Tales from the Back of a Bus

De: John Pivovarnick

Narrado por: Mason Carver

"A wild concoction of Vonnegut and Lynch filtered through Mel Brooks, this is one rollicking existential ride through the ugly '80s world of Hollywood and publishing, and I've never read anything like it. Screwball and cosmic horror collide in Pivovarnick's absurd genre-bender that feels like watching Angel Heart and After Hours on a handful of psychoactives." (Thomas Pluck, author of Bad Boy Boogie and Life During Wartime)

It’s 1984 in Los Angeles. Jake Maldemer’s first book, Tales from the Back of a Bus, is a hit. It's a darkly comic, genre-bending roman à clef in which aspiring writer Jack Moses meets an odd little man name Kobold who keeps randomly feeding him handwritten horror stories as they travel across Los Angeles in the back of an RTD bus.

Just as the life of Jake’s storybook-self gets stranger and more chaotic, so does Jake’s real life. As he heads across the country to start his first ever book tour, stories and messages begin to arrive from someone calling themselves Kobold out here in the real world. Either somebody is playing an amazingly cruel and elaborate joke on him, or Jake Maldemer is slowly going insane.

©2018 John Pivovarnick (P)2018 John Pivovarnick

Well written, funny, interesting book!

I really loved this book and the narrator was perfectly suited to tell the story.

I was getting echoes of "Inception". It's like a book within a book within a book, which provides for a very interesting story wrapped in multiple layers that I thoroughly enjoyed unraveling.

This book really made me think, which in my mind, is a hallmark of a great story. There are many parts that had me laughing out loud and others that I had to pause and really absorb and let it soak in.

The narrator's voice went well with the story and his accent of various characters contributed to my enjoyment.

The character development is done very well and I tried to get inside Jack's head, and Jake's head, and Kobold's head. Or were they one and the same? I'm still trying to piece it all together, but I know that I loved it.

There were some very beautiful, quotable observations in the book. One of my favorites is: "Books are a weakness that even Damon's fleet of doctors can't deprive me of. They strain nothing but my mind, contain no cholesterol or salt, and the ideas they hold displace the darkness of my mind."

Just beautiful! I loved everything about this and I highly recommend it. Give it a listen!