Book Details

Wood's book is a collection of bite-sized stories blending biting social satire, cartoon-inspired craziness, cunning linguistics, and anti-book comedy. Offbeat yet literary, Wood's serious silliness is matched only by his silly seriousness as he dissects, skewers, and clarifies identity theft, the waning human attention span, crime, love, religion, obsession, partying, fear, cancer, quiet desperation, and dung beetles rolling the human race into tiny balls.

 

Book Excerpt


The Dung Beetle watched in fascination, his mouth a waterfall.
 
“What is this??!!” he demanded, mesmerized.
 
“The government,” Routine said enticingly. “The biggest pile of sh*t you’ll ever roll…and there’s one or more in every country, one more full of sh*t than the next…make no mistake, my friend, this is the cream of the crap.”
 
“Where is it?” demanded the Dung Beetle. Routine answered, and the next thing he knew he was driving the Dung Beetle at full throttle to Washington DC, the anticipatory drool of the Dung Beetle threatening to fill the car. During the ride, the Dung Beetle became silent, his mandible humming. When they arrived at The White House, it seemed that every Dung Beetle in the world must have been there…Routine gazed in fascination and horror at the sea of black exoskeletons, churning, writhing, 50 feet high…the Dung Beetle leapt from the car and joined the overwhelming throng as it moved as one toward the White House.
 
Had the event been televised, it would have garnered the most amazing ratings in history; however, the Dung Beetle army had laid waste to the whole of television (as well as print) journalism…only those present were witness to the surreal vision of the White House being toppled end over end by the Dung Beetle mass until it became a tiny ball, with only the President’s genitals and John Hancock’s signature from the Declaration of Independence visible.

 

About the Author

Jim Wood

Jim Wood arrived in America in 1376, and was told to come back after the country had been “discovered,” wrested from its native inhabitants, colonized, and rendered independent. Wood followed that advice and was born to a middle class couple in 1963 in central New Jersey. He led a happy and relatively uneventful childhood, which led to a more turbulent, angst-filled adolescence, which finally blossomed into an angry, confused, and bewildered adulthood masked by unending mirth. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in a house built in 1850 (474 years after his initial arrival in what would become America). He owns approximately 5000 78 and 45 rpm rhythm and blues records from the golden era of roots rock (1946-1954), and likes beer a whole lot, maybe too much.