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I just completed reading Carlton Mellick III’s Cuddly Holocaust. If you want to know what I thought of it, carry on to the mildly spoilery paragraphs below:

This book was an awful lot like the first rock concert I ever attended. It wasn’t the first Bizarro book I had ever read, but it was the first by CMIII. And that is something guaranteed to wring your brain out and then soak it in a turpentine and lye solution known to make perfectly stable people go stark, raving, “The FBI recruited my pet hedgehog to spy on me,� mad.

The basic story idea is that intelligent toys get sick of humans treating them like inanimate objects and get their vengeance on Homo Sapiens in the usual manner � violent revolution and death camps, among other things you need to read to find out about.

Our heroine is a young lady with some personal reasons for wanting to fight back against the evil plushies, strong enough reasons to volunteer to be made to look exactly like one. That way she can more easily infiltrate them and do the job she needs to do.

There are nostalgic glances back at all sorts of toys we kids of the 70s and 80s grew up with, but I won’t spoil them here.

In a clever cartoon at the end, CMIII is asked by an irate chap what the story means. Carlton answers as best he can and comes up with responses that definitely ring true for me. I did have two further thoughts on what the insanity could mean.

1. That revolutions (and people) tend to be and/or become identical to those things they hate most.

2. Nostalgia is nice, but the past is deader than a Whiner (read the book, you’ll get it) so don’t live there.

The writing style is smart and savagely witty, by also breezy and feels like brain candy. You don’t realize until it is far too late to save you that the candy is made of a turpentine and lye solution. But, at that point, you don’t really want to be saved. You’ve been indoctrinated into Reverend Mellick’s Church of Screw Logic, Have Fun, and Break Your Brain. It is one faith guaranteed to make at least this lifetime much better. Highly recommended!