Hello Devilfish!

About the Book

Hello Devilfish! is a first-person (or first-fish) account of a giant blue Japanese movie monster stingray's attack on contemporary Tokyo and his tragic morph into human form. Using elements of Japanese shock-pop and the infamous Hello Kitty meme, the story is told in comic narrative from the stingray's point of view as he gleefully creams Tokyo into rubble. The stingray is soon pursued by Squidra, a love-struck giant squid. She demands love; he refuses. In an epic waterfront battle, she traps him in a human-growth hormone bath that changes him into a puny human - a reverse metamorphosis - monster to man. Refusing to accept his humanity, the stingray acts like his former giant self while trying to find food, shelter, romance - and avoid the destructive rampage of his stalker squid love interest. Hello Devilfish! is told in a readable, comic narrative occasionally spiced with Manglish words. Funny and very readable, underneath the outlandish plot is a truly fresh critique of contemporary culture and mainstream literature.

About the Author :

Ron Dakron is the author of the novels infra, Newt, Hammers, and Mantids. His work runs the gamut from surrealism to sci-fi pastiche, with a prose style that he describes as "haplessly Chicagoan and influenced by working class whites, African American slang and Yiddish comedy." His novels explore differing styles of poetic prose, from Romaticism, to cubism, B-movie satire to mangled Japanese translation. Point No Point tagged his novels as "a cross between jive bullshit, hip-hop Henny Youngman, and full-tilt Rimbaudian street-smartass sublimity." Raven Chronicles judged him "as sinister as a thirteen-year-old with a lighter and a keg of butane." Publishers Weekly deemed him "a writer with a fine ear and plenty of gusto."

Born in Chicago, Dakron majored in English at Elmhurst College and Lawrence University before moving to Seattle where he worked as a street violinist and house painter, and developed a confrontational poetic performance style "drenched in faux punkery." He began writing novels in his late 20s, and considers himself "a proud working-class novelist who dreams up Big Lit." Dakron currently lives in Seattle, WA.

Review :
"A comic romp that makes you laugh nearly as much as you shake your head and say, "What the f*** am I reading?" It's a great feeling, a change-of-pace in a literary world with not nearly enough changes of pace. It's like Monty Python acting out a Christopher Moore novel, or Christopher Moore writing a Monty Python sketch, or maybe it's not like either of those things, and it probably isn't because it's one of the more unique stories I've read in recent memory and unlike anything you'll read this year." --Ryan Peverly, Lit Reactor "The anarchist as social monster, scoffing at bourgeois values, is supersized into a 90-ft. 'gigantor' blue stingray in this rapid-fire stomp through pop culture and Japanese monster movies. Dakron (Mantids) tosses out a stream of cultural criticisms warped as puns ('You gotta fight for your Reich to party'), even as he admits there's no point in trying to upset our all-absorbing entertainment-industrial complex ('Nazi jokes are so 20th century'). Resistance may be futile, but this book at least makes it fun." --Publishers Weekly "An audacious, laugh-out-loud novel that is brilliantly committed... For readers with a high tolerance of the unconventional, this is an audacious, laugh-out-loud novel that is brilliantly committed to its conceit... Recommended for fans of absurdist fiction authors such as Patrick Wensink and Carlton III Mellick."--Library Journal "Clever, smart, engaging and completely unique. Ron Dakron is one of the most imaginative authors I've ever read." --Carlton Mellick III, author of Quicksand House "It is said that Frankenstein is the first myth of the anxiety of the Scientific Age. Godzilla is the anxiety of the Atomic Age. Hello Devilfish! is the anxiety of the Information Age. Dakron had created a living linguistic Kaiju composed of the interjection, syncretism, and meta burp. This novel is an inoculation against the future." --Matt Briggs, author of Shoot the Buffalo and Virility Rituals of North American Teenage Boys "I was sucked into Ron Dakron's prose and the world he created. I read the rest of the book in one sitting because he had created a world I found interesting." --410media.com "Dakron draws from many sources in order to provide his readers with a side-splitting adventure that'll give anyone the much needed laugh they deserve in life. A must for humor readers seeking something with a twist." --Midwest Book Review "Ne plus ultra bizarre, man! With cartilaginous prose, soft as fishbone, sense bending and scattershot as a Robin Williams shtick where lost meanings blast by, Dakron follows the comet trails of Infra and Newt with a morphological plot out of Ovid by way of Kafka." --Kirkus Reviews