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THE SHROUD OF THE THWACKER
by Chris Elliott
Miramax, October 2006
368 pages
$22.95
ISBN: 1401352456


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

THE SHROUD OF THE THWACKER includes mystery and time travel and a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour. Whether or not you like this sort of thing is another issue altogether.

In 1882, there was a murderer in New York City known as Jack the Jolly Thwacker (America’s answer to Jack the Ripper). He killed and gutted prostitutes and used their intestines as artwork. At the time, this was taking place no one realised that at each scenario left by the murderer were important clues to his identity.

It is left to fearless Police Chief Caleb Spencer, ex-lover Evening Post reporter Liz Smith, and Mayor Teddy Roosevelt to try to solve the murders. They are however thwarted at this. Then the Jolly Thwacker disappears, leaving the murders unsolved.

Fast-forward to 2005 where author Chris Elliott decides to try to discover the true identity of Jack the Jolly Thwacker himself. Digging through the clues again, Elliott is sure that he has found some new evidence that may help him ascertain the killer. His digging and perusal of the facts is all the information that he has until he comes across a something that appears to show a familiar face. Is it or is it not the Thwacker?

In THE SHROUD OF THE THWACKER, the plot leaps between present and past, with the author irregularly either moving the plot forward or talking to the reader. Elliott also uses the story to heap satire on a number of modern-day items; for example a kerosene-fired wooden cellphone in the 1890s and a proto-Internet (which can only be found in the penny arcades).

The book starts out interestingly enough and in fact, some of the silliness may count as entertaining, but it soon becomes dire. There are too many gags in this book for them to work. Nevertheless, if you are a fan of films like There's Something About Mary, Jackass, and American Pie and enjoy the sick humour of South Park then you will certainly be on the same wavelength as the author.

It is clear that the author was aiming for THE SHROUD OF THE THWACKER to be a parody of the Caleb Carr ALIENIST novels, but sadly, it does not work. Not only that, the book has been written at a level where he believes that the reader’s sense of humour is solely of the bathroom variety with the jokes becoming tiring after a while and unmistakably appealing to the lowest denominator.

This book is not even the remotest bit amusing. Talking about deliberately blinding orphans because the view from the orphanage is dreadful is not funny, neither are his repetitive and wearisome references to black people and culture. If anything, it comes across as quite racist and in fact awful.

THE SHROUD OF THE THWACKER has been compared to the humour present in Monty Python. As far as I am concerned, that is sacrilegious and one should not speak of the two in the same breath. Only read this book if you do not mind a heavy overdose of absurdity, and do not mind being hit over the head repeatedly with his lame and tired jokes that stop being funny once you have heard them. The author has tried too hard to impress readers with very little joy.

Reviewed by Ayo Onatade, November 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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