Gone Whalin'

How best to describe Gone Whalin' by Conor Lastowka?You know those "soft" sci-fi movies like Liar, Liar and Freaky Friday and The Hot Chick (for the record, I have not seen any of those, some of them I haven't seen many, many times...) where it's like, there's some sort of weird poorly-described and extremely irritating supernatural effect that causes wacky hijinks to ensue?Gone Whalin' is sort of like if one of those movies had sex with Hot Tub Time Machine and had a baby.Well, no--Gone Whalin' is EXACTLY what would happen if one of those movies had a baby with Hot Tub Time Machine. Imagine that Ron Howard's Cocoon bumped uglies with Hot Tub Time Machine--nineish month later, Gone Whalin' would be the result.Maybe Cocoon isn't the best example. At least they were aliens, and you could hand-wave the geriatric alien poop baby super-broth swimming pool away by just claiming "ET did it!" Maybe Herbie the Love Bug. Or Pleasantville--that's good. If Pleasantville and Hot Tub Time Machine banged and had kids, at least one of them would be Gone Whalin'.My point is, there's no real attempt made at explaining how all the weirdness in this book happens, it just does. Which, you know, is fine, but don't pick this up thinking that you're going to get a history textbook. Part of the charm is the author's callous disregard for historical accuracy.So if you're charmed by gratuitous historical inaccuracy and Ron Howard-style soft sci-fi with a dash of Hot Tub Time Machine-style penis-based humor, Gone Whalin' is for you.The story centers around a college-age slacker named Cormac, who every other day, leaves his present-day body behind and wakes up on a North Atlantic whaling ship in the 1850s.This is weird enough, and could probably warrant its own slew of Kiplingesque (and covertly racist) adventure chronicles, right? But Lastowka (or "The Stowk" as I'll refer to him from now on) kicks it up a notch by including a brilliant (?) twist: if you look into the ear of Cormac's unconscious present-day body while he's time traveled, you get a fully immersive virtual reality-style view of what Cormac is experiencing in olden-times (which is mostly, at first, being on a boat and hunting for whales, but devolves into some incredibly violent pirate-killing and the singing of extremely filthy sea shanties).Intrigued and beside themselves, Cormac's friends and the dean of his college immediately contact CERN, Fermilab, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and James Randi and begin rigorous scientific study of this amazing, unprecedented temporal phenomenon.Er, I mean, they immediately use it as an excuse to throw dangerously huge bashes at which copious amounts of drugs and alcohol are partaken of, all while charging admission to people that want to experience what 1850s whaling ships are like by looking in some sleeping dude's ear.What results is a bizarrely off-the-wall mashup of co-ed college party life with a grotesque amount of extremely un-PC whale killing and slightly more acceptable but still pretty gruesome pirate slaughter. It sounds ridiculous, but strangely, it all works. You know how Michael Crichton (before he got all crazy about global warming) could take what appeared to be two totally unrelated topics and forcefully smash them together into a page-turning techno-thriller? DNA sequencing and theme parks--POW. Quantum mechanics and medieval France--ZOOM. It takes a certain amount of talent to do that and not look like a total idiot. Toward the end of his career, even Crichton had a hard time with it, but The Stowk pulls it off.The book is pretty funny. Funny enough that I kept laughing and waking up my wife because the bed was shaking. She got so mad at me! I tried to convince her it wasn't my fault, but she wasn't buying any of it. So I got on Twitter (this is a 100% true story) and complained to The Stowk that his book was keeping my wife awake.He was nice enough to write me a note: pic.twitter.com/ZmXz4D3f9HI'm not saying you'll get the same sort of customized gag he gave me, I mean, me and The Stowk are like *this*, but if you want to ask him if he'll take time out of his busy sched to help you out with your pissed-off spouse, I won't stop you.It was shortly after receiving the note that my tablet died. It's an ASUS TF700, only about a year old. Went into a serious bootloop and just wouldn't start up beyond the Android splash screen. Took me a few days of messing with it before I finally figured out that I needed to re-push the entire OS via a side-load, pretty standard really. Once I found the necessary files and got on the right track, it was a pretty easy fix, and I want to thank all the folks over at transformerforums.com for helping me out.OK, OK, I can hear you now, "But Damon, don't you have a phone that will run the Kindle app?" YES, I do, what am I, a caveman? But I HATE reading off little screens so LAY OFF, sheesh.Anyway, by the time I got all the settings on my tablet back the way I wanted them, I had sort of lost momentum on the book, and it took me another few days to get back into it. And every time I laughed about something and shook the bed, I waited for my wife to start giving me guff so that BAM, I could show her The Stowk's note.But she just WOULD NOT wake up. I swear, I couldn't budge her. There was no guff given! Here I had this great note, but no opportunity to bust it out.I eventually started laughing at stuff that wasn't funny, just to see if she'd wake up. And I was laying it on pretty thick toward the end, throwing out some hearty guffaws at random intervals and shaking the bed like an off-balance washing machine.No luck, she slept right through them.Or so I thought... When I got to the last page (by the way, the book ends with a Dude-Where's-My-Carian sci-fi epilogue that I won't ruin by trying to tease in this review), she rolled over and asked me if I was done. I forlornly said yes, disappointed that I didn't get to use my note. She asked, "Was it a funny book?" and I sighed dramatically and said, "YES IT WAS A FUNNY BOOK."Without missing a beat, she said, "There is no book, you're crazy!" and ran out of the room. (reference the above twitpic)She'd been spying on my twitter feed and had seen the whole thing, and was getting my goat the whole time, the crafty lady.Sorry Stowk, I tried, but she pulled a fast one on us both.

