Rating: 
Summary: I Smell A Rat
Review: A few years ago, I was lucky enough to meet Mike Nelson - everybody's favourite guy who talks to puppets - at a booksigning for what was his first book of essays: "Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese." No Crows or jumpsuits this time - it was just a mike and a cardigan. Anyways, after an evening of joking around and general tomfoolery, I got my copy signed and asked Mike what his next project was, and he said, he was working on a novel. So I said, right monkey boy, tell me another one. Well, I didn't actually say that...but the thought did cross my mind. But the man wasn't joking at all!So here's my take on the third in the "Mike Nelson's" series. It's not bad...it certainly has some great moments...but Mike doesn't hit one out of the park either. For a few reasons...maybe the most telling being that this is Mike's first book of straight-forward fiction. Whether it's MST3000 or his two books of essays, Mike's comedy bits have been great because they're just that...bits or short doses. Some of the book was amusing but some of it does tend to go on too long...almost like Mike seems hampered by having to stick to a conventional plot. And some take offs like those on Prince (aka King Leo) and Tom Clancy (aka Bunt Casey) seemed a little too obvious. In fact, the book reminded me an awful lot like Carl Hiassen's novels though not quite as successful. Don't get me wrong, I liked the book, I would've bought it anyways. I was just expecting a home run when I got a ground rule double.
Rating: 
Summary: If Hiaasen were Minnesotan and liked umlauts
Review: Anyone who likes Carl Hiaasen should like Mike Nelson's Death Rat. Instead of Hiaasen's south Florida, Mike Nelson pokes fun at the icons of Minnesota which, of course, are the only three Minnesota icons that one can think of: Prince, Garrison Keillor, and Jesse Ventura. Throw in a little Fargo and some Danish humor and you got Death Rat. (I didn't even know there was such thing as Danish humor: apparently it involves strange and bland food, words with umlauts, and naked men getting drunk in saunas).
As with any good farce, the plot is secondary to Nelson's stream of comedic riffs. Just like the wedgies that are the protagonist's greatest weapon: Death Rat is good clean fun.
Rating:
Summary: A good, solid piece of work.
Review: Before I start with the review, let me point out that I am a fan of Mike but not of his written work. His Megacheese got a solid four from me, while his later work, Mind Over Matters got a two. I figured his dive into the world of fiction would be a fresh start and it WAS. I found his plot, the idea of an author trying to break out of non-fiction history books into money-making novels about giant rats, interesting. Mike's characters were twisted and the city of Holey was very surrealistic. Within the page he attacks everything from fashion, pop and even the book industry. The art on the cover of the book screamed bad 50s movie. Very well crafted.
Yet I had to take a point away. Many of the jokes were like bad run on sentences that he couldn't bring to a proper ending. The flow, the very plot, got lost in the waves of humor he was trying to soak into the pages of the book. On top of all that the very ending seemed kind of rushed and very bland. Maybe it was too well crafted?
Maybe if he let Kevin Murphy co-write his next novel or...naaa.
Rating: 
Summary: Embrace the Rat!
Review: Death Rat is a fun, intelligent look at a group of well-drawn characters who struggle with fame and failure. The book's main foils, Pontius Feeb, Gus Bromstad and King Leo all handle being in the public's eye differently . Ponty, a good-natured history writer, comes across to the public as "a picture of someone's crazy uncle", while Gus BromstadÑ who is inwardly a mean-spirited, selfish authorÑworks hard to maintain his loveable, homespun facade. Also in the mix is King Leo, funk superstar, who has immersed himself so deeply in his public persona that his sanity is now in question. Mike Nelson hilarously and cleverly guides these characters through a bizzare series of events as they struggle to keep up appearances and what's hidden in them struggles to come out. Mike Nelson is like an unjaded, more sympathetic Kurt Vonnegut and his first novel is more than just a great, funny read. It's a also a heart-warming look at the struggle to be a successful artist and a real person at the same time.
Rating:
Summary: A gem of a book.
