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Book Review: Cluck: Murder Most Fowl

I fretted about how to begin this review for hours. I was afraid that if I came right out with the basic premise—how a boy with a very special gift is whisked away to a chicken-obsessed secret society in France to learn the fine-points of poultry exorcism, and then gets tested years later in an extremely haunted farm house infested with ghost-chickens—you would probably laugh out loud, then go on your merry way without even considering the idea of reading the book, and that would be a shame.

But, readers of this blog know good quality entertainment when they see it (obviously) and I know they will give it a chance; besides, who could resist a novel featuring a zombie Rooster King and his army of phantom hens?

Cluck is extremely well-written and is story-telling at its best. Author Eric D. Knapp shows his skills by successfully blending the difficult combination of humor and horror without the whole thing unraveling into something stupid. This is not so easy to do as I’ve seen with other novelists attempting this type of thing; the humor tends to clash with the horror and the author tragically turns it into something really dumb. Not so with Knapp; he grabs you on page one and doesn’t let go until the last zombie-chicken is plucked.

However, be forewarned: sections of this novel get down-right spooky! I get the sense that Knapp, who studied English and writing at the University of New Hampshire and the University of London, could have easily written a successful main-stream horror novel without so much as breaking a sweat. The opening scene of Cluck so vividly describes the creepy mouth of hell that I literally had goose-bumps forming on my arms.

Luckily for me, Knapp also crafts several scenes throughout the book which are absolutely hilarious. In particular, I enjoyed the exchanges between the book’s hero, Armand, and “The Charge,” a friendly but wise-cracking supernatural entity inhabiting his body. I defy you to suppress the laughter when these two (sharing the same body) disagree.

In the book’s final battle, Armand must face a very powerful Dead Rooster (yes!), “The largest rooster, living or dead, ever known to walk the face of the planet.”

Cluck: Murder Most Fowl is independently published so there’s no telling how long it might still be available. It is not, to my knowledge, available in any brick-and-mortar bookstores, so you will have to order it from Amazon or some other online bookseller.

CLICK HERE TO GET IT FROM AMAZON

One thing is certain: Cluck is completely original. You will not find anything like it anywhere and probably never will.

Cluck: Murder Most Fowl
Author: Eric D. Knapp
Illustrator: Ian Richard Miller
Published by: Booksurge
340 pages
Available only in Paperback

They are finally running the 2009 Honda Pilot commercial I worked on and mentioned in a previous post. I saw it myself this morning on–you guessed it–CNN (do they love me over there or what?). The commercial involves a Good Samaritan (driving a 2009 Honda Pilot) who encounters a recently-landed hot-air balloon blocking the road. The occupants of the balloon are in need of a lift and the Good Samaritan offers them a ride but is surprised to discover they are a group of elderly nudists.

You can’t see me on camera, but I am actually hiding behind the balloon basket with an inflation fan which I am using to fill the envelope with air just before they start to roll the camera. Given the short length of the commercial you wouldn’t guess I had probably filled that thing at least 50 times!

Side note: For those of you looking for my review of Cluck, I’m still reading it. I know it’s taking me forever to get finished, but it’s because I keep getting bombarded with actual paid-work which I can’t ignore. Anyway, I’m hoping to finish reading the book tonight and hopefully I’ll have a review up tomorrow.

Photo credit: riptheskull

WEEKEND PLANS ABORTED. The plan was to take a few days off, mix up a pitcher of margaritas, relax on the back porch and finish reading Cluck: Murder Most Fowl. The trouble was that the temperature here in the beautiful wine country of southern California shot up to over eight-million-degrees–or, in the real world, about 102 F (39 C), and it was way too hot to sit out there and read. I think I even heard some grapes popping on the vines.

Anyway, I really needed to get this reading done because I had promised Eric Knapp, author of Cluck, that I’d get a review of his book posted this week. Lucky for me, the temperature is supposed to back-off to 86 F (30 C) today which should be just fine for reading in the shade. I am only about half-way through the book, but I should be able to finish it today and have the review posted by Thursday.

Over the weekend, while I was stuck inside watching cartoons and sipping margaritas, a thought occurred to me: after all the extra traffic from the CNN story, I wonder how many of the new visitors converted to RSS feed subscribers? I don’t really push the RSS feed subscriptions, but with all those extra visitors you would think at least some of them would do it.

Some of them did: Two of them.

I always wondered why my feedcount looked so anemic compared with other, similar blogs. I guess part of it can be chalked-up to the fact that I just haven’t been around for very long; but, it still seems like I should have more subscribers. So, I did a little research and discovered something very interesting that made me feel a lot better.

…and, I doubled my feedcount in 24 hours.

I’m not going to get too much into the inner workings of WordPress except to tell you that there are several RSS feeds hiding in there and if you use feedburner it just adds another one. What this means is that there are feed subscribers scattered all over your blog, some of which you probably don’t even know about, and the feedburner feedcount displayed on your blog is probably only a fraction of the actual number of subscribers you have.

If you operate a self-hosted WordPress blog there is an easy solution. Feedburner has acquired “Feedsmith,” a plugin originally developed by Steve Smith that takes your maverick RSS feed subscribers and converts them all to Feedburner subscribers.

Installation is a breeze, just download the plugin, unzip, pop it into your plugins folder, activate it, and then set it up with your feedburner RSS address in your WordPress dashboard.

DOWNLOAD FEEDSMITH FOR WORDPRESS

FEEDSMITH INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

Remember, Feedburner updates their stats only once a day so you might have to wait as long as 48 hours to see the full results.

A few notes:

1) obviously if you are a blogspot blog this does you no good, however, it’s probably a safe bet that “blogger” blogs already convert all the RSS feeds (I would be a little surprised to find out that Google doesn’t incorporate this technology into their own blogging platform).

2) This is not yet available for WordPress.com blogs—hopefully they will get around to it at some point.

3) I got to thinking that some bloggers may want to keep some of the feeds separate. If that’s you, there is a hack I found by Abhijit Nadgouda that might do the trick.

4) When I first started this blog (January 1st, 2008) I didn’t immediately start out using Feedburner (I didn’t even know what Feedburner was at that point), so that may account for my unusually high gains–mileage may vary.

Note: If you want to help get Dead Rooster’s feedcount up to a respectable, display-worthy level, you can subscribe to my full RSS feed by clicking the orange RSS Subscription button at the top of the sidebar at right. You know you want to!