When your cat starts talking to you, you can either think your crazy and ignore it. Or, work with it and help defeat evil.

This is a great supernatural, horror, comedy book.

It has some great one liners and great characters. It kept my intrigued and wanting more.

I hope there is a sequel.

An excellent and gripping novel that reminded me of Landsdale.
It's well written, full of dark humour and highly entertaining.
It's the first book I read by this author and won't surely be the last.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book. This was a gritty little weird novel. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I look forward to reading more by this author. Reminded me of Joe Lansdale.

CW: strong language, violence, gore

Shotgun Joe is very different from what I usually read but it is a book that left me convinced I will be reading any other book written as a sequel to it. The premise starts simple with the main character Joe finding a stray cat, Zappa, which he ends up adopting. Cue the chaos. He gets fired from his last job, which is not a new thing for him, and he receives the job offer of his dreams as his cat warns him of what will happen—by speaking. The story is action filled, constantly humorous and sarcastic thanks to Joe's inner monologues, and manages to delve into the subject of good and evil and has a well-rounded main character with his virtues and flaws despite the overall absurdity.

While the story stalled a bit toward the middle with Joe's visions, the suspense of not knowing whether Joe has gone insane like he suspects or what he witnesses is actually happening. kept me curious and excited throughout the book, and eventually I found myself devouring the action-packed second half of the book, and normally I am not much of an action reader.

I recommend Shotgun Joe to anyone who likes dark comedy, action, supernatural and stories about cult activity or just wants to try something new.

What happens when your cat starts talking to you and you start having waking dreams and prophetic visions involving mysterious cult leaders and impending doom? Nothing good, I assure you. There's a very good chance that Joe is going, or has gone, full blown "hide the steak knives" crazy.

That's the basic set-up to Shotgun Joe. A heartbroken lab-tech slacker is content to drift from job to job and ride out unemployment benefits in between. Enter a stray cat to be named Zappa - after Frank Zappa, Joe will explain - and soon things start to get weird. Not just Deja-Vu kind of weird but, "Gee, I wonder what life in the insane asylum will be like?" kind of weird.

There's a lot of Armageddon, End of Days, true nature of evil stuff that comes into play. Most of it played out in tongue-in-cheek fashion but somewhat open to individual perception/interpretation/sensibilities... in other words you'll probably get out of it what you choose.

I found some of the longer forays into Joe's crazy psychedelic prophecy dreams kind of monotonous - it really isn't something I'm into all that much... Once it got past all that the story really picked up and I enjoyed it.

While Shotgun Joe wasn't a perfect fit for me I think there's a significant audience for this kind of thing. It has a supernatural horror absurdist comedy aspect to it that is both frightening and funny at the same time.

I always want to try to give potential readers an idea of whose work an author (particularly a new or lesser known author) might invoke in terms of similarity or genre; Admittedly this book is outside of my usual frame of reference so I'm thinking more ballpark idea than pinpoint precision when I say that Shotgun Joe by Bob Mann might be of interest to fans of Joe R. Lansdale's absurdist supernatural efforts (Bubba Ho-Tep) or possibly Dean Koontz fans with a taste for a bit more dark humor... maybe a little Stephen King overlap in terms of subject matter but not really in style or sensibility.

There's adult language, violence, gore, definitely an R-rated endeavor.

***Thanks to NetGalley, SFK Press, and author Bob Mann for providing me with a free digital copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.