The Cool Thing: A Dark Comedy. Or Not.
(By Robert Rife)
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| Author | Robert Rife |
THE COOL THING is a storm of monsters, madness— and love. A shifty couple steal from a buried UFO. They're snatched into a lab of terrifying human/alien experiments. She's scheduled for an implant. He's lost and blundering. Escape is up to her. Life is such a pain... so is dying.
"fun, irreverent, and scary" * "this story will blow you away" * "ribald, and frequently hilarious"
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SYNOPSIS: (a much mouthier, self indulgent version of the above)
A perpetually drunken junk dealer is offered an item he thinks is medieval. He’s off by a couple light-years; it’s part of an ET spacesuit. If activated, it will nullify distance, opening a walk-through portal into a long ago crashed spaceship, and the human staffed laboratory built above. Without getting paid, seller Carl vanishes, leaving the device sitting in a vaporous haze. Even more baffling to the inebriate junker, overnight, his eternally disagreeable wife becomes deliriously happy, attentive, and insistently… available. Before anything else terrifying can happen, he dump-sells the object to R.L., who takes it home.
Having rubber band ethics, an antiques shop, and slightly reformed street girl Deena, as paramour, RL should be just peachy. BUT, he’s fallen F-faced in love with her, and she plays him like a money wheezing accordion. This is a man burdened with an innate love of valuable crap, animals… and wayward women. He’s also a congenital liar with an all-consuming itch for too much money. All these fountains of joy are constant aggravations to his neighbor, Jayderay; a man-cursed black woman who is about to liquidate some vintage treasures in a Shirley Jackson-esque eerie mansion. RL wants those contents, not knowing the house is linked to the thing he’s bought, the spaceship lab… and horrors beyond imagining.
When RL runs an errand, Deena disappears. No one is there to hear her scream. Returning, he thinks the girl is playfully hiding, and takes the device to his shop. While there, it’s stolen. Of course it is, life being such a cesspool.
Stalked by a starving, nightmarish Lab Spill, Deena runs into Carl. Both have been snatched into an immense, beguiling playground. A carnival like area that’s home to Proby; a dubiously successful 1956 splicing experiment. (if Elvis had humped a Gecko…) Obviously not human, but pathetically thinking he is, Proby is the lonely, decades old, pet teen of Dr. Lillith Gaust. This nightmare scientist, riddled with time-treatments, boiling insanity, and blood from another world, has kept him intermittently alive out of boredom: freezing or thawing on whims. When the spacesuit piece, lost and inoperative for years, began opening the ship’s portal, Proby had yanked the boy and girl into the ship. Dr. Gaust has an urgent, ghastly use for Deena.
Being very, very practical, Deena latches onto Carl, who is brainlessly intoxicated with her. The two become Proby’s, 50’s style, teenage gang, his friends. The creature desperately needs and cares for them; they make him human.
Jayderay, conducting business, spots the stolen spacesuit part. Thinking it and Deena are at the home of a legally untouchable predator, she calls RL. And off he charges, the wrong way. Blocked by inconsiderately dