Shantnu Tiwari, $3.99, ISBN 978-1507063385
Humor, 2015

Despite its title, Shantnu Tiwari’s Dude, My Boss Is Evil (Also, He’s a Zombie) is not a horror story. It is, instead…

Ugh, I don’t even know what this thing is about. It’s more akin to the rambling of a schizophrenic person.

Here are the opening lines:

Have I ever told you how much I hate zombies?

No?

I’m sure I have. You probably weren’t listening.

If there is one thing I hate more than zombies, it’s Nazis.

If there is one thing I hate more than Nazis, it’s Nazi zombies.

If there is one thing I hate more than Nazi zombies, it’s… well, I hate nothing more than Nazi zombies, actually.

Man, you’ve seen all these documentaries on World War II, right? I used to like them as a kid, till I grew bored of them. Seems all TV channels show is World War II and ancient Egypt. There are other parts of history that are as, if not more, interesting. Do we ever get to see a documentary on them?

What about the pyramids of the Incas? What about the Easter Island stone heads?

What about World War I, which started with soldiers fighting on horseback and ended with fighter planes and tanks bombing the hell out of everyone? You think we’d get a documentary or two about them?

But no, it was just WWII all year around. Later on, I realised it was lazy journalism. There is already so much material on the second World War, and it is easy to recycle.

Uh huh. 

Let’s take a random leap to the opening lines of… oh, Chapter 9.

Hi guys. Blue here.

I got back on Shake for throwing water on my pants. I put a bucket full of ice in his underwear.

Yeah, that’ll teach him.

He is screaming like a little girl, swearing at me. A part of me even feels sorry for him.

I wouldn’t like ice cubes crawling down my underwear, either.

Close your eyes for a second and picture that.

Feel the ice going down your hips, down your buttocks, sliding down to your pelvis.

Feel your whole body freeze with cold.

No, I’m not being kinky.

That’s how we felt when we woke up.

Okay.

The whole thing is like this. There may be a story in there… somewhere… but the reader will have to be enthralled with the author’s style of going off on into bizarre tangents or are patient enough to wait until the author gets to the point, whenever that will happen, if it will ever happen.

This style of comedy can be amusing if it didn’t overstay its welcome, but this one just goes on and on and on, sigh. The whole thing is just the work of an overly self-indulgent author that lacks the ability to self edit. This is going to be hit or miss with folks out there, and with me, it’s a big miss.