Last Condo Board of the Apocalypse

Review: Last Condo Board of the Apocalypse by Nina Post

This novel is an absolute gem!! I totally enjoyed every moment and every sentence. What a freewheeling world is Pothole City, the setting! It has practically everything, including an interdimensional portal admitting all kinds of monsters; a 500-unit condo complex with the amenities, which is confinement for a host of fallen angels; the lazy, good-for-nothing Destroying Angel of the Apocalypse; the CluckSnack Holding Company, purveyor of foodstuffs beloved of angels, ferrets, and domestic pets; and single-purpose angels. Pothole City also has the talented Kelly Driscoll, sole survivor of a family of skilled thieves, and now sometime paranormal hunter and protector of single-purpose angels.

This is a joyfully comic paranormal which deserves to be enjoyed. Go ahead: make yourself happy!

The English actor Edmund Kean's last words were alleged to have been: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." Well, bizarre comedic novels may be the hardest of all. For every book that hits the sweet spot that balances humor, silliness, deadpan earnestness and fake normalcy there are a slew of books that try too hard and collapse in a mess of desperation, flop sweat, bad timing and over-eagerness to please. This book avoids those problems, exhibits control and restraint, and hits the sweet spot.

When I mention deadpan silliness I mean the kind of business that marks Monty Python's most inspired work. Earnestness coupled with fake normalcy and skewed plausibility is the hallmark of a Douglas Adams book. Terry Pratchett and Robert Rankin, ("Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse"), are masters, respectively, of insanely unbalanced dialogue and inventively impossible characters. Well, that's what you have here, and if any of those authors tickle your funny bone, this may be the book for you.

Here's an example of what I mean. The setup for the book is that a private detective type character, who is "normal", is hired by an angel to track down and trap a fallen angel. (The fallen angel is somewhere in the Amenity Towers condo building, because that's where all fallen angels are bound.) Anyway, the angel is explaining to our heroine that there are zillions of angels, each with a very well-defined and specific job and responsibility. He explains that there are angels for each day, each species, each job, and so on. The list keeps getting sillier and more specific, until he observes that there is an angel for "lumberjack sports and timber entertainment". Now, I think "lumberjack sports" is funny enough, but, the extension to "timber entertainment", which is a ridiculously meaningless phrase, is what moves this book to a higher level.

The other thing going on here is that this book actually has a plot and identifiable characters. It is not just word play and funny business. That can get old very quickly without a plot to hang the silliness on and characters to keep your attention. In fact, our heroine is cut from that old reliable world-weary-seen-it-all Marlowe kind of cloth, which is essential to keeping one invested in the story even as it veers all over the place.

So, all in all a very happy and entertaining find, and I'm pleased to add a new author to an unfortunately short list of people who do this kind of book right.

Please note that I received a free electronic copy of this book in exchange for a vague undertaking on my part to write a candid review.

Last Condo Board of the Apocalypse by Nina Post

Kelly's job is to kill monsters. She does it mostly because they killed her mother when she was small, but it's also fun for her to do. There are a lot of them in the world she lives in, so you'd think her job would be secure. She doesn't want to hunt vampires, though, so that cuts back a bit on her income.

Curiosity Quills Press and Net Galley allowed me to download a copy of this ebook for review (thank you). It's been published, so check with your local bookstore for a copy.

I enjoyed this read. It's a wild ride in world that is totally out of control with paranormal creatures. I once saw a movie called the Fifth Element and this story reminded me of that. I bought the movie if that tells you anything. I'll be buying this book, too.

Kelly is supposed to be looking for a rogue angel and sucking him up in a test tube. It begins to get confusing when she's finding all kinds of angels to remove from the building but seems not to find the one she's looking for.

She dresses in different disguises to visit the building and do her searches. She develops a crush on an angel in the building. The angels' condo board considers getting pizza delivered its biggest problem (someone keeps eating the pizza delivery guy). And the guy she's working for is actually her biggest enemy. Other than that, everything is normal. The sad part is that in this world, that's true!

It's a busy story that's a bit silly, has some humorous spots, and keeps you glued to the pages. Why not visit this out of this world place and see if you think you could manage as well as Kelly?

Happy reading.

I can only classify this book as fascinating. I'm surprised I have just heard of it now. It is what I have been looking for in my reading adventures revolving around fantasy. Comedy, violence, bumbling fallen angels, mystery, all into one. The angels are more like demons but isn't there a fine line between a fallen angel and a demon? The Angel of Destruction? Mere mortals would see that angel as a demon, tired guardian angels, obsessive, single-minded angels, and what the Cluck is in that snack pack? I received an unedited e-book so there were some minor errors and formatting was definitely off but it didn't take away from the story.

When times are lean, everyone has to make some tough choices. Do you not pay the bills, and let your family go hungry... or do you suck it up and take whatever little jobs you can find to stay afloat? (That’s a no-brainer, right?)

