Weird Monkeys

Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys is one fun weird book. Or maybe a weird fun book, because Ruff relates some truly looney things as matter-of-factly as crossing the street. Jane Charlotte is locked up in the Las Vegas jail's psychiatric ward and is explaining herself to a therapist.

Jane, you see, is an agent for the The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons, or folks who are sometimes called "bad monkeys." In short, she works for a group that picks out evil people and eliminates them. But in order to keep themselves secret, the Department often makes these eliminations seem like accidents or natural causes. The "Natural Causes Gun" helps her out on these missions, able to induce heart attacks, strokes or other instantly fatal catastrophic health failures.

Ruff spins a reader around more than almost anyone has since G.K. Chesterton played with the days of the week about a hundred years ago, and it's a credit to how cleverly he characterizes Jane that readers would want to stay with the story through his maze. His final whirligig is something of a disappointment, as much because it seems so ordinary and pedestrian compared with the whimsy of the rest of the book.

It's not a deal-breaker, though, and in any event it's much better for you to read about Bad Monkeys than to be one. The Department, after all, is watching...