A Bad Day for Voodoo by Jeff Strand + Author Guest Post: Moonlight Gleam's Bookshelf

When your best friend is just a tiny bit psychotic, you should never actually believe him when he says, "Trust me. This is gonna be awesome."

Of course, you probably wouldn't believe a voodoo doll could work either. Or that it could cause someone's leg to blow clean off with one quick prick. But I've seen it. It can happen.

And when there's suddenly a doll of YOU floating around out there—a doll that could be snatched by a Rottweiler and torn to shreds, or a gang of thugs ready to torch it, or any random family of cannibals (really, do you need the danger here spelled out for you?)—well, you know that's just gonna be a really bad day ...

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My Thoughts/Review:

Bwahaha!! This book is hilarious. Most of the characters were only two-dimensional, but the sarcasm definitely (probably) makes up for it. Because the characters were so one-sided, it was really very odd, because of the amount of I spent laughing over the stupid things that were happening, or the extremely weird things that just popped up out of nowhere.

Basically, how can a book that starts out with an extremely hilarious FAQ, and has a page in the middle that says  "INTERMISSION. Go read The Hunger Games again." not be hilarious? That is funny, you have to admit! Especially since a lot in my life has been centered on the Hunger Games lately. My best friend just now read it, and I have the movie, so we watched it, and let's just say that a lot of inside jokes were involved. ;)

To be honest though, it's really hard to review humor books. They're just too humorous. The characters are usually only two-dimensional, because every part of the book is always entirely focused on the humor. I don't know if this annoys me, or makes me want to laugh really hard, like a maniac.

Probably the second one. To one point, the characters were slightly more fleshed out than Shakespeare Shapiro, but to another point, they really weren't , because the context that the book was written in. I don't know if that made sense, but maybe you get what I mean. (But, to be honest, I'm really not sure what I mean.)

So, all in all, it was entertaining, and it kept me in stitches on the floor, but characters are a big issue with me.
How can characters be fleshed out while in a humor book? First person to write a book that's humor, with all the characters being very fleshy and real, gets my vote.

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*Guest Post by Jeff Strand*

Author of a bunch of demented books, including GRAVEROBBERS WANTED (NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY), SINGLE WHITE PSYCHOPATH SEEKS SAME, CASKET FOR SALE (ONLY USED ONCE), HOW TO RESCUE A DEAD PRINCESS, and THE SINISTER MR. CORPSE. The mass market edition of my novel PRESSURE will be in bookstores May 26th from Leisure Books.


The desire to be a writer has been with me for literally as far back as I can remember. When I believed in Santa Claus, I wanted to be a writer. When I would scream and scream while my mom washed my hair in the sink, I wanted to be a writer. When I ate so much red licorice that I got sick to my stomach...actually, that was this morning, but the point is, if there was some instigating event that led to my career choice, like the Bogeyman saying "Become a writer or I'll eat ya!" it happened before I can remember.

And there was no one book or author that made me think "Wow, I want to do that!" I had my favorites, of course, but I wasn't a very discriminating reader as a kid. Pretty much anything could get me completely enraptured, wishing it would never end, and flipping immediately from the last page back to the first to read it all over again. (The breadth of my reading before high school was somewhat limited because of my tendency to read books like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing over and over and over and over and over again.)

I've also always wanted to be a professional writer. It was never "I should just do this in my spare time for fun to entertain my friends." Even when I wrote stories that starred my friends, I secretly believed that these would go on to great mainstream success. I always knew that my work would be published, and I always knew that I'd be making huge amounts of money at it very quickly.

Of course, the road to professional publication took...ummm, slightly longer than anticipated, and I missed the title of "Freakishly Young Published Author" by several years. Also, the wheelbarrows of cash were perhaps not as overflowing as I had envisioned. But it's something I've wanted to do my whole life, and I'm doin' it, and I'm happy!