Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gas Mask: A Book People Should Read

A couple of months ago, my friend dan recommended Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gas Mask, a book I'd never heard of by some Canadian guy I'd never heard of. I'm glad he did, I'm glad I read it, and I'm glad to upgrade author Jim Munroe to the short list of Canadian Guys I Have Heard Of.

Authentic Canadian Cover for Purists

Cover for the American Release

Flyboy is about Ryan, a Toronto college student whose secret power is that he can turn into a fly. He meets Cassandra: she's a waitress, a single mom, and the former singer for a famous-in-certain-circles punk band. She can make things disappear.

It doesn't take much reflection to figure out that Ryan's superpower kind of sucks. Flies are annoying, but powerless; they can be fairly easily swatted, or trapped, purposely or accidentally. This is underscored from the first scene in the book, when one of Ryan's roommates smashes a fly on Ryan's bedroom wall, leaving behind a bloody smear that never gets cleaned up. To further complicate things, Ryan returns to human form buck-ass naked, and, if he's been a fly for very long at all, covered from head to foot in a layer of viscous green slime.

On the other hand, it takes Ryan and Cassandra awhile to figure out just how awesomely powerful she is. They join together as Superheroes for Social Justice, and lend their powers to the social and political action they're already part of, a community of young activists who deface offensive billboards and attend hastily-organized political meetings in the damp basement where they also attend terrible poetry readings when they're not busy organizing this year's Take Back the Night March.

As someone who was part of a community just like this back in the 90s, when the book takes place, I found Ryan and Cassandra's community very familiar and comfortable, and would hand it to my kids to read with the introduction, "Just imagine that everyone in this book is a lesbian, and, except for the superpowers thing, this is exactly what my life was like in my 20s."

Cassandra and Ryan don't want to hurt anyone; their goal is something more like civil disobedience, and shaping creative punishments to fit the crimes of the powerful. For instance, angry that the police did not respond to the organizers' request that officers assigned to the TBTN march be female and unarmed, they march the route, Cassandra disappearing each officer's gun as they come into sight. They then introduce themselves in their thrift-store superhero costumes and make a statement to the press

The news coverage, when it comes, focuses on Cassandra's looks, and they punish the newspaper's sexism by driving around late at night, disappearing newspaper boxes. Ryan drives, and after awhile Cassandra slips into inattention, looking up quickly and doing her thing when Ryan tells her they've reached the next box.

This inattention is how she accidentally disappears a mailbox.

R & C are so conscientious that the disappearance of the mailbox bothers them on its own merits: "What if there were personal letters in there?" one of them says. But from there, the "what-ifs" pile up. What if instead of a mailbox, there had been a person there? Cassandra already knows she can disappear people; her power manifested when she accidentally disappeared an uncle who was trying to molest her when she was six. She and Ryan start speculating about the limits of her power. "Could you disappear the sun?" Ryan wonders. Cass doesn't want to think about it.

The superhero storyline is fun, and thoughtfully played out: Ryan's relatively weak power makes him, inevitably, the sidekick, and it's a lovely thing when a straight white guy ends up the sidekick to a bisexual woman. As a fly, he can observe (he helpfully retains his brain and ability to read), but his power to act is very limited, and there is a tense scene in the book when he is witnessing something terrible and can neither escape from having to see it, nor stop it. Cassandra's power, on the other hand, is almost infinite. She is ultimately faced with knowing she can stop a terrible thing, but only by doing a terrible thing. Can she do it? Can she live with herself if she does?

I don't love this book for the superhero stuff, though. I love it for the way that Ryan and his male friends are trying to navigate their relationships and their place in the community they've chosen. They are white guys trying to be decent white guys, and their efforts are touching. They want to be supportive of each other but aren't sure where the lines are; they want to be decent to the women in their lives, but aren't sure they know how. Ryan's friend Jack gives him The Female Eunuch to read at one point, and I admit that touched my crusty old battle-hardened feminist heart.

I love a moment, too, when Ryan, just getting to know Cass, is so overwhelmed by her vocabulary and intelligence that he has to curl up in a ball for a minute. A few pages back, he was admiring her looks, but it's her brain that renders him speechless. Ryan and Cass meet with one of her exes, who is territorial and hostile with Ryan. Later, Ryan wonders out loud what it means that he didn't feel threatened by her behavior, whereas he thinks he would have if she'd been a man.

Cass says, "It means you don't see a woman as a realistic competitor for a sexual partner. It means you're a little bit sexist, and a little bit homophobic."

Ryan thinks, "Ah. Good to know." (paraphrased from memory here)

I have three sons, and I would give them this book to read because they would be into the humor of it, and the superhero stuff. But I would really like them to see, too, the way Jim Monroe portrays male friendship, female friendship, community, and romantic relationships. 

