I appreciate beauty, prose and darkness in my fiction. The authors I have highlighted prove this, but I have another love – humor. Humor, sarcasm and witty banter have been integral in my life as I consider myself a pretty funny guy with some chops for improvisation. I have a drag queen’s tongue, so I appreciate a mind with an asinine sense of humor and unsavory jokes. R.J. Astruc is a writer who delivered everything I love in humor and left it in my lap with a pretty bow.

I read Astruc’s “A Festival of Skeletons” back in 2010 (I can’t believe four years have come and gone already) and thought it to be one of the most hilarious novels I have ever read. Provided my reading in humorous fantasy ends with Pratchett, I couldn’t not compare it to the master of funny as I laughed uncontrollably (something I used to do when reading Pratchett as a teen). However, the difference between Pratchett and Astruc is the edge to her humor. She takes her comedy one step further and touches upon genuinely unfunny topics such as cannibalism, massacres or serial killers. Admittedly, violence has been a comedic subject for ages, but what Astruc succeeds at is to keep the danger and thrills at the core of it.

I want to provide my favorite dialogue from the novel: Continue reading »