powers. As the story goes on, things get stranger and stranger, eventually introducing a counter-organization known as the Troop (whose symbol is a scary mandrill, rather like the one on the cover of the book), a group known as the Scary Clowns, and some really amazing drugs.
Like Dick at his best, Ruff does a wonderful job setting up an atmosphere in which paranoid schizophrenia seems like a perfectly rational response to the world, and Jane’s training and early missions are related with a great deal of panache. Also like Dick, the book comes off the rails a little toward the end (the climactic showdown in Las Vegas is a little over the top, and there’s maybe one big reveal too many), but getting there is so much fun that I’m willing to forgive the shaky aspects of the ending.
Really, the only major complaint I have with this book is in the packaging– it’s taller and narrower than a typical book, and has relatively soft covers and rounded pages. It’s very distinctive, but it’s also kind of awkward to read.
Those quibbles aside, though, this is a fun book. Ruff has written a charming-killer story that ranks right up there with Bradley Denton’s Blackburn, with an extra twist of unreality. It’ll keep you reading and guessing right up to the end.