I did roll my eyes at Cass's Perfect Fiction Baby. As is so often the case in books and movies, Cass is a single mom who rarely suffers the real challenges of single motherhood. She says, "Just let me put the kid to bed and I'll be right back," and emerges from the bedroom a peaceful five minutes later. When adult conversations need to happen, the child entertains herself endlessly with toy cars; when an adult conversation has to happen in a restaurant, the child interrupts only once, and then only briefly, despite having nothing to entertain herself with but a napkin and a pair of chopsticks. Cass's apartment comes equipped with a Child-Loving Older Woman Who Lives Alone In The Apartment Downstairs, and who is so delighted to watch Cass's child that neither Cass's job, nor her social life, nor her political activism, have to suffer; Cass can set her own schedule and be relied upon to keep it, while the grandmotherly neighbor picks up the extensive slack.

I get that these kind of fictional children are an expediency that allows writers to include children in characters' lives while telling stories that are not primarily about parenthood and children. Along with everyone's bathroom habits, most of the meals they eat, the haircuts they never mention getting unless it's central to the plot, and the bills they must be sitting down to pay at least sometimes, most childrearing challenges take place off-stage so as not to bog the story down. I'm still in a stage of parenting, though, where I'm very aware of the enormous disconnect between these fictional children and the real thing, and so I can be forgiven an eye-roll or two.

You can buy copies of the book at Jim Munroe's website, No Media Kings, and I recommend you do. Munroe offers a pay-what-you-can ebook option as well. dan also recommended Munroe's book Angry Young Spaceman, if I recall correctly, and I look forward to reading that next.

A Book So Bad That Once You Start Enumerating Its Flaws, It's Hard to Stop.

Earlier today at GoodReads, I posted a review of Mira Grant's novel Feed. That first link leads to my 2-star review, but here it is in its entirety so you don't have to click:

I really like the world-building in this book. The setting is 25 years after the zombie apocalypse. Zombie-ism is caused by a virus that everyone is infected with, but only activates under certain circumstances: death is one, or being bitten by a zombie, but sometimes someone can convert to the active form for no clear reason. This is a great set-up, as it leads to a culture in which people undergo blood tests to check their viral load constantly--at every perimeter, at the door of every building--because, even though great swathes of the country have been reclaimed from the dead (while others have been given up on), the threat is in the safe zone with everyone, all the time.

I also loved that the virus also infects animals, though only animals over a certain weight convert. In the course of the book, we get zombie horses and zombie deer, which are a great touch and an added source of disquiet and menace.

On the other hand, Grant doesn't think about the implications of her own set-up: though the zombie apocalypse killed a huge proportion of the world's population, the US remains a ridiculously rich nation, with technology (like recording equipment so small it can be worn as an earring) that far surpasses what we have now. Every home has to be fitted with expensive test equipment, and vehicles with armor or other enhancements; Grant never comments on what happens to people who can't afford that (though the story of the communities that are struggling to survive without the fancy airlocks and so on would be an interesting one) or indicates at all what drives this lush economy. Also, you will be glad to know that Starbucks, Apple, Coke and other favorite companies survive the end of the world as we know it.

Sadly, Grant creates this fantastic world only to populate it with tedious, one-dimensional characters whose personalities are all described, not shown. in some cases, the actions of the characters directly contradict what we are told about them. The main character, for instance, is a newsblogger, and she tells us over and over that she is all about the Truth with a Capital T, that she leaves the opinionating to her brother/colleague/creepy crypto-lover. But then every excerpt from her writing that is included in the book is pure opinion.

The presidential candidate whose campaign they are embedded with is a big hunk of 100% pure awesome, while his opponent practically rubs his hands together and cackles with evil glee. No character undergoes any change (except to become a zombie, which doesn't quite count).

The plot, which primarily follows the presidential campaign, is tedious in the extreme. And so is the writing, which describes every single blood test in detail no matter how many times we've heard it before. It also stops telling the story to drop huge chunks of exposition in willy-nilly, and re-uses the same phrases and tropes over and over and over and over (you could have a drinking game for every time the narrator refers to the sting of the testing needle, to her risk-taking brother's habit of "poking zombies with a stick," or to her own completely unsubstantiated commitment to the Truth). Another goodreads reviewer said no other book made him appreciate the work of good editors more than this one. Amen.

I've also seen reviewers compare this to fan fiction. I tell you: I have read better-written, more compelling fan fiction.

