The Good Humor Man
Or, Calorie 3501
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this satiric romp inspired by Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, set in 2041, government-sanctioned vigilantes—the Good Humor Men—ruthlessly patrol the streets, immolating all fattening food products as illegal contraband. A pound of real chocolate is worth more on the black market than a kilo of cocaine. Evil "nutraceutical" company MannaSantos controls the food market with genetically modified products, such as "Leanie Lean" meats. But the craze for svelte healthfulness has reached a critical turning point, as a mysterious wasting plague threatens to starve all of humanity.
A lone ex-plastic surgeon and founding Good Humor Man, whose father performed a secret liposuction surgery on Elvis Presley, holds the key to humanity's future. In a mad dash to retrieve his family heirloom—the mortal remains of the King's belly fat—Dr. Louis Shmalzberg becomes entangled with a civil servant of questionable motives, an acquisitive assassin from a wealthy Caliphate, a power-mad preacher evangelizing anorexia, a beautiful young woman addicted to liposuction, and a homicidal clone from a MannaSantos experiment gone terribly wrong.
Can Elvis save the world sixty-four years after his death?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fox (Fat White Vampire Blues) pens a half-baked riff on Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 that imagines a near-future America where the government brutally enforces dietary laws through vigilante squads in repossessed ice cream trucks. When a raid on contraband cheese turns deadly, middle-aged Good Humor man Louis Shmalzberg, a former liposuction surgeon, predictably begins to question his vocation. When a pair of mysterious men demand that Louis turn over a vacuum jar of fat and stomach fluid removed during the botched lipo operation Louis's father performed on Elvis, Louis embarks on a contrived chase across the country, incidentally investigating a corporate conspiracy that's fast becoming a national health crisis. Fox's pseudosatirical premise could work as farce, but endless expository conversations and lifeless characters (including some eyebrow-raising racial stereotypes) make this contrived yarn unconvincing.
