Book Review: OLD SCHOOL EVIL by Brian Cave
OLD SCHOOL EVIL by Brian Cave is a sort of Venture Brothers-esque black comedy that I absolutely enjoyed. The book is a loving homage to Saturday Morning cartoons from the Eighties and early Nineties but twisted into a parody that also gives surprisingly poignant comedy about aging as well as legacy. It's a bit crass, bizarre, and stream of consciousness at times but that's what makes indie books enjoyable.
The premise is that Jayce a young man that has killed his foster parents after discovering he was a werewolf. Possibly the only werewolf on Earth. This leads to him being contacted by his father, Max Malice, who reveals an entire hidden world. In the Eighties, it turned out that the world was frequently menaced by mad scientists and goofy terrorists that fought against small teams of superheroes. All of this stopped by 9/11 and the surviving supervillains were rounded up and stuffed in Hidden Brook, a retirement home that serves as a luxury prison.
When I say this is black humor, I am not kidding. The essential absurdity of a bunch of violent narcissistic sociopaths locked up in a retirement home doesn't disguise the fact they're all murderers as well as objectively terrible parents. The perspective of their children is also a mixture of the strange with the more mundane abuse. One of the teenagers has been cursed with a magic gun that carries the spirit of a Wild West outlaw. Cool, huh? Except, no, because he grew up impoverished and is horrified to discover that his dad was a career criminal.
There's a certain melancholy to the fact that the surreal cartoonish world of the past has been replaced with the dreary banality of the present. In some ways, this is similar to Mark Miller's WANTED, with the premise that the supervillains have rewritten reality to become their paradise. However, in this case, it is the US government and its banal bureaucracy that has replaced a stylized world with a mundane one. They've also erased all the memories of the more flamboyant characters that once fought epic battles of good versus evil.
If you are a big fan of Saturday Morning Cartoons or at least know who the Ninja Turtles are, you'll probably enjoy this but if you really like the old cartoons and can recognize what Dinosaucers were then you'll probably love it. The book relentlessly attacks the premise of small groups of heroes versus overpowered mad scientists and terrorists but in an affectionate Robot Chicken sort of way. These neurotic superpowered weirdos are miserable but in a thoroughly relatable way. We all fear aging and irrelevance for example.
In conclusion, this is a fun book, and I enjoyed it. It has some slow bits and I think it would have benefited from some more recognizable EXPYs of Skeletor and Cobra Commander, but it was a lot of fun as is. There’s also a surprising amount of humanity be found here. Overall, I recommend if you like superhero satires then this is a book for you.
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