Review: Revised Review: 'An Assassin without a rifle is like a mosquito without a proboscis.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 30, 2014
San Diego based Alex Burke seems to be trying every manner of making art. He lists himself as a novelist, poet, screenwriter, and painter, and yes, he has prepared himself for these categories of expression by schooling in computer science, literature and art (at Otis Parsons School of Art and Design in Los Angeles). He has written some 13 screenplays of bizarre themes (none produced to date), his paintings range from copying the masters to complete abstraction, he has apparently written the software for Top Secret national security projects as software engineer for Northrup Grumman, and he is a member of Mensa (for the uninitiated, Mensa is the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world. It is a non-profit organization open to people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on a standardized, supervised IQ or other approved intelligence test). Now he supersedes all of these talents with the publication of this massively long epic (almost 800 pages!) of one of the most hilarious, parody driven, zinging takeoffs on the flaws in human history's coping with assassinations. This ambling, rollicking `oh-my-gosh' tale is wiltingly clever and a must read for those unafraid to look at the disasters of the past in a comic light.THE ASSASSIN SHALL PREVAIL: A TALE OF THE HYPER SNIPER recreates the mind of Oswald (never named but merely listed as `O.' for probably security purposes....). It takes off on that fateful day in 1963 with the waking of O. and from there it explores the interstices of a deranged mind, finding kinship with some the brutes from history (Hitler, Genghis Khan, Stalin, etc etc) as well as some of the sacred cows of our creation, and the results are at once hilarious, frightening, soulful, and insightful. Much of that is due to the fact that Alex Burke just happens to write brilliantly. Example: `At precisely thirteen years, ten months and twenty-two days past the mid-point of the twentieth century, in one of our more forward-looking Southern cities, where voting for a Democrat was tantamount to treason; where fornication of the disgusting h********list variety warranted death by being dragged behind a car; where Jewish shops were smeared with swastikas; where spitting on the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was considered legitimate political discourse; where a q***r was a guy who preferred women to guns; where g*y rights consisted of giving the f****t a ten second head start; where big money backed little men for high office; where billionaire oil barons wallowed around like pigs in cowboy hats and bolero ties; where "detectives" turned the most beautiful Assassination in the history of the world into farce - there lived a young man in a small room in a rooming house. This room, no bigger than a medium-sized walk-in closet, whose walls were painted battleship gray, now faded and flaking, consisted of a cot-sized iron-framed bed, a lamp without a lampshade resting precariously on a night stand, a wooden chair at the foot of the bed, and a chest of drawers, missing three knobs, one on each drawer, the top and bottom ones the knob on the left, and the middle one, the knob on the right. The lone window was covered with a faded yellow curtain. The overall effect to the eye well-trained in interior design was one of dilapidation, squalidness, shabbiness, poverty, and a deliberate disregard for any aesthetic qualities whatsoever, an attitude which several years hence would become de rigueur for the smart set who owned and occupied apartments on Park Avenue. One fine autumn day, this young man, early twenties, lay asleep on his bed, atop a black and white striped mattress, beneath a dirty, faded, cream-colored threadbare blanket. Quite early on the morning of that fatal day, O. awoke from troubled dreams to find himself transformed into the world's greatest Assassin.'That is just starters. Burke just may be in a league with Jonathan Swift, Molière, Lewis Carroll, P. G. Wodehouse Kurt Vonnegut et al. Brush up your funny bone and your history lessons and jump on this rollercoaster ride of an experience. Grady Harp, March 14