Bounty hunter Kelly Driscoll has been facing the same prospects, now that her work has slowed way down, and the fact that the bounties she tracks down are all escaped monsters--think weird, creepy things you never, ever want to encounter--makes no difference; broke is broke. But, when something that started out seeming like a small job turns into something a whole lot bigger, well... that’s when Kelly has to put her big-girl panties on, in Nina Post‘s whimsically-wild and wacky tale, The Last Condo Board of the Apocalypse.

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If nothing else, life is rarely boring in the less-than-melodiously-named Pothole City, where Kelly Driscoll has been eking out a modest living for the past several years. With its mix of old buildings and new construction--along with those pesky potholes (some large enough to swallow whole cars!) everywhere you turn--the city is the sort of place that attracts a wide variety of inhabitants (many of whom she’s successfully nabbed in her line of work).

The only thing Kelly refuses to do is catch vampires (which is unfortunate, since being a vampire hunter is the new “in” thing, and consequently, a big reason why her own business is down). Still, a girl has to choose what lines she will and won’t cross... and that’s where she draws the line.

So, when an impeccably-suited fellow drops in on her (literally) in the middle of a case--rapelling down the side of the building she’s acting as a window washer on (to spy on apartments trying to locate a stolen painting)--and nervously explains that he needs her help on a job (one that doesn’t involve any nosferatu, thank goodness), the answer is an easy-enough “yes”.

Turns out he isn’t her new client, however, but a go-between whose reclusive boss--Don, the Destroying Angel of the Apocalypse (yep, you read that right)--can’t be bothered with such trivial things, but no matter, because the money’s good. The job? Locating one of Don’s rivals, who’s been causing all sorts of problems in Amenity Tower (“Pothole City’s Finest Luxury Condominiums”), the building Kelly was just hanging from, as it happens. She has two days to find and subdue the guy--although no one knows what name he’s using or what he looks like now. (There’s always a catch, isn’t there?)

Naturally, it turns out there’s a little more to the job than it first sounded like (as though that wasn’t already enough). Amenity Tower isn’t just any luxury condo building (nice as it is) boasting 500 fabulous units; it also happens to be chock-full of fallen and cast-out angels, currently inhabiting human bodies, and all bound to the building (as in, can’t-leave-no-matter-how-much-they-want-to-do-so) as punishment. And, during the same two-day window in which Kelly’s supposed to find the missing miscreant, all those other angels will be trying to figure out how to escape from Amenity Tower (so they can then go forth and wreak havoc, destruction, chaos, and The Works, once more). Yikes.

Murray gives Kelly a little help... of sorts. There are special-purpose angels (SP’s, for short) in charge of overseeing specific tasks (one returns small birds to their owners, for instance, and another guards bicyclists)--and Kelly has one, and then, more than one, as they seem to multiply--at her service. (The fact that they’re inordinately fond of a particular brand of snack food--Cluck Snacks, in all their myriad flavors--features humorously in how she eventually figures out how to use her merry little band of SP’s.)

Meanwhile, a group of some of those most-powerful fallen and cast-out angels have been holding regular (daily) board meetings at Amenity Tower. Their primary goal (along with making sure the luxury gym is kept up-to-snuff, pizza deliveries are arranged, etc.)? Discovering precisely how and when to escape their horrible bondage (at “Pothole City’s Finest Luxury Condominiums”, don’t forget), so they can return to their higher purpose, running amok and causing all manner of mayhem.

Things get a little murky, though, when Kelly actually meets one of those über-powerful fallens, the movie-star handsome Af... fitness aficionado, lover of gadgets (and of photographing them), and committed writer (presently working on a little something he’s calling “The Fallen Angel’s Survival Guide: Your Ultimate Handbook for a Bound Lifestyle”). He’s nice, interesting, and normal... and in no hurry to leave Amenity Tower (unlike the more-vocal members of the condo board).

With Af’s assistance from inside the walls of his “prison” at Amenity Tower, and the help of an ever-growing number of happy, snack-food-gobbling SP’s on the outside, Kelly races to beat the deadline (while unburying a couple of nasty surprises from her past) and stop the coming apocalypse. The fate of the world is all in a day's work (or so she hopes).

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The Last Condo Board of the Apocalypse is the real deal, a true original. Yes, Post has penned an urban fantasy... but she’s done it as a broad (and singularly-clever) satire. It’s surreal and hilarious, bizarre yet surprisingly relevant, and even has an unexpected core of sweetness (lying buried in a cavernous pothole beneath mounds of various Cluck Snacks wrappers, of course).

In short, this one’s a wildly-imaginative and loopy lark... and if you’ve got the right (seriously off-kilter, possibly-certifiable) sense of humor, it’s one humongous heap o‘ fun. :D

GlamKitty Catnip Mousie Rating: 4 out of 5 Blissfully-Zonked-out-on-'Nip Mousies