Mount Toberead 13 - Emperpr Mollusk Versus The Sinister Brain by A. Lee Martinez

That title is a mouthful even for the mind that brought readers Gil's All-Fright Diner.

Gil's All-Fright Diner was A. Lee Martinez's debut novel, it was also the first one I read, and in my mind easily remains his best work.

Martinez is an interesting author in this day of multi volume series and trilogies, he writes standalone novels. To date he has not written a sequel to any of his books, including Gil's All-Fright Diner, which just screams for a sequel. He also likes to jump genres and sub genres. In some cases they're a mix up of things which makes classification next to impossible, Personally, I think Martinez just likes doing it to annoy people who want to put everything in a neat little box.

Over time, though, even the most fertile of minds can run a bit low on inspiration, and I think Martinez hit that wall with Emperor Mollusk Versus The Sinister Brain.

It's not a bad idea at the heart of it. It's a sort of pulp science fiction riff (something that seems to be enjoying a new rush of popularity at present) about the Neptunon self proclaimed Emperor of Earth (or Terra as our planet seems to be known) and the greatest threat he's even faced.

I'm sure Mollusk was meant to be both entertaining and amusing, but he somehow managed to be neither and became one of the most unlikable heroes I can remember encountering. One of the big problems was that he was too perfect and had the desire to try and turn everything into a joke. This made him look like a try hard. The perfection thing also worked against the story, because it very soon became clear that no matter how dire the situation, nothing would happen to Mollusk.

I felt that had Mollusk's much put upon bodyguard the Venusian warrior Zala been the central character and narrator that the whole thing would have worked a lot better.

While I've read a few A. Lee Martinez books that I wish had sequels, this isn't one of them.

I'll be skipping the letter N, because I just don't have anything that fits for this particular idea, and going straight to P.