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BAD MONKEYS
Matt Ruff
HarperCollins
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0061240419
ISBN-13: 9780061240416
Hang on to your hats. BAD MONKEYS by Matt Ruff is an occasionally funny, often
baffling and always entertaining romp that will have you questioning everything
you know to be true. Faintly reminiscent of some of Philip K. Dick’s earlier
work from a topical if not stylistic standpoint, it provides the answers to those
questions that come to you unbidden when you wake from a sound sleep in the middle
of the night and start thinking just a bit more than might be mentally healthy
for you.
BAD MONKEYS is primarily a narration that takes place in the Las Vegas County
Jail between a prisoner named Jane Charlotte and county psychiatrist Dr. Richard
Vale. Charlotte, who has been arrested for murder, is being evaluated because
she advised the arresting officers that she was a member of a division of an evil-fighting
(as opposed to crime-fighting) organization. Charlotte’s division is officially
known as “The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons,”
or, as they are nicknamed, “Bad Monkeys.” Dr. Vale’s job is
to determine if Charlotte is lying, crazy, or something else.
Charlotte’s narrative is so compelling and detailed down to the last nuance
that it’s difficult to doubt her. She tells a tale about her being recruited
into The Organization after her birth mother abandons her and is somehow given
a pass on every test of her initiation, even as she fails miserably at each. Her
final assignment may or may not be her ultimate test, and she may or may not be
sane. Nothing is as it seems, even those “truths” that Charlotte holds
to be basic to the history of her life. Vale is an interesting and effective foil
to Charlotte, researching her allegations and finding them to be false for the
most part. But are they?
The deeper one gets into the book, the more one wonders about the line (if such
exists) that separates illusion from reality, the line that is always there as
opposed to the line that we construct out of whole cloth.
BAD MONKEYS is unsettling. If you’re cracking up while reading the book,
you will find that your laughter becomes increasingly more nervous as you proceed
through it. And Ruff’s vision is remarkably clear for a tale in which the
horizon point is so hazy. If you feel like your hold on your own sanity is somewhat
tenuous, then BAD MONKEYS may be the lotion that frees it altogether.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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