Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! By Mykle Hansen
Blurb for the back cover:
“Like a train wreck that just keeps getting worse and you can’t look away from”
Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! is the heartwarming story of Marv Pushkin who wakes up on day to find his beloved SUV overturned and on top of him with his leg firmly planted under the car’s axle. It’s a good thing that the car landed that way too. You see, the axle is acting like a tourniquet and is preventing major blood loss from the nub that was his foot but was eaten by a bear. Thankfully, he always keeps a supply of various pills to kill pain, cure depression (you would be depressed too if you had lost a foot), and fix erectile dysfunction on him at all times. When Marv thinks that things couldn’t get any worse, they naturally do but he tries to keep his upbeat and positive attitude. Marv is a powerful business man, a supervisor, a natural leader. Once he gets out he will fire his subordinates, after all it is their fault he was is in this mess. All he wanted was a nice team building retreat and maybe for his wife to get eaten by a bear instead of him.
HABIEM is one of those books where you hate the protagonist. He has no redeeming quality and secretly the reason I kept reading was because I wanted this book to end badly and see him not get rescued because that is what he deserves. But having said that, I enjoyed this book. It’s like a train wreck that just keeps getting worse and you can’t look away from. Intertwined throughout his harrowing tale of being slowly eating is flashbacks relieving how he got himself in to this situation which adds some incite in to the mental state of Marv. Switching between flashbacks and the present, the reader gets glimpses of Marv’s personality then gets treated to his situation becoming worse.
The writing style in this book is different from traditional novels. It’s told as if Marv Pushkin was telling you the story of his life. At times it feels like being trapped in an elevator with him. Instead of reading a book it can feel like reading an internet blog with the occasional poor sentence structure.
I came across this book while wondering around the small press section of Powells (my new favorite section?). Mykle Hansen has written other books that I will now be forced to track down.