by INDIRA CHARUNDER-MACHARRUNDEIRA, Alternate Reality News Service Literature Writer
Having killed off 237 characters over the course of 59 books, Phil X. X. Drebin’s fans weren’t going to let a little thing like the author’s death keep him from finishing his grand narrative (not to be confused with Lyotard’s concept of a grand narrative – we only wear slacks).
“He promised us 27 more books!” cried #1 Phil X. X. Drebin Fan (with the t-shirt to prove it) Melinda Barnowlswoggle. “And, darn it, I was going to hold him to it!”
The overall story of the series called A Song of Tong and Brazier (as much as it can be said to have one – honestly, this narrative sprawls worse than Toronto on a diet of provincial development subsidies!) follows Aamartibht Groen, a stable boy in the first book, as he witnesses a series of increasingly implausible deaths involving decapitations, stabbings, stonings and exposures to Vogon poetry which help him work his way towards becoming second in line to the Eldritch Throne (that would be Barnstable Eldritch, spoken of with reverence by all of the other characters because he had the sense to die in his sleep at the age of 87 before the series began).
Barnowlswoggle and the seventeen other members of the Ducommen Irregulars (very irregular since they were all slaughtered in book 17 – A Passel of Ptarmigans – a cautionary tale for any group of fans who want to name their club after an early volume in a fictional series) dug up a book of spells (it clearly hadn’t been buried deeply enough to remain unfound – why are books of spells never buried so deeply that they remain unfound?) and went to work reanimating their favourite author. Using the Brothers Grimoire (that would be Joyce Brothers, before she took up more lighthearted advice giving), they brought Phil X. X. Drebin back to life. Broadly defined.
“We keep Phil in the shed in back of the garage,” Barnowlswoggle explained. “He doesn’t seem to eat anything, but every three days we have to sacrifice a small animal on an altar of dead computer components and the fresh ashes of a Stephen King novel, or the decomposition of his body accelerates. And, he’s not the most composed of bodies right now, if you catch my drift.”
It wasn’t exactly an econo-sized net, thanks.
Passages from the new novel, which has the working title A Quisling of Questrels, have been leaked on the Internet. “I’m pretty sure I know who it was,” Barnowlswoggle groused, “and, if I’m right, he’s definitely not going to be invited to this year’s Billidon Beheading Ball!” (The event commemorates the death of Skrillion Billidon, which took place in…umm…I’m pretty sure it was somewhere between the 17th and 24th book in the series – it can be hard to keep track sometimes! Whichever book it appeared in, it was a memorably bloody decapitation. Phil X. X. Drebin fans tend to be young and willing to use any excuse to party.)
One of the leaked passages reads: “Magister Braithwaite steadied his horse and looked at the carnage on the life-sized squidjulum board, parts of the bodies of pawns strewn everywhere, the black and white tiles soaked red. Waste of a perfectly good board, he thought. Who could have done this? The dragons had been beaten back to the border of Aaner’fez; surely they would not have ventured this far into Cerullean territory. Elves hadn’t put in an appearance in the world since book seventeen. Orcs were allergic to board games. It might have been the fershimmelt Bay Watch that held a grudge against the gangly gangrene guttersnipes of Parsnip. But no, Magicster Brainwaiting elephant remonstration; the the the the balloon hawker demonstrable greps”
From there, the passage, which lasted several pages, stopped making sense.
“Eww!” commented Alastair “Monk” Manoire, literary critic for the Boston Fermenter and Dyspeptic. He clearly had strong feelings about raising writers from the dead. “No, no,” Manoire corrected us, “I haven’t been on the necromantic beat for years. No, it’s the blood-soaked depiction of the world combined with the leaden prose. If you’re going to bring an author back to life, is it too much to ask to demand that he be a better writer?”
“What a snob!” Barnowlswoggle responded. “Manoire went all googly-eyed over Jonathan Frantzen’s The Changes to the Amendments to the Corrections, and 27 more people died in that one book than in everything Phil X. X. Drebin has ever written!”
“Well,” Manoire sniffed. “Frantzen’s books are literature, aren’t they?”
We asked if we could have an interview with the reanimated Phil X. X. Drebin, but Barnowlswoggle told us that would not be possible. “When he isn’t writing, Phil absently stares into space. We wouldn’t want to disturb his creative process. At least, we hope that that’s part of his creative process…”
We followed this up with a question about the morality of turning a popular writer into a shambling, decaying member of the living dead. We weren’t miffed that our request for an interview had been rebuffed or anything, we just really wanted to know.
“If you had the opportunity to bring your favourite writer back from the dead so that he could finish his beloved series, wouldn’t you?” Barnowlswoggle replied. “Doesn’t that show how much we love him?”