The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse

Robert Rankin

The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse is sick. It's perverse. It's completely twisted. It's also quite funny. And well worth picking up.

Jack is a young man fleeing a life of mindless factory work, on his way to the big city, where (he's been told) he can make his fortune. After some trip-ups on the way, he gets there and finds out that the city, in fact, is populated with toys, with the majority of the humans being nursery rhyme characters who are retired, or semi-retired (Miss Muffet, for example, has a daytime talk show, and Tommy Tucker is still doing his thing). The problem is, someone's killing off those old nursery rhyme characters, and Jack, by befriending the bear of missing private eye Bill Winkie, gets caught up in trying to find the serial killer before any more nursery rhyme characters meet ironic ends.

The main problem the book has is that it's genre writing. What genre is subject to debate, certainly, but all the hallmarks of genre writing are here. One dimensional characters, plot herrings that should have been used satrically but weren't, chapter-ending cliffhangers, characters coming back from the brink (or over it) of death, etc. It's The Perils of Pauline with toys. For all that, it is funny, and if you've got a twisted sense of humor, you'll likely get a kick out of it.