The Jolly Coroner: A Picaresque Novel by Quentin CanterelMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Bring your thesaurus you will need it. The language is descriptive but obscure.
It was challenging to get into the book and characters; Billy Rubino is a very unlikeable protagonist. He is the Hokum town coroner by default and spends most of his time alternating between being unpleasant, relaxing with Asian porn, and trying to become the next media sensation. Billy does not take his job seriously; he creates nonsensical stories to explain events at crime scenes and is anything but jolly.
The Jolly Coroner reminded me of an art film. It has a lot to say, and the audience is either going to love it or hate it. Something made me press on till the end, perhaps it was the quirky character studies or the novel within a novel about the schoolteacher, or the macabre humor. The payoff was ultimately worth it if only for the immersion in the satirical world created by Quentin Canterel.
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