Johnny awakes. A puppet looms over his bed.
He recognizes the furry Grandpa was its puppeteer on the children’s television show R-City Street. But Grandpa went missing a year ago. He disappeared from this very apartment building, which was converted from the old R-City Street studio.
Desperate to see Grandpa again, Johnny follows the puppet inside the building’s walls, ever deeper into a puppet-infested labyrinth…
People don’t usually understand why I don’t like the Muppets, but this guy gets it. Helps that the author has a deep-seated fear of them, actually.
The puppets are too clever by far and get our protag, Johnny, into the fucking walls to jumpstart to Puppet Apocalypse. Somehow you sit there, aghast at the imagery, wondering, fucking puppets? while someone gets fuckin’ vored. Yeah, I said it. Reddo (the stand-in for Elmo) unhinges his little monster jaw and swallows a grown man whole, folding him in half in the process.
The book is quite good. It’s an exploration into self-destructive grief and the lengths one would go to to get back the feelings of being safe with a loved one. It doesn’t veil this, but the structure of the labyrinth is a nice backdrop for the intensifying dread of realizing that death is forever, and the person who is gone will never come back.
Plus, Johnny starts the fucking Puppet Apocalypse.