Review: I was skeptical at first of Mike Nelson's plan to delve into fiction. But I am happy to announce that I was more than blown away by this book. I now hope that Mike writes another humor novel. Death Rat reminds me a lot of the books by P.G. Wodehouse. There is a certain eccentricity to all of the different characters, but still a realization that these people could exist. My favorite chapter out of the whole book is when Jack, Ponty's front man, meets with the Prince simulacrum King Leo. I thought for sure that I was going to need an iron lung I was laughing so hard. It really is amazing how much this book can make a person laugh, snort, or just giggle idiotically; and still have a realistic twist to it (six foot giant rats aside). Also, being a Midwesterner I especially enjoyed the part where the Governor of Minnesota yells at the weatherman on the TV. Sounds like just about any Nebraskan dealing with the constantly changing weather. I'd just like to end by saying, get this book, get your friends to buy this book...
Rating:
Summary: Mike Nelson's greatest hit
Review: I'll admit up front I'm an unabashed partisan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and so I'm inclined to want to like anything produced by one of its alumni. And while I thought Mike Nelson's two previous books, collections of short essays, were pretty funny -- and I rated them highly -- there was something about them that didn't feel quite right. I think it must have been the format. Humor essays and short fictions always seem a little forced and artificial to me, and there was some of that in Mike's essays too. But with this novel, his first, I think Mike has found his natural genre. This is a very funny novel, but also a very well written one. The plot has a certain level of absurdity, but not too much: the characters are believable and the situation outlandish, but not so much as to challenge our suspension of disbelief. And it's also, as I say, quite funny. The story picks up steam at it rolls ahead and the situation slips beyond our hero, Pontius Feeb's, ability to control it. The people he encounters along the way include a fascinating bunch of characters, including many stolid Midwesterners, a few Danes somewhat out of their element, and some vaguely recognizable individuals like an action-hero Minnesota governor and a funkalicious singer with a large entourage and "royal" name. One of the elements of this story I liked best was that it, not unlike MST3K, never lost its essentially positive and optimistic worldview. No matter how far into the depths Ponty fell (literally, in the climactic scene), the humor and feeling of cheerfulness remained. I've praised Mike's characterizations, but I should note, too, his skill at descriptive narrative. Many of the funniest passages aren't dialogue, but rather Mike's scene-setting. I liked Mike's essays fine, but I'm not in a hurry to re-read them. But I am eager, now, to read Mike's next novel (making him only the second novelist about whom I'll say that). If I have one suggestion for next time, it would be that Mike or his publisher ditch the "Mike Nelson's..." prefix all his titles so far have included. Now that he's established a reputation as a novelist to watch -- and I think this title does that -- having his name on the cover twice seems like an unnecessary conceit. Well done, Mike.
Rating:
Summary: Slow start, but worth the ride
Review: Michal J. Nelson's latest foray into literary humor, "Mike Nelson's Death Rat!", is one of those books that starts slow, but begins to pick up steam once the scheme of having another man stand in for the aging Pontius Feeb (and accidentially selling the story of a six-foot-rat as NON-Fiction) is hatched, and the attendant efforts of a Garrison Keillor-type (actually, the mental image I had of him was more Patrick F. McManus or that guy with the hat on "The Red Green Show") to unveil the truth. I picked up this one because, as a huge MST3K and Mike Nelson fan, I looked forward to his attempt at fiction. I immensely enjoyed "Mind Over Matters" and "Movie Megacheese", so this was a bit of a no-brainer...when I finally got around to buying it, months after publication. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the novel's absurdities and thinly-veiled caricatures of various Minnesotans (Keillor, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Prince), and the story flowed along well. Now as to why I didn't give it 5 stars: There's an element of clumsiness to the book overall, as if Nelson is trying to cram too many knick-knacks about Minnesota or the Midwest mindset to bother with any hint that readers might just not care. There were whole paragraphs which could have been excised, but what little distraction these provided was negligable overall. I think my view might be tempered by the fact that the first few chapters seemed overwrought in absurdity, and I really didn't feel comfortable with the book until about the first hundred pages or so. I have to dock it a star for that, but the book as a whole is worth it for any MST3K fans.
