Disregarding nay-sayers, the cheese of B-movies and pulp fiction has had a strong effect on the world of fiction. Not only did they inspire Quentin Tarantino's movies, but they also had a major hand in nourishing the development of bizarro fiction and many other examples of cult entertainment. Jeff Burk's Super Giant Monster Time! took a lot of these plot elements to make possible, and it gives the reader the benefit of not only being slammed upside the head with the cheese hammer, but giving them three possible hammers to choose from - Si, a punk rock girl waking up to an apocalypse; John Smithe, an office worker filing reports during the apocalypse; and Gary Freedman (Half-Life reference?) whose company may have had a hand in the apocalypse.
In effect, Super Giant Monster Time! is a choose-your-own-adventure book for the current age that relies on camp from yesteryear. If old sci-fi, horror, and superhero fiction makes for tickling experiences, it helps that this book gives readers the way in which they will be tickled. Stabbing people with mohawk spikes, going on a tag-team superhero adventure with your cat to fight aliens and monsters, and undoing the fabric of one's own existence are only a few possible actions among many that breed feelings of "Oh hellz yeah." Even some of the failure outcomes can be entertaining, and while the spacemen get to be annoying after a while, it is interesting to roll a die and find out just what flavor of punk you are transformed into by their ray guns, and if you even survive after that. "But Ed," you may say, "please stop spoiling this book." It would be spoiling if it weren't for the 50+ possible endings, so everything said here only includes roughly the first few readthroughs, if that. So I'll halfway-spoil one more ending: one of them does not quite seem like an ending at first, only coming to light when the realization of a tedious loop forces you out of the page turning.
As for any complaints... wait a minute... waaait for it... um, too many "death" endings, I guess? They can be a bit frustrating and they often seem to shoehorn the reader in only a few directions when constantly having to return to earlier parts to pick solutions that further the plot. Also, the illustrations can be a bit hit-or-miss. While there are some very well-detailed ones, there are a few that seem out-of-proportion with other ones. For example, one character's chin (I won't say who) seems to change between one picture and another. And, while it's not a proportion thing, it was a bit weird to see John have a tie in one picture and no tie in the rest of the pictures when there's no mention of him taking his tie off.
Okay, so those complaints are token. Super Giant Monster Time! is simply too awesome to level any concerned criticism towards it. There may be some who would be turned off simply by the subject matter, but those people are no fun.
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