cover image RED MEAT CURES CANCER

RED MEAT CURES CANCER

Starbuck O'Dwyer, . . Midnight, $22.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-9721624-5-6

O'Dwyer certainly picks a rich target for his satiric debut novel, but this sendup of the fast food industry has a lot of empty calories, including enough sophomoric humor to make many readers gag. Sky Thorne is the 46-year-old director of corporate communications for Tailburger, a fast food outfit whose primary product is a waistline-busting fried burger slathered with mayonnaise. Faced with the prospect of selling the product in a world of low-fat, slimmed-down fast food choices, not to mention a class-action law suit, Thorne ditches the high road and concocts a new ad campaign that emphasizes the raunchy, hedonistic culinary excess of the Tailburger. The campaign draws ire from several quarters, notably the comely but strident Muffet Meaney, leader of the antimeat lobbying group S.E.R.M.O.N. (Stop Eating Red Meat Now), whom the widowed Thorne is trying to bed. Thorne's comically unscrupulous boss, CEO Frank Fanoflincoln, is threatening to fire him, and that possibility only becomes more likely as public relations catastrophes pile up: a gargantuan Belgian pro basketball player, who's just signed an endorsement contract but who dies of a heart attack after bingeing on Tailburgers ("Belgians in body bags don't sell burgers, Thorne"); a scandal that ensues when Thorne runs Tailburger ads on a porn site; a legal setback from an E. coli incident and a bribery fracas with a legislator named Plot Thickens. O'Dwyer's humor is considerably less sophisticated than Christopher Buckley's, but there are some undeniable gutbusters buried here. And with plot twists like these, he deserves points for sheer chutzpah. (Dec.)