Venus on the Half-Shell – Kilgore Trout (1974)

I won’t hold it against you if you like this book. It’s not for me to judge. I just ended up hating it, or hating that I was reading it. If you’re not familiar with it, or the name rings a bell, you’re like likely familiar with Kilgore Trout as the fictional author who pops into various Kurt Vonnegut stories and novels. He’s in Slaughterhouse 5, he’s in Breakfast of Champions, and God Bless You Mr Rosewater, among others. One of the lovely things about Kilgore Trout is that his books aren’t real. And that allows Vonnegut to invent a Kilgore Trout book for whatever need and purpose might arise in his writing. It’s usually brilliantly applied, and when done adds to the novel you’re reading. It’s like the weird robot cartoon from season three of Fargo (which I still really like) and I think this robot story is based at least in part off of Trout.

Well anyway, I guess in the early 1970s Philip Jose Farmer, of Riverworld fame, decided he was going to write a book as Kilgore Trout, and then he did. The story goes that Vonnegut sort of understood (possibly incorrectly) the request to write the book as a kind of “I’m going to do it no matter what” and gave in. Apparently he hated it (and I think for good reason). It did take me down a little wormhole of looking up books written and published in the real world as if by fictional authors from tv shows, movies, and novels. I don’t want to read any of these, so if you do, have fun. One of the reasons I love Misery by Stephen King is looking at just how goofy the snippets of the books are. Sometimes fictional books in other works do seem really cool, and when that hidden text is part of the whole of the book — after all, we have the brilliant perfection of Pale Fire — we’re better off, and sometimes we’re not. No one, including you or me, needs to read the Hank Moody novel God Hates Us All, I promise.