Oh wow, how do I tackle this review? 'Grizzled' is technically a novel, as you might expect, but it's framed more like a movie novelisation, of a creature feature that's so outrageously bad that the writer probably conjured up just as much material again out of whole cloth, just to keep himself interested. Except it's so much more meta than that. At one point, we encounter a billboard for the movie being novelised. A little later, workmen swap it out for its sequel. At another point, it becomes a billboard for a Rycke Foreman novel. Heck, at one point, Foreman is writing the script and, at another, characters interact with the crew actually filming the movie.

I'd suggest that you need one of two things to appreciate this novel, but both would be better. It ends up as more of a comedy novel than a horror novel, so a sense of humour is important, along with an awareness of comedy in pop culture, which leads me to the other thing, which is still more important. That's an awareness of pop culture generally, because Foreman drops references like he's being paid a bonus for each movie he can throw in.

Frankly, you don't even need to start into the book for those to dance in front of your eyes, as the back cover blurb is full of them, but the opening line of the prologue is "Call me Ishmael." Is 'Moby Dick' a creature feature? Well, technically it is, I guess, just not in the way that 'Jaws' or 'Day of the Animals' are, which are the primary references in play. There's actually another reference above the first line, in the chapter subtitle, but, either way, the count has begun and it just keeps going.

Before I dive into all that, I should introduce you to the plot, or what counts for one. The prologue introduces us to a laboratory, where a number of animals are forced to watch monster movies. Is this the new cast for 'MST3K'? No, they aren't, but twenty-eight months later, the penguin, who's called Jataguin (or Jataquin on the back cover), is an eighteen-foot behemoth wandering around the Coconino National Forest outside Sedona, Arizona, killing people. Well, eighteen feet plus six inches in heels. This does take pride in being silly, playfully so.

For every monster in a movie, there's a team tasked with taking it down and here that team is led by Roy George, the forest ranger named for Roy Scheider and Christopher George. Working with him are Dick Dingo, who's so Aussie that he's like Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee put together, though he's known as Dog the Wombat Hunter; and Forster, a veteran hunter so reminiscent of Quint in 'Jaws' that the author is "expecting a posthumous lawsuit from Robert Shaw for personal damages caused by excessive grave-rolling". Helping them out are a pair of other rangers, Kelly Stone-Parker and, get this, Briscoe C. P. Coltrane. That's two references wrapped up in one!

There's a lot more to it, but it really won't help to add it to a synopsis, and a lot more characters, but they're only worth mentioning through their references. Oh, except Michael, the daughter of the president (his son is Marion, which is a neat reversal of expected gender, in a way that seems like a jab at American naming standards, as against English ones, which was unexpected). She's in the forest somewhere, but she's lost and, if Jataguin doesn't take up all their time, Roy and Dick need to track her down and bring her to safety.

Now, I'm a film historian so I got most of these references, but there are definitely some I missed because a few were so obviously references I didn't recognise that I looked them up. For instance, one character has three different names that are crossed out before becoming Farley. They're all characters in monster movies, 'Grizzly', 'Piranha' and, I presume, 'The Last Shark', which is a deep cut indeed. However, it's not as deep as the technical details of a RV that shows up very late in the book. It's a YT-1300 with VIN 492727ZED, as indeed is the Millennium Falcon. How deep can a deep cut get?

Most are far more obvious. Michael was "last seen near the Blazing Saddles ranch, just past the Johnson rock ridge, near Mel's Brook." On the comedy side, I also caught a 'Young Frankenstein' reference. Some of the humour is 'Police Squad' literalisms. There's plenty of 'Monty Python' and some 'Airplane!' There's Douglas Adams too, even before chapter nine opens as Ford and Arthur are temporarily other characters, travelling on the 'Heart of Gold' under the Improbability Drive. Who else writes perspective lines like "Mandy Watkins landed on the ass she wasn't laughing off."

There's even 'Looney Tunes' logic, when one character finds a convenient box marked 'Emergency Forest Disguise'. It's an early foreshadowing of my favourite convenience, namely FedEx literally delivering a "deus ex machina" at a crucial moment. Oh, and the incredibly brief chapter four is a deliberate pun that unfolds in the surreal style of 'Monty Python' or 'The Goodies'. And talking of surreal, there's even original surreality, when Jataguin reappears and blots out most of a page of text. That was very cool indeed.

On the more general pop culture side, I caught a wide range of references. Of course, 'Jaws' is all over the book like a rash, though I did like how Foreman snuck in 'adieu to you fair Spanish ladies'. There's 'THX-1138', 'The Dukes of Hazzard' and "Carl Kolchak, INS News", from 'The Night Stalker". Joan Wilder is "Jewel in the Nile", there's a "'Vertigo' shot" and Roscoe County Jr. is Briscoe C. P. Coltrane's cousin. Multiple characters reference 'Tremors', there's Horace Pinker from 'Shocker' and one of Forster's war stories brings in both the Pork Chop Express and 'Gilligan's Island'. That's a diverse pairing right there!

That really ought to give you a good idea whether you're going to like this or not. It's silly but it's happy to be silly. It's happy to lean into puns and spoonerisms but it's mostly about references as a sort of sporting challenge. If you don't get the references, then you're missing the jokes and it's probably going to prompt you to dismiss the book as pure nonsense. The story is deliberately not good, so much so that characters bitch at the author writing them. It's outrageously convenient, even more so than the most clichéd bad monster movies tend to be. Read it straight and it sucks. You have to get the jokes.

Maybe it's a little long, but that's a matter of opinion. Really, the negative aspects that can't be questioned are the usual ones for a self-published novel. The smart apostrophes are mangled, as they tend to be nowadays. Nobody gets them right any more. And there are odd spelling issues, of the sort that spellcheck doesn't catch. There's an "eek" for "eke" and a "rye" for "wry", that sort of thing. Again, it's far too common nowadays, so I can hardly single this book out for mistakes like these. They're annoying and frustrating, especially for a proofreader, but they don't appear too often, so it's not too hard to skip past them with a sigh. And if that's the worst a book gets, it can't be that bad, right?

I think Joel and the bots would have had a lot of fun with Jataguin the mutant penguin, who's a different height every time we meet him. I think 'Grizzled!' could have been a favourite episode. ~~ Hal C F Astell