Bad Monkeys

Many years ago I stumbled upon a book called Fool on the Hill, by Matt Ruff. It was an amazing work--a hybrid of a college novel (set at the very real Cornell University) and a fantasy, with evil gnomes that lived in a cemetery. The novel has become something of a cult classic, and it was written by Ruff as his senior thesis while he was at Cornell.

That was twenty years ago. Ruff has written only a few books since then, and Bad Monkeys is the first that I've read. It's an odd concoction, an accomplished thriller that reads as if sprung from the imagination of a fourteen-year-old boy.

The book is presented as a jailhouse interview. Jane Charlotte has been apprehended for murder. She is being interviewed by a psychiatrist, who is evaluating her mental competence. She begins at the beginning, telling him about her childhood, when her mother gave her to relatives because she thought she was evil, and her aimless adult life.

Then she is recruited by a secret organization that assassinates evil-doers. Usually they do this with an "NC" gun, which can give someone a heart attack or a cerebral hemorrhage (the NC stands for "natural causes"). The organization calls themselves "Bad Monkeys," because that's who they're doing away with. There are splinter organizations, one of them known as the "Scary Clowns," who operate in Las Vegas, appropriately.

All of this seems like the fantasy of a teenage boy, given that there are secret codes, cool technology (the organization keeps tabs on everyone through spying mechanisms that are embedded in the eyes of paintings, statues, etc.--even the eye of the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill) and the kind of hierarchy that imaginative youths have created in their spiral notebooks for the last half century. The topper is that the secret agent in question is a female, although she isn't her appearance isn't described, but she did go through a phase where she seduced teen-aged boys.

As I read this fantasy, I was waiting for the twist that would make it all seem right--that the entire thing was the figment of her imagination, or something similar. I did get a twist, but I didn't anticipate it. I'm not quite sure how the book ended, but it's suspenseful, including a Matrix-like battle across the casino at The Venetian hotel.

Bad Monkeys is the kind of book that's perfect for a long plane ride for those who are into adolescent mystery/thrillers like the Hardy Boys, but would be too embarrassed to actually dip into those tomes from their childhoods.