I am familiar with Conor Lastowka's work on Rifftrax as well as the many humorous posts he makes on Twitter. So while I knew he could fire off some funny one-liners (contained within a 140 character limit), I was curious to see if his wit could be sustained for a 600+ page novel that encompasses two centuries, two very different settings and over half a dozen main characters. Happily, this was in fact the case. Short riffs turned into longer passages and recurring jokes. Clever turns of phrase become more developed narratives. And the entire six hundred and thirty-eight pages were a delight and a joy to sail through.I usually try to give some sort of a plot summary in a review, but in this case I wouldn't like the pleasant madness of Gone Whalin' unfolding storyline to be spoiled. It's enough to know that the protagonist is an average, slightly-stoned/drunk college kid, Cormac McIlhenney, who inexplicitly wakes up on alternate days in the belly of a 19th century whaling ship, leaving his unconscious body resting in the present day.The parts of the book that were so appealing to me were the strange dual little universes that Lastowka creates. I loved the university setting with its joyfully corrupt dean, its spineless board, its population of stoners, minor drug dealers, painfully slacking students and opportunistic cult members. The section where Cormac, his roommate and the college dean visited a local dive bar ended up being where I first learned how to use my Kindle's highlight function, because several of the passages were wonderfully and perversely funny, and needed to be remembered.The other half of the book -- the adventures on-board the whaling ship -- is equally entertaining and enjoyable. That universe also has a fun cast of characters, who -- like the fellows in the present day -- are presented almost as over-the-top caricatures, but never as lazy or dull cliches.There's something that reminded me of Douglas Adams about the book. I appreciated the way Lastowka initially presents an absurd premise but then sticks with it and drags every last possible drop of humor from it. His prose also had faint reminders of Adams, although with far more emphasis on whale penises than the Hitchhiker's author ever attempted.Gone Whalin' is Conor Lastowka's first novel, but it certainly has the self-assurance of a work from a more mature writer. It has a casual and confident style which made it easy to jump in and out of. I'm looking forward to Lastowka's next novel. And if they ever film the movie version of Gone Whalin', I pray that Karl Welzein is available to play Captain Anson.

Wow! Love this book! Kind of long but that's a GOOD thing! Layers. In the style of Off To Be The Wizard and Death Rat! If you like those or the jokes in Rifftrax buy this book!

The book made me laugh out loud several times. A good piece of absurdist humour.