The book: Cape Comedy
The author: Marc Weingarten
The genre: Humor/Crime/Murder Mystery. You know, funny deaths.
The verdict:
Cape Comedy is a self-contained psychiatric asylum wherein the under-medicated residents are somehow in charge. This book keeps the reader turning its pages to find an answer to the recurring question, “What the hell?”
Marc Weingarten creates a vivid world — one that starkly exposes the best and worst truths of the comedy industry, modern society and the human experience. He packs that world well beyond the fire marshal’s occupancy limit with mystery, murder and moral depravity, and then napalms the hell out of it with humor ranging from “punchline” to “read-between-the-lines.” Finally, he drops your squeamish ass right into the mix and forces you to fend for yourself.
On a technical level, the story never stops peeling back layers. Each character is rich with his or her own unique shades of humanity and, ultimately, that’s what drives the plot of this story forward. You’ll shift uncomfortably in your seat more than a few times as you read Cape, not only because of what goes down in Juarez, but also at your own cognitive dissonance; you’ll find yourself cheering for one character one minute and then begging for that same character to get into a much-deserved fender bender with the Angel of Death the next (and vice versa).
This is the book that, if he were still alive today (and were far more depraved, unstable and generally terrible, like, on a human level), Tolstoy would’ve read. Or maybe even written. Then again, he’d be 186 years old and, really, who has the energy to write something like this?
Fortunately, Weingarten did.
You can buy Cape Comedy here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JRGJJJQ