Review: Out of Shape Story Runs Out of Gas at the End
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 4, 2014
J. A. Konrath's humorous horror novelette "Shapeshifters Anonymous" resembles an out-of-shape runner running a distance race. It gets off to a good start but sets too fast a pace, then runs out of gas in the home stretch and barely makes it to the finish line.The premise is terrific. The protagonist, Robert Weston Smith, suffers from bizarre blackouts two or three nights a month, then discovers that he's been eating some pretty bizarre things during these blackouts. When his doctor can't find a rational explanation, he fears he may be turning into a werewolf and turns to a highly unusual self-help group, Shapeshifters Anonymous, where he meets with others like him.Tongue is all the way in cheek in this one, and Konrath's dry humor works rather well in the beginning, which bears at least a passing resemblance to reality. Once Smith settles in at the meeting however, the story winds up spinning out of control very rapidly. Soon, he learns that he and his fellow shapeshifters are in deadly peril from Salvation Army Santa Clauses, who are demented followers of the real Santa Claus, who has been hunting shapeshifters for centuries. The climax is a huge battle between the forces of ho-ho-ho and those of the Animal Kingdom.Any comic will tell you that timing is important in comedy. You have to give the audience just enough time to appreciate one joke before moving to the next. Konrath loses track of that principle, however. Rather than mine the comic possibilities of a group of people who turn into animals, he rushes into the big fight scene where he stacks one bizarre visual gag on top of another. Of course, these aren't visual gags in the cinematic sense... readers can't see the bizarre battle on screen where some effective FX work or comic acting might make it funny. Instead, they are descriptions of a deranged Salvation Army Santa doing battle with a turtle with vaguely human features. At some point in the narrative (and in my case it happened rather quickly), those descriptions lost any amusement factor whatsoever.I realize that humor is very subjective and some people may find this entire concept hilarious. Unfortunately, I didn't. The snappy jokes of the first third of the book turned into, for me, the equivalent of a bad professional wrestling Battle Royale, and the story became a bit of a chore to finish, even at fifty pages. I admire Konrath's imagination and the highly unusual storyline he concocted here. I'm just disappointed that he couldn't maintain that premise for the entire length of the novelette.