The Death Rat Cometh
For most people who read this site all I should have to say is “Mike Nelson wrote a novel. Here’s the Amazon link. Go buy it.” and we’d be good.
But I’m going to choose to believe that there are people out there who aren’t as fanatical about people making fun of movies and back up just a little bit.
Michael J. Nelson was the head writer for Mystery Science Theater 3000 for nearly a decade, and was the host for five years. Now he’s the headliner for RiffTrax, and if you don’t know about RiffTrax, well, that’s a topic for another time. At any rate, this is a man who knows funny. To sum it up: Mike Nelson, a guy who lives in Minnesota, wrote a book about Pontius “Ponty” Feeb, a guy who lives in Minnesota and wrote a book. Both books are called Death Rat! (With the exclamation mark, thank you very much.)
Death Rat! (The real one that you can pick up and read) is a lot of things. The story line is frantic, but more or less begins when Ponty decides to write a fiction book instead of the humorously-named history books he’s been writing for decades. The problem is that no publisher is going to publish a good ol’ red-blooded adventure story with a dumpy ol’ guy like Ponty as the author, so he hires Jack Ryback, an out of work actor, to pretend he wrote the book and get the sale. Everything goes great until Jack tells a publisher it’s a non-fiction book, and it gets sold as a true story.
Incidentally, Death Rat! (The one Pontius Feeb wrote) is about a giant rat that stalked the small town of Holey, Minnesota, population: 46. The book takes off, and suddenly King Leo (who is surprisingly similar to The Artist Again Known as Prince in our world) is convinced that he must commune with the Holy Rat. But others are not so pleased. What follows is a giant, joyful pile of plots, counter plots, turkey hunting trips, middle-aged romance, Danish people dishing dirt about Finns and Swedes, Mayors rappelling out of gubernatorial mansions (okay, only one of these), middle-aged authors wearing fake moustaches and insisting that people call them “Earl”, and all the general zaniness that you’d expect from someone who is a self-avowed fan of the three stooges.
The characters in the book are either personifications of the typical Minnesota resident or caricatures of actual famous people from Minnesota. Jesse Ventura (the gubernatorial version) gets in, as does Garrison Keillor. But, unsurprisingly, it’s Prince’s Expy that steals the show. Every scene with King Leo in it is solid gold except for the scenes where he’s talking to the residents of Holey. Those are solid platinum dipped in pure, distilled magic.
And yet, underneath all the action and poking fun at how the typical Minnesota resident dresses, talks, and deals with oddness is someone who genuinely loves these people, and the book feels more like the gentle ribbing of a sibling than an actual attack. “Yes, these are all crazy people,” the book seems to say, “but they’re our crazy people.”
I don’t want to tell you too much more, because I don’t want to take away the fun of reading it all for yourself. So, to reiterate: Mike Nelson wrote a novel. Go buy it.
You have a limited amount of time, so why spend it reading about things that suck or are only kind of okay? Favorite thing EVER is not a review site. We're unrepentant fans, and this is the stuff we love. Hope you like gushing, because we're about to embarrass ourselves.
I read his book of movie reviews a few years ago and it was so funny that my face hurt from smiling. Woo Death Rat!
I have all three of his books (Death Rat!, Movie Megacheese and Mind Over Matters) and I have read them all to pieces. There’s a story in Mind Over Matters that still makes me fall out of my chair laughing whenever I read it.
How did I not know about this before now? Sounds great.
Read the first pages on Amazon. Brilliant stuff!