An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil
Munroe’s first novel, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, paired his flair for describing the mating dances of nerds with some clever ass kicking: his cute pair of worker-bee lovers discovered they had superpowers and set out to mess with their overlords. It made a quiet but not shabby debut on HarperCollins in 1999, but Munroe, who’d wandered into fiction writing after publishing a zine for several years, never really got comfortable as “Cultural Production Employee XKJ93” in Rupert Murdoch’s vast multimedia empire. Instead, he used his agitprop Web site, NoMediaKings.org, to launch his own imprint and in 2000 released his second book, Angry Young Spaceman, in which an earth kid figures out how to enjoy transgressive interspecies nookie with a gelatinous beauty from an underwater planet.
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Munroe launched the work by giving thrifty readers the option of reading each entry for free online as it appeared on a fake blog (yup, roommatefromhell.com); the full text was available by the time the bound copy hit the market. New narrative tactics are always welcome, and I’m glad somebody’s running with this one, but I wish it weren’t Munroe. The diaristic writing, the warm and fuzzy feeling generated by “interactive” semicreative activities like blogging, and the subsequent temptation to navel gaze could only have hurt a writer like Munroe, who under the best of circumstances can barely achieve the scope he needs to keep his ideological agenda from getting on the reader’s tits. Lilith’s odd-couple romance with a guy who turns out to be a real-life angel is an interesting metaphysical conceit, but it isn’t enough to keep this tale afloat.
