Go Go Girls of the Apocalypseposted by Chris · April 1, 2009 7:00 AM
Unlike most disaster/apocalyptic novels, Go Go Girls doesn’t have a single cause to the apocalypse. Instead, the world lurches from disaster to disaster, finally melting down into the familiar post-apocalyptic landscape that we all know and love. While this is happening, the hero - Mort - is hiding in a cave in the backwoods of Tennessee from his soon-to-be-ex wife. He gets a ringside seat to the meltdown via radio, but batteries soon burn out and he hunkers down to wait for the screaming to stop.
Nine years later, three men show up, scouting around his refuge, and end up dead. This gets Mort thinking, and he decides to rejoin what’s left of the human race. Unfortunately, Mort seems to be fairly clueless. He’s not a quick learner, and is immediately captured & tortured for the wonderful things he’s carrying. Conveniently, his captor is confronted by a fellow survivor, dressed as a cowboy. The captor ends up dead, the cowboy ( who calls himself Buffalo Bill) turns out to be a decent fellow, and Mort has a guide in the scary new world.
The two of them travel together to a nearby Joey Armageddon’s, where the author’s vision of the world really starts to take shape. Joey’s is a post-apocalyptic franchise operation - a combination go-go bar/trading post/hotel. There’s electricity, hot water, and booze - everything you’d want after civilization went to hell. Mort and Bill trade a bunch of Mort’s things, Mort gets ridiculously rich, then gets drunk, and decides to find his ex-wife. Apparently, she worked at this specific Joey’s, but she got a promotion and is working out of Joey Armageddon’s head office. Much adventure, horror, and humour are dispensed on the way to find her.
There are some good bits in this book. I like the idea of Joey Armageddon’s itself. Post apocalyptic franchise operations are a neat idea, but I’m thinking that they’d be difficult to set up. I also like the idea of civilization re-growing around commercial sites. After all, that’s the way our civilization grew in the first place. Some of the best bits in the book are presented as throwaways - for example, after everything has collapsed, Jack Daniels is still being produced and distributed. The tale of Fort Lynchburg had me giggling and nodding at the same time.
But I didn’t like everything in the book.
For one thing, one of the main features of a Joey Armageddon’s is that it has electricity. This is provided by a squad of more or less indentured bike riders, who provide motive power to generators attached to exercise bikes, charging banks of car batteries. I’m thinking that if you have the technological expertise to hook up generators to exercise bikes, wouldn’t you hook them up to a waterwheel instead? You don’t have to feed the river, after all.
Mort and Bill come across as a little bit shallow. I know - it’s a spoof, intended to amuse the reader, not to be a deep soul-wrenching exploration of survivor guilt. But I’d have expected a little more emotion on the part of Mort. He spends much of the first third of the book just trying to catch up to what has happened, let alone having any emotional reaction to it. Instead, he lurches from experience to experience, never showing much empathy for the people he meets. It’s like he’s on a ride, waiting to see what horror or adventure lies around the next bend. Instead of doing things, they’re happening to him, over and over again.
But none of these criticisms take away from my enjoyment of the book. I’d give it a solid 3 1/2 out of 5, for creativity and excitement.
filed under Books, Environmental, Nuclear War, Plague, Technology
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