Dead Funny: Tom Holt

I've been searching for modern fiction that is the perfect escape into fantasy for over a decade, but I always go back to my old favorites like Kafka or Tolstoy. Tom Holt is on par with the great authors of history. He takes subjects of complete impossibility and makes them seem feasible. If you want to exercise your imagination while having a good laugh, this book is for you.

I'm glad to see thse two books back in print, even if they're now printed in one book. (UK readers may see the same two books collected as "Dead Funny," with a different cover but the same ISBN.) They're two of Holt's best, dating back to the early 1990s. In the first half, "Flying Dutch," Holt traces Cornelius Vandervecker from the fifteen-hundreds on, sailing forever across the loneliest wastes of the seven seas. Yes, Cornelius is the Flying Dutchman. No, he's no myth. And no, he's not exactly cursed - well, not as such. It's more of a blessing, really, if you allow blessings of the mixed sort. There was an incident involving an alchemist, a hasty retreat from a suddenly-unfriendly shore, and an untested elixir of eternal life. And alcohol, lots of alochol. (Well, everything around Vandervecker seems to involve alcohol.) That elixir just happened to work, but has a teeny little side effect - a personal pong that would knock a buzzard off a dungwagon. On the whole, it's a good idea to put a few thousand miles between the crew and anyone with a normal sense of smell. There's that alchemist, though, who's still trying to fix that little problem. There's also Danny Bennett, an enthusiastic journalist with a nose for news, and whatever else it is that surrounds the Flying Dutchman. And there's also this little matter of Vandervecker's long-term investments - I mean, very long term, with compound interest. The second half reprints "Faust Among Equals." In it, the Devil's lien against Faust's soul resulted in repossession long since. But the Devil has moved on, and a new consortium is handling the business. They're the modern devils - they're demonic management consultants, bean-counters who've mastered accursed accounting, and lawyers. No, no special kind of lawyer, just the usual. During the management reorg, Faust escapes. He and Helen of Troy have settled down to shear-it-yourself sheep farm in Australia, with only occasional disruptions of the world's technological infrastrucutre. This one blemish on their otherwise spotless record isn't good for hell'snew corporate image, so they take on a bounty hunter ("acquisition consultant") to wipe out that blemish. Or to wipe out Faust, they don't much care. He does, though, and the chase is on. Both of these are Holt at his best, with chases across continents, across centuries, and sometimes across planes of being. His characters are caricatures, living exaggerations of painfully familiar people. They're great good fun. //wiredweird