Resume with Monsters

Philip Kenan has moved to Austin, Texas, in an effort to win back his estranged girlfriend, Amelia. Since at Micromeg, their previous workplace, he once tied her up and hid her in a mail cart, she is not inclined to get back together. But Philip was saving Amelia and indeed the world from the incursion of The Old Ones – Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Dagon, and rest of the slimy crowd from the works of H.P Lovecraft. Unfortunately for Philip, his heroic efforts look remarkably like complete mental breakdowns to the outside world.

In Austin, Philip works for Ralph's One-Day Resumes handling a job for which he is over-qualified. Amelia works for the Pelidyne Corporation, which is housed in a building of black glass and odd angles that suggests to Philip that it might be the next site of an incursion of The Old Ones. When he gets a temp job at Pelidyne he discovers that he is right.

Spencer's novel is laugh-out-loud funny, told in a voice finely tuned to the absurdities and indignities of the modern workplace. Here he describes what was actually one of Philip's better past jobs.

The research library was located in the basement of a gravy-colored, three-story brick building that squatted in the middle of a parking lot, its tiny windows glittering like eyes of a mechanical spider…it was inhabited by unhappy people: secretaries who had lost all hope, narrow-shouldered men in cheap suits who lived in fear of being fired, fast-striding men in better suits who lived in fear of dying before they had fired their quota of timid underlings, and the real bosses, grim, self-assured men, ever vigilant to screw before getting screwed.

When Philip is reduced, after some time in a mental ward, to seeking any kind of work he can find, he learns to decipher the want ads.

"Entry Level" meant a dismal minimum wage job that never evolved into anything else since even the toughest and most desperate employees lasted only a month before quitting. "Go-getters" were solicited for sales positions hawking products like life insurance and shared vacation time. "Must love people" was a clear warning that the customers were difficult, perhaps psychotic. "Industrious people" were requested to apply for positions at sweatshops filled with dispirited, bitter employees.

Philip could be referring to his job or the upcoming invasion of The Old Ones when he reflects, "The truth was too loathsome and ghastly to rest sedately in the limited, cloistered realm of human reason."

Spencer pulls out the stops and rises to dizzy Lovecraftian heights once the fabric separating our world from the Old Ones is rent. Lovecraft purists may not approve of this book, but it's immense fun for the rest of us.