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I suspect that my (ongoing) ignorance of Poe's original Pym blinds me to some of the gags/moves Johnson uses, but he does good work to explain enough through the narrator that I bought in. What a weird, enjoyable book. I've been hiding in it instead of doing work for a week or so. Basically, an African-American scholar gets fired for not being black enough/being obsessed with Poe's only novel, inherits money through a groaning plot device, then uses the money to fund an expedition to Antartica to find ... I don't remember what ... but then he finds a race of weird ultra-white hominids who semi-accidentally enslave him (and all the other people on the mission, who are all not coincidentally fellow African Americans). And then kind of an action movie ensues, which involves a satire of the painter Thomas Kinkade who lives in a biosphere in Antarctica. Also at some point the rest of humanity dies off-camera. It's very funny, not as weird as it sounds when you're in the middle of it. The novel mechanics were a little slapdash, and some of the characters seem like coathangers for jokes, but i actually laughed while reading it and was very sad when (spoiler alert) ....
the one sympathetic ice monster accidentally died from eating rat-poison-laced pudding. RIP augustus
the one sympathetic ice monster accidentally died from eating rat-poison-laced pudding. RIP augustus