The Ballad of TERROR TINY TIM & Other Tales of Unkindness – Douglas Hackle

“It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you
There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never had.” 

I can sympathize with Ebenezer Zebenezer…..I’d get tired of listening to this, too, if it was all I was listening to, especially in a college class! AULD SKULL is just one tale in this wonderfully weird and entertaining collection by Douglas Hackle. This was my second work of his, and I can quite happily say that it was just as wild and off-the-wall as my first of his!

One thing that did really bother me was the somewhat liberal use of a certain “r” word. It’s not a word that I ever say, and I don’t enjoy seeing it in anything I’m reading. I can make a grudging exception if it’s a period piece type of thing, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. There were also a few continuity and spelling things that stood out a bit, seemingly unintentionally.

I also thought that some of the jokes got a little tedious as the stories went on. If the book was one whole story, I wouldn’t mind the recycling of jokes and references, but in a collection of different stories presumably set in somewhat different worlds, some of them got to be a little over-used.

I am a big bizarro fan, though, and this was a great palette cleanser from the heavier books I’ve been reading. I can always count on Hackle to simultaneously give me a good laugh and make me stare at the book and think, “WTF??”!