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It's a savage and funny book, like Fahrenheit 451 meets Revenge of the Nerds, with a little Oprah's Book Club mixed in. It's a Fight Club for bookworms.
Bookstore clerks stage a violent revolution in Corey Redekop's Shelf Monkey
Corey Redekop met with Uptown to talk about his novel Shelf Monkey at a Starbucks.
It's an appropriate venue to talk about his debut novel because he wrote a big chunk of it while at working for the coffee-store chain.
Shelf Monkey (ECW Press) tells the story of Thomas Freisen, a failed lawyer and depressed book lover who finally lands the perfect job - a sales clerk in a big-box bookstore.
But there's disenchantment in the stacks. His fellow employees, also bibliophiles, are fed up with a corporate mentality that pushes profit over quality, so the Shelf Monkeys, as they call themselves, get together by moonlight to attack the books they hate.
Things get crazy and even violent when they learn that their arch enemy, TV-talk-show host Munroe Purvis, is coming to town. Purvis has a company that publishes the worst books in the world, crap he promotes ruthlessly on his talk show. The Shelf Monkeys concoct a plan that reveals what violence mild-mannered book lovers are capable of.
It's a savage and funny book, like Fahrenheit 451 meets Revenge of the Nerds, with a little Oprah's Book Club mixed in. It's a Fight Club for bookworms.
"It does get dark. I wasn't intending for it to get that dark," Redekop says, laughing. He adds that the book's plot took some turns that surprised even him, but everything was all right in the end.
"I had an ending in mind, but I didn't know how to bring it about. But that's what I like about it," he says. "I tried to make it lighter, but, as Stephen King said, or someone said, 'You don't finish writing a book - you abandon it.'
"It's like what you say to a child: 'Get out and get a job. Start supporting yourself, you bum!'"
Redekop, who just took a new job as administrator of the library in Thompson, admits that he reads trash now and then, but like the Shelf Monkeys he believes that good books are important.
"Of course they are, but (the Shelf Monkeys) take it to extremes. They take themselves too seriously," he says of their nocturnal book chats. "It's not an anti-book club. It's an anti-bad-book club. It's a book club taken to its logical conclusion. They have fun in their own way and they're not hurting anyone - for a while anyway."
The Shelf Monkeys eventually hatch a plan to take out their nemesis, and Thomas is swept up in their revenge fantasies, shocked at what bookstore clerks can dream up.
"People are interested in different things," Redekop says, pointing out that that's something the Shelf Monkeys seem to have trouble accepting. "It's important to keep your mind open to things.
"I know people who never read and they're happy. They're good people."
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