Before he died, Saelig Zilch was a chef. Now, posthumously recruited by a shadowy agency for reasons still unknown, tasked with keeping the public safe from things that go bump in the night, he hunts monsters. Zilch scrabbles out of a North Carolina grave in someone else's body. Someone recently dead. He only has a few days to find his bearings and carry out his latest mission before the precious few nano-bugs in his corpse shell are exhausted and he's forced to start all over at the beginning. Lucky for him, as he trudges down a dusty backroad, he runs into Galavance. More accurately, she runs into him with her pink Chevy Cavalier. A case of unfortunate timing? Maybe not. Turns out the critter Zilch has been dispatched to dispatch of - a murderous were-frog - squelches uncomfortably close to the trailer Galavance calls home. And come to think of it, Galavance's boyfriend Jolby has been spending a lot of nights out lately...
Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2017 September #2 When a paranormal creature infiltrates a rural North Carolina backwater, a mysterious agency sends a dead guy to make things right, as one does.Young-adult novelist Post (The Siren House, 2016, etc.) jumps into the horror-comedy subgenre firmly pioneered by the likes of Christopher Moore, S.G. Browne, and Isaac Marion with this grotesque Southern gothic that's half Evil Dead, half Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil. Our hero, if you can call him one, is Saelig Zilch, formerly a chef and husband to a beautiful wife, Susanne, who is now dead. That's Zilch who's dead, not the wife. Of course he's the one who's deadâyou can't name a guy "Zilch" and not expect him to come to a bad end. But Saelig is trapped in an unending nightmare in which his mysterious "employers" capture his dead spirit, thrust him through some paranormal means into a freshly dead body, and reanimate it with nanobugsâover and over again. Cue the zombie hand leaving the grave. The first person that runs into Zilch is a local fast-casual restaurant waitstaff shift manager named Galavance who literally hits him with her car. "I tell you I'm a reanimated corpse sent back from the dead to hunt monsters, and you're fine with it...and you giggle?" remarks Zilch. Once they part ways, we meet Gal's circle of local losers, most notably her slimy stoner boyfriend, Jolby, and Patty, the shrewish and scheming owner of the restaurant. Saelig's gig is hunting lusus naturae, freaks of nature that invade the human species and wreak havoc, in this case a disgusting swamp-beast that can disguise its true nature. The action is somewhat pedestrian, but Post has a knack for the grotesque imagery of horror, whether it's Zilch casually entering a scene with his intestines wrapped around his neck like a scarf or a phantasmagorical plot to provide the restaurant with a very special ingredient. A squishy bit of pulp horror with a hero whose loneliness just complements his lifelessness. Copyright Kirkus 2017 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Post (Knuckleduster) serves up a succinct, frequently disgusting creature feature that will make readers laugh and gag in equal measure. Saelig Zilch is dead, and has been for a while, but working for a strange organization killing monsters gives him a new lease on life. Nanobugs with his essence are injected into a dead body, and he's assigned to track down a werefrog who's terrorizing a North Carolina town. Galavance Petersen isn't happy with her job at Frenchy's restaurant or her lazy boyfriend, Jolby Dawes, but she never could have imagined how Jolby has really been spending his free time, and her regional manager gives new meaning to the concept of the nightmare boss. After Gal hits Zilch with her car, they team up against a terror from the swamp that's turning more murderous by the minute. Some balancing pathos is provided in the form of Zilch's memories of his wife, Susanne. Readers may grow weary of Gal's opining that Jolby the jerk really isn't that bad (he is), and details about Zilch's employer are slim, but all in all, this darkly funny novel will appeal to readers who like gross-out humor balanced with just the right amount of existential angst. (Oct.)