A Man Made Entirely of Bats
by Patrick Lenton
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Pub Date 1 Mar 2015 | Archive Date 10 May 2016
Description
RYAN O’NEILL
‘Despite – or, perhaps, because of – a recurring preoccupation with the television show Friends, A Man Made Entirely of Bats is a consistent laugh-riot.’
SIAN CAMPBELL, Scum Mag
A Man Made Entirely of Bats is a collection of short stories and flash fiction by one of Australia’s newest voices. Comedic and absurd, these stories are an entertaining exploration of the concept of super heroes and of the super strange in our world.
This is well written silliness. ‘Radiocative Jerk’ tells of a man bitten by a jerk who gains the exponential strength of ten jerks. ‘The Insomni-Yak’ tells of a man who can’t sleep and is visited by a well-meaning yak every night.A Note From the Publisher
Patrick Lenton is a playwright, fiction writer and blogger at The Spontaneity Review. He was a Finalist in the 2013 SOYA Awards and was shortlisted for the 2015 Scribe Nonfiction Prize. His play 'Sexy Tales of Paleontology' won the Sydney Fringe Best Comedy Award. He writes The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge for Going Down Swinging. His writing have appeared in Junkee, The Best Australian Stories, Scum Mag, Voiceworks, Seizure and The Lifted Brow. He tweets @patricklenton.
Advance Praise
The debut collection by writer, playwright and possible mad scientist Patrick Lenton pulls apart icons of 21st-century pop culture and reassembles them in an ungodly mixture of satire, fan fiction, noir, schlock horror and absurdist humour. In these tiny stories, vignettes and sketches, Lenton takes common metaphors, one-liners and eye-watering puns and riffs on them, teasing out sublime and ridiculous worlds filled with second-rate superheroes, rogue FBI agents and washed-up sitcom stars. In the opening story, ‘Mooncat’, the protagonist, who inexplicably turns into an unpleasant ginger cat every full moon, tries to turn his condition to his advantage. In ‘Sheila Discovers Magnetism’, a woman believes love to be a form of magnetic force and carries iron filings in her hand to gauge attraction. In ‘Insomni-Yak’, a man unable to sleep enlists the help of … well, take a guess.
Lenton’s writing is confident, witty and unashamedly fun, playing with genre tropes and narrative conventions. A number of pieces in A Man Made Entirely of Bats take the form of monologues, lending them the rhythm and cadences of stand-up comedy. Like any comedian, some jokes land better than others, but the delight Lenton takes in wordplay and narrative experimentation is infectious, and there are frequent moments that are laugh-outloud hilarious. But there are moments of poignancy and melancholy too, and juxtaposed against the overall playfulness and strangeness of the collection, these moments, when they come, knock the wind out of you.
Alan Vaarwerk is the editorial assistant for Readings Monthly.
‘I love Patrick’s stories because he seems to think a bit differently to everybody else. He strolls down the shoreline picking up seashells and gold coins and gemstones as well as bottle caps, discarded pantyhose, broken dreams and crisp packets and he makes them all play together in his wild sandcastle. Patrick is a bit like a child who knows way too much and also has a degree in poetics. Do not read this on the bus if you have a primal fear of laughing loudly in front of strangers.’
ZOE NORTON LODGE (Story Club, ABC TV's The Checkout & The Media Circus)
"The best thing about Patrick Lenton is
that he’s not writing for you. There’s an unselfconscious enjoyment in his
characters and scenarios, their bizarreness laced with blackly comic puns and
phrasing. Where so much laboured humour is built for a market, Lenton
entertains by happy accident."
GEOFF LEMON, Going Down Swinging
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Available Editions
| EDITION | Ebook |
| ISBN | 9781925052121 |
| PRICE | A$4.99 (AUD) |
Average rating from 8 members
Featured Reviews
Joel S, Reviewer
Playful, Strange, Darkly Comic and Surprisingly Touching
It seems to me that it is exceptionally hard to write quirky bizarro stories properly. It can't be just wild and crazy characters and it can't be just random slice and dice. Each story has to have an underlying point, or point of view, and all of the moving parts have to fit together and complement each other, even if they initially appear to be unrelated. It can't be labored and it has to be nimble. Sort of like insane haiku. Once it gets heavy or complicated or dense or it requires too much explanation, (or heaven forbid it gets all twee and cutesy), then it collapses under its own weight.
All of this is the long and tedious way of getting to the fact that most of Lenton's stories work most of the time. A were-cat throws off a lot of one-liner cat attitude that is at odds with its milquetoast attitude when it's back to being human. Wonder Woman spends time during her heroics to wonder about things. The vigilante crime fighter Man Made Entirely of Bats lives in a cave under the mansion of a billionaire industrialist, who doesn't know he's there. A guy bitten by a radioactive jerk becomes a super-jerk. The heads of all of the major religions play poker, because they are good at bluffing. In each story there is a joke, then jokes about the joke, then surprise twists that turn back on the original joke, and maybe a twist that stands apart from the joke.
And between the obvious jokes and the very sly jokes, all of a sudden, there is a poignant or melancholy moment that stands in opposition to the jokes and adds weight and depth, out of seemingly nowhere, to the silliness. What kind of book draws one to describe it as surreal, hilarious, generous, and tender - sometimes within the space of a few sentences?
Not to be nationalistically insensitive, but most of my experience, (generally of the happy sort), with Australian writers has been in the fields of Boys Own adventure, people slowly going nuts in the bush, and walking about with baby-eating dingoes. Elegant and playful absurdity is a refreshing surprise, and I'm all for it.
Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.
Stephen G, Reviewer
5 stars Excellent, funny, weird short stories Patrick Lenton has put together a selection of not-normal short stories. I enjoyed them very much although I must confess that the stories, even for science fiction/fantasy, are weird. For example, in one story, a man turns into a tree out of sadness. In another, a woman seeks magnetic love. And in a third, a superhero is made out of bats. Nonetheless I enjoyed the stories and recommend it for anyone who likes SFF.
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