The United States is already at a loss when a one hundred and fifty-foot-tall lizard seems to wake out of a dormant volcano in Alaska, but things only get worse when a meteor strikes the heartland and a gargantuan cockroach emerges from the crater. While the US military is paralyzed, ordinary citizens are on the move: a teen and his grandfather, an innkeeper, a gangster obsessed with monster movies, a reporter and her cameraman, a retired general, and a few more odds and ends all team up to figure out just how humanity is going to survive these extraterrestrial monsters.
Sam Sumac’s PUT A BUG IN YOUR EAR is, obviously, a love letter to classic Atomic Age science fiction about huge, destructive monsters—frequently referencing some of its favorites along the way. But the book is also heavy-handed slapstick, spinning the classic monster imagery with wry humor, as when the obvious Godzilla stand-in dips a single, massive toe into the frigid waters of Alaska and must daintily convince itself to go for a swim. That humor is omnipresent in the text’s maximalist descriptive language. When one protagonist, for instance, develops a psychic connection with the lizard monster, he doesn’t merely feel its sadness; he feels “the waves of the lizard’s sadness saturate his being like the electromagnetic radiation of a microwave oven streaming into a frozen burrito at a 7-Eleven.” The text isn’t without a few choice bits of witty dialogue, either. When a female pilot points out that she couldn’t fly in the Vietnam War due to her gender, a normally irritable retired general replies, surprisingly earnestly, that “someday soon you women will get your chance to kill just as many people during wars as we men.”
A good chunk of PUT A BUG IN YOUR EAR is funny. Unfortunately, not all of it is. Obviously drawing on some of its inspirations (B-movies now decades old), the text sometimes falls back on stale, uninteresting jokes about gender or ethnicity—a problem exacerbated by the fact that the characters are mostly flat, serving as types rather than people. With a kind of comedic horror vacui, the text fills space with jokes no matter their quality: a plain and simple fart joke falls flat, taking up far too many pages. And so does a more metafictional joke, in which the editor takes an extended detour to explain a choice of fonts. The problem might ultimately be that PUT A BUG IN YOUR EAR is bouncing off a technical challenge: it’s drawing not just on film, but on destructive monster movies, which more than other genres rely on visual spectacle. There’s just no perfect way to transmute the awe (and fun!) of a big silver-screen monster into prose, and the result leaves the reader wanting plenty more.
Though it may scratch an itch for dedicated aficionados, PUT A BUG IN YOUR EAR will, at its best, prompt readers to go off and watch the old movies that inspired it.
Sam Sumac’s PUT A BUG IN YOUR EAR wears its heart on its sleeve, but it can’t quite capture the fun of old-school movie magic.
~ Dan Accardi for IndieReader