John Corey Whaley does not disappoint with his 2014 release, Noggin. Frankenstein, reanimation, zombies, there are many tales of horror based on these fear inducing beings, but what if they didn’t come back as abominations, and instead were much the same as they had been in life? John Corey Whaley confronts a myriad of bizarre, sad and just plain wrong situations with grace and humor in his new book, Noggin. When Travis Cotes wakes up with a new healthy body (curiosity of Jeremy Pratt) he becomes an object of hope and fear but really he’s just a teenager trying to make sense of his life-five years after he’s died. The beauty of Whaley’s characters thrust into this freak situation is their adaptivity. When I read the phrase “Cryogenic American” I laughed so hard that I spit chai down the front of me.
Some of my favorite quotes:
“Of the string of weird days that had made up my recent life, this one was shaping up to be the longest and most bizarre. Within a couple of hours we would illegally pour my ashes onto the grave of a stranger whose body happens to be holding up my head.” (p.325)
“There is no delicate way to tell a person that he is holding a container full of the incinerated remains of his own body.” (p.36)
“And you can’t go to sleep at night knowing you have some poor kid’s body attached to you and feeling like you don’t have any damn good use for it.” (p.81)
fragilemuse 