Bad Monkeys » (Reprint)

Matt Ruff is the author of the critically acclaimed Set This House in Order as well as two previous novels, Fool on the Hill and Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder.

She says she's a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil. She says she's working with the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons—aka "Bad Monkeys."

Her confession lands her in the jail's psychiatric wing and earns her countless hours of poking, probing, and questioning by a professional. But is Jane crazy or lying?

Or is she playing a whole different game altogether?

The New York Times - Jonathan Ames

Along with the Salingeresque details, Ruff has animated Bad Monkeys with the spirit of Philip K. Dick, and he's borrowed a little seasoning from Jim Thompson and Thomas Pynchon. The ray gun is, naturally, pure Dick, and the fact that you root for Jane even though it becomes clear she's a sociopath is a classic Thompson touch. (See The Killer Inside Me and Savage Night.) And I felt Pynchon-like flourishes out of The Crying of Lot 49 in Ruff's elaborately conceived secret societies. The real debt is to Dick, though, in the way Ruff expertly plays with notions of what is real and what is illusion. Bad Monkeys, allusions aside, is highly entertaining. It moves fast and keeps surprising you. There are also some exciting and hallucinatory action sequences that are so skillfully written I felt as if I was watching the first "Matrix" movie, which I unabashedly loved.