The Day My Butt Went Psycho - A review.
Dedicated to my dearest frienemy, cranedance , who inflicted this book upon hobbitdragon as some form of demented joke for Christmas, without having read the thing in its entirety. Darling, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.
I shall begin with a gentle overview of what passes for this abomination's cover. Vertically juxtaposed, a bald cartoon faces off with the rounded cheeks of his own rectum, as a psychedelic green and gray spiral swirls in the background. "Best-selling author Andy Griffiths" the book proclaims, along with the title. On the back, a yellow and pink theme permeates as the main character once again squares off with his hindquarters, which have sprouted arms and legs. "An epic tale of one brave boy and his crazy, runaway butt," the tag-line announces, but refuses to stop there. "Can Zack save the earth from butts gone berserk? Can he defeat the biggest, ugliest, meanest butt the world has ever seen? More important - will Zack and his butt ever find true happiness? It's an adventure you and your butt will never forget!"
The premise of this book paints for the reader a vivid picture of an alternate universe where human beings, and their posteriors have apparently co-evolved, and share a symbiotic, and sometimes argumentative existence with each other. Dancing around themes of slavery and class, the story begins with the main protagonist's ass scampering out the window, farting on a cat, and rallying a crowd of butts in a football stadium ala hitler. There's a nefarious plot involving communal farting and a buttcano and global reassignment of heads and asses.
And regrettably, does not stop there. My inner twelve year old took over, and so I read on. After witnessing his butt oversee the relocation of a local buttcatcher's (yeah, they called them buttcatchers) head and hindquarters (The butts put the buttcatcher's ass on his neck, and his head in between his legs. Why yes, the man survived. Did I mention the butts can talk as well as sprout arms and legs?) the boy is given the gift of a pair of stinky socks, and sent on a quest to find a legendary butt-fighter and stop his butt's nefarious plan to stink humanity out of existence.
This, I imagine, is about where Crane stopped reading. Not as sensible as she, I continued to read.
Our hero knows about this famous butt-fighter, they have collectible cards of famous butt-fighters in this nightmare universe. Which, of course, means that he is a complete failure in the Junior butt-fighting league. And from there, the story follows a typical Animu adventure epic. Our hero gets attacked by kamikaze butts, who then create a clusterbutt, which he is then saved from by the daughter of the famous butt-fighter, and she proceeds to insult him at every turn while sweeping him away on her (you guessed it) butt-mobile. Only he cocks up their grand escape by throwing up on the windshield, and they're waylaid by butts until they are saved by a troupe of very, very fabulous butt-fighters ( I swear I'm not making this up) riding Flying butts. Their names are the Kicker, the Smacker, and the Kisser. Guess how they do battle. Butts explode.
Our hero relates his story to the quartet, who then rush the news to a butt shelter, which was apparently over-run by butts. They save the day, talk to officer Brown, and try to leave our hero there with a false butt, which they all apparently have, because real butts can't be trusted. And the false butts are self-wiping. And then they go on to destroy our hero's ass. He stows away, they run out of gas, they go to replace the gas-tanks, which our hero had brilliantly taken off the ship to fit into the cargo bay.
They crash in a Windy Desert, meet a crazy old guy who tells us that the desert is "Where old farts go to die." He smells seventeen different kinds of horrible, and collects and salvages old parts from downed buttmobiles crashed by unfortunate people who landed in the Windy Desert. They suffer Methane Madness, (the stench literally drives them bonkers, which of course cannot be distinguished from the rest of the insanity permeating the book) which the smelly man saves them from, and then he gives them HORRIFYING foodstuff. They cross the desert, are picked up by a tornado, and dropped like Dorothy's house into the Brown forest, where something called a Stenchgantor lives. They lure wild butts out of hiding and capture them using fluffy pink toilet-seat covers, (I'm not making this up, I swear, this thing was published, I read it!) and having saddled their ungainly beasts, use them to FLY over the forest. Not kidding. There was a paragraph dedicated to the mechanics of steering and controlling gas propulsion using corks.
Well, our hero's mount had a pimple on it. And in accidentally poking that instead of the cork, he careens out of control, lands in a bog, and has to be saved by the female lead. They BOTH end up in the bog, and then they meet Stenchgantor, the Great Unwiped Butt. And...(*sighs*) And the food the kid ate, gave him terrible gas. He saved both himself, and the girl, by launching them out of the bog via his explosive flatulence. Through a false butt. And into the enormous monster troll butt's cave.
The author then takes complete leave of his senses, and the next few pages involve the words "FII FIE FO FUTT--" (you can complete it, I'm sure you won't be far off) and LOVINGLY crafted descriptions of monstrous pimples on a blind butt who has a nostril in place of an eye. This, is probably the most well-written part of the book, and VIVIDLY DISGUSTING. The hero defeats the monster butt by taking off his socks, which are stinky enough to knock it senseless. There's some weak plot about The Kicker being a butt-sympathizer (aka, on the side of the butts, therefore trying to fuck up the mission) when the Kisser has obviously been the most fabulous and uh....sympathetic, toward the plight of the renegade butts. AND THEN THEY GET OUT OF THERE, BY POPPING ONE OF THE COLOSSAL ZITS ON THE OGRE BUTT, AND USING THE TRAJECTORY TO LAUNCH THEMSELVES OUT OF THE FOREST.
They then have to cross an ocean. With aquatic butt-life in it. Octobutts. And butt sirens. I wish I was kidding. The two main characters bond over the girl's sad story about how her mother was killed by....yeah, Butts. The Great White Butt, in fact. Who is apparently the REAL baddie behind all this. The hero is lured in by the siren song of the aquatic butts, there's a STORM, they have to ride poopoises (NO REALLY, POOPOISES,) and battle blowflies. And then they reach their goal, and this is about where my brain switched off, and I kept reading out of sheer will.
The plot continued to fart out (sorry) bad butt jokes, there was a supremely gay fight between the butt kicker and the butt kisser, the butt kisser was thwarted by the Smacker and the desert-hermit guy, and falls into the buttcano and is eaten by enormous butt-maggots or somesuch, and there was a face-off between the heroes and the REAL threat: a legendary evil butt called the Great White Butt, which was immortal and, you know...kind of an asshole. (*SIGH*) The main character's butt has a change of heart and reattaches itself, the Legendary butt-hunter father dude comes in and saves the day...except I guess the main character did too? By this point I was just a little over-saturated with how much fail I'd just subjected myself to.
There were some truly horrific descriptions of Skinning the Great white Butt and using it like a parachute, and the Legendary Butt-Hunter being away for most of the plot because he was on a top secret mission to thwart Alien zombie butts from Uranus. And everyone was happy again.
SO THIS BOOK HAPPENED. IT HAD A GLOSSARY, A PUBLISHER'S DISCLAIMER, AND IT IS PART OF A SERIES. AND I READ EVERY WORD OF IT.
*clears throat* Crane....what did we ever do to you? Moreover, what did Dean ever do to you? This book managed to pretzel -ME- in a few places, and you SPENT MONEY TO PURCHASE AND SEND THIS BOOK TO HIM? ....I mean sure, HE was smart enough not to read it, but this level of DO NOT WANT is -dangerous-, all the same. Like, on the level of toxic seepage. This is like giving someone dangerous quantities of Uranium for Christmas, dude! Come on, at least test the WHOLE product before assaulting the rest of us! I'm a seasoned atrocity tourist, and this makes the thing with the carebear bondage brutal monsterfuck look CUTE!