* * *

And now, a confession: I wrote that review when I was barely 400 pages into the book's 560 total. And I am still reading it. Why? Though I suspect I know how it ends, I'm just curious enough to keep skimming along just to find out if I'm right.

This gives me plenty of opportunities to observe other flaws in the book. For instance, I can elaborate on one source of the tedium, which is that Grant doesn't know how to telescope mundane activities. For instance, suppose your characters are going into a restaurant, but the actual going in doesn't matter--nothing happens, they don't run into an old friend on her way out, nobody smashes a finger in the door, nobody glances at the newspaper rack and sees an alarming headline that is integral to the plot. They just go in. You might write something like this:

"The four of us headed into the restaurant and ordered eggs and a large pot of coffee."

Your reader can fill in the walking through the door, saying "four please" to the hostess, sitting at the booth, and so on.

Mira Grant writes all that. Her characters approach the door, reach for the handle, grab the handle and pull, hold the door until the next person reaches it, look around as the door closes behind them to see that this is an ordinary little diner, are greeted by the hostess, who is thrilled to see them because [digression into how the zombie apocalypse made public gathering places so risky that most people won't go into them anymore so little diners like this hardly get any business], are directed to a booth, sit down in the booth, pick up the menus and study them, decide on poached eggs (Shaun) and over-easy eggs (George), tell the server their order, and so on...

Grant can slice time into the smallest possible pieces. Into layers so thin that you can see light through them. And all of it with a minute attention to details that do not matter at all.

You want proof, and not just my made-up parody? OK. Three characters get into a car on page 325:

"One day you're going to call me that, and I'm going to punch your head clean off," said Steve, and slammed the door. Shaun laughed. The sound of Steve's footsteps moved around the car, where the driver's-side door opened and closed again.

Really? We need to hear the footsteps? We need it spelled out that Steve had to open the door to get in? "Steve slammed the door and took his place in the driver's seat" would have been more than sufficient, Ms. Grant. I assure you.

On pages 194-195, it takes the main character 8 paragraphs to take some pain pills out of a bottle and wash them down with some water. "When I finished swallowing," is not a phrase you ever need to use. You do not need to have your discursive time* so expanded that people have to stand around waiting for someone to finish swallowing a sip of water.

The biggest boner in the book so far is another example of a character being described one way but acting completely differently. At our house, we think of this as the Will Riker Is A Great Diplomat phenomenon, because in Star Trek: The Next Generation people are always saying that Riker is, yes, a "great diplomat," but whenever Riker is facing some aliens on the viewscreen he's always looking angry and saying, "What the hell is going on here?"

There is a character in Feed who, for 350 pages, is described as a technological whiz. She can, among other things, create security for the news team's computers that is unbreakable, while at the same time breaking through any firewalls they want a peek behind.

And then, on page 365, she has to give the main character the password to her private files and notes.

And it is a significant date in her life. Just that. Not even encoded or anagrammed or mixed up with numbers standing in for letters or anything. Just February-4-2029.

My eight-year-old has stronger passwords than that. The cryptology expert should have rattled off a password more like the one from the first season of Veronica Mars:

Veronica: I need to change the password on my email account. Someone managed to figure out the old one.

Computer guy: That's why your password should always include numbers as well as letters. Everyone thinks its fun to use the name of your dog or boyfriend, but that actually makes it easy to crack. What was your old password?

Veronica: GJ7B!X.

Epilogue, next day: I have now finished the book. My hope that all the tedious details were leading up to something was in vain. I hoped that we were hearing over and over again about people standing in airlocks waiting for the blood-test indicator to turn green because one of these times, it was going to turn red instead. Nope. It was like a play with a hundred guns on the mantelpiece in Act 1--and all of them still there when the curtain rang down three hours later.

Also, while we hear all about doors opening and closing, and Georgia squinting in the sunlight because of her sensitive eyes, and long redundant conversations about politics, the central mystery of the story is solved completely off-screen. We hear that they're working extra-hard, and then suddenly there's a packet of documents that proves everything. It's as if a detective novel were entirely about what the detective wore, where she ate lunch, and her thoughts on education policy, and then in the second-to-last chapter she suddenly says, "Oh, by the way, I've been finding clues and following leads, and the killer is Mr. Smith. Mr Smith, are you the killer?"

Mr. Smith: Yes, yes I am. I did it and I'm glad I did it and I'd do it again. [Shoots self in head.]


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*Discursive time, or story time, is how long it takes for something to be shown or told; as opposed to narrative time, which is time as experienced within the story. A slow-motion shot of something falling down, for instance, has a long story time but a short narrative time, whereas a film cut or chapter break that moves characters instantly from the living room where they're drinking coffee together to the airport where they're saying good-bye has short story time but long narrative time.