Rating:
Summary: Not Only for Mike Nelson Fans
Review: Mike Nelson proves two things with this novel: One, that he has a touch for comedic writing, and Two, that he can find life in old chestnuts of a plot. Here he takes a plot that has seen many an incarnation and turns it into something that becomes quite compelling to read. It concerns one Pontius Feeb, a sixty-year old writer of arcane historical books who suddenly finds himself unemployed when his publisher folds its book division. He suddenly finds there is absolutely no market for his kind of books, so in desperation he turns to the sort of writing of the Nelson DeMille - Tom Clancy - Clive Cussler school. But he is deemed too old to make an effective author, so he recruits a college student to pose as the author, with hilarious results. It has all the makings of Preston Sturges, except that Nelson doesn't supply us with an ingénue. Much better than the stuff he made fun of on "Mystery Science Theater 3000", this is the sort of novel you'll remember bits and pieces from long after you've read it. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: What do you expect from a book named "Death Rat"?
Review: MIKE NELSON'S DEATH RAT is the story of an aging history writer who decides to write a thriller after being inspired by the assembly line of Tom Clancy hardware-stories. But in order to appeal to today's discriminating book-reader who bases their purchases on what the author's bio picture looks like, author Pontius Feeb decides to hire a young, rugged-looking young man to claim authorship of the work. Naturally, hilarity ensues when the publishers accidentally market the book as a non-fiction tome, which is complicated by the fact that Feeb has a written a story about a supernatural giant rat. This short summary should give you at least a glimpse into the madness that lies within this book. I was a fan of Mike Nelson's first two collections of essays (MIKE NELSON'S MOVIE MEGACHEESE and MIKE NELSON'S MIND OVER MATTERS) as well as his work on the late, great "Mystery Science Theater 3000". Nelson's distinctive style is all over this book, which is most welcome. His narrative voice is unmistakable; I could imagine some of the paragraphs coming straight from an unused skit or riff on MST3k. Remember during the MST3k host segments how every secondary character was played by the same handful of actors? There's something similar going on here, but it's more concentrated than that. All the characters act like aspects of Mike Nelson. There's Mike Nelson as the confused old man; Mike Nelson as the young college boys; Mike Nelson as a country yokel; Mike Nelson doing a Jesse Ventura impersonation; etc. This, of course, isn't a bad thing, just a little confusing at times. Mike Nelson is a funny, funny man, so anything that brings more of him into the novel can only be considered a good thing. Nelson's prose style is highly amusing. He has a wonderful knack of taking small ordinary pieces of human interaction, blowing them up to cosmic proportions, and then deflating them with a clever turn of phrase. He's so effective at this, that I actually found it a bit distracting at first. It seemed to me that the humorous plot was being tripped up and slowed down by the language quirks and the diversions. After a few chapters though, I settled in and was able to adjust to Nelson's writing style. The plot is entertaining, the prose is grin-inducing, the characters are hilarious and the satire is wonderful. I get the impression that because I don't live in or near Minnesota, I may have missed a few of the celebrity skewerings. However, there's more than enough funny material here to keep me happy. I laughed out loud many times while reading this, which is the best judge of whether a comedy book has succeeded.
Rating:
Summary: Good writing, oddly pale plot
Review: Pontious Feeb, writer of obscure history books, finds himself without a job and sharing a house with college students a third his age. Desperate for cash, he writes an competent action-adventure novel, but finds himself unable to make a sale because publishers don't think the meek 60 year old would look good on the dust jacket or on book tour. He resorts to deception to get it published, starting a downward spiral that eventually results in the Governor of Minnesota, a beloved local author, and a team of crack Danish spies gunning for him. MST3K alumn Mike Nelson has interesting characters and humorous incident down cold, but the story as a whole left me a bit disappointed. The notion of a nebbishy author hiring an handsome young actor as his public face has a lot of potential, but rather than stay the course of sticking it to the publishing industry Nelson moves the action to rural Minnesota. Not a must read, but probably worth a look if you want something light and funny.
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