Alone and Unobserved

Martin Millar is the funniest author you may never have heard of. I just finished Lonely Werewolf Girl and am halfway through The Good Fairies of New York, the only two of his books (currently) owned by my library, and I am plotting to get my hands on his earlier works through the magic of Interlibrary Loan.

From Neil Gaiman’s introduction to The Good Fairies of New York:

Millar writes like Kurt Vonnegut might have written, if he’d been born fifty years later in a different country and hung around with entirely the wrong sort of people. . . . The Good Fairies of New York is a story that starts when Morag and Heather, two eighteen-inch fairies with swords and green kilts and badly-dyed hair fly through the window of the worst violinist in New York, an overweight and antisocial type named Dinnie, and vomit on his carpet. Who they are, and how they came to New York, and what this has to do with the lovely Kerry, who lives across the street, and who has Crohn’s Disease and is making a flower alphabet, and what this as to do with the other fairies (of all nationalities) of New York, not to mention the poor repressed fairies of Britain, is the subject of this book. It has a war in it, and a most unusual production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Johnny Thunders’ New York Dolls guitar solos. What more could anyone desire from a book?

Lonely Werewolf Girl, on the other hand, is about a dysfunctional and murderous clan of Scottish werewolves struggling to remain relevant in a modern Britain filled with cable television, haute couture, thrash metal, army boots and T-shirts. It features: a fashion-obsessed Fire Queen; a deadly knife; a band named Yum Yum Sugary Snacks; a seventeen-year-old laudanum junkie werewolf; and a young human woman named Moonglow. It also features several deadly werewolf battles and a great deal of fine Scottish whiskey.

Both books are hilarious, brilliant, inventive and highly recommended.

P.S. The sweet potato fries last night were fabulous. I ended up roasting them for about 20 minutes in a 350-degree oven with some broccoli florets. Yummy.