Book Review: Repo Shark by Cody Goodfellow

Repo Shark by Cody Goodfellow

300 pages

Broken River books

Broken River is a new bizarro publisher focused mostly but I don't believe exclusively on weird crime novels. This imprint is the brain child of J David Osbourne the author of "By the Time We Leave Here We'll be Friends" a novel surreal novel published by Swallowdown and one of the best books I read the year it came out. Swallowdown to me had put out a chain of books that I considered instant classics. So I was excited when Osbourne put out a novel by fellow Swallowdown alum and diabolical genius Cody Goodfellow fresh off his Wonderland award for All Monster Action.

The novel in question is the most straight bizarro of Goodfellow's novels. Every single one of his novels are on the bizarro side of horror. It is not to say that this novel lacks horror elements, in fact it has more horror elements than I expected. However this is a bizarro crime novel. Goodfellow himself described it as “It’s about a repo man who goes to Honolulu to repossess a classic Harley from a were-shark. If you’ve ever enjoyed the quirky detective novels of Charles Willeford, Joe Gores or Elmore Leonard while flying on mushrooms, then this will come as a sensible value. Zef DeGroot is a tarnished White Knight private eye in the classic Spade-Marlowe tradition, but with black belts in karaoke and auto-fellatio.”

The story of vegas based repo-ninja named Zef. He has just taken a job to re-claim a Harley Davidson sold to gambler on a roll in Vegas. Before the sellers realized this Hawaiian man named Donny Punani whose money was not good for it the classic bike was on it's way back to the islands. Punani is serious criminal but he is also the ghost-god son of the King of All Sharks.

As Zef navigates the island he has to sift through the criminal underworld and deal with the possible legends. I laughed through-out the novel, but enjoyed the story and setting as well. Zef is the kinda hapless hero. As weird as it is Goodfellow doesn’t skimp on the quality story-telling and razor sharp prose. It ends with a finale as disgusting as anything in the World Horror convention’s annual Gross-out contest, but it was not forced. It was perfectly weaved in the story and had me laughing and marveling at its genius.

The best thing about this novel? It is like nothing this author did before. I hope you buy it and read it. You’ll enjoy it and then we should all get more weird as hell crime novels from Cody Goodfellow.