Cynically Sweet (Booklikes)

Giant Land Octopus by George L. Cook III begins in 1999 when a bunch of octopi fall off the back of a truck. A pet shop owner claims them for himself after he finds that the real owner doesn't want them. Unfortunately they've been mutated by scientists and the outcome is not good. A ten year old boy, John, is looking for a new pet. Thinking it's just a normal Caribbean Pygmy Octopus, he buys it from the pet shop, takes it home and calls it Neptune. Fifteen years later, we find it wrecking Lolo, the fictional town in Texas.

It was a good idea in theory, an octopus that can survive out of water and it eats people and stuff. However, I don't think that the story has been well executed at all. The author has decided that it's primarily meant to be a silly story. Even for a parody it's excessively silly. The humour isn't funny to me; they're just "jokes" taken right from other media and stuck in this book without a real understanding of setting up real humourous situation. It's a bit difficult to explain, but essentially the jokes don't fit in. They're not funny to me and the author just sticks them in whenever he feels like it. The characters are all pretty poorly written as well. I think the author has done the same as with the jokes; he's taken a lot of built up characters from other media and stuck them in the story, which is why they're all so generic. There's the big kid with no friends, police officer who has nothing to do until his part of the plot, someone to fall ridiculously in love with a main character for no conceivable reason and even an incredibly smart scientist who is actually so stupid that it's just cringe-worthy. The plot is also something that's been derived from and follows quite closely to other productions of the same nature.

Like I commented earlier, it's a good idea in theory. However, the story is pretty badly written and lacks any real creativity on the author's part. It's just so generic. Apart from that, there are a few errors that could have been fixed with editing. Overall, I can see where the author was going with the story and what their intentions were, but it's not very well done. I would rate this as only one star, but it was bearable and not as bad as some of the other things I've read. So I rate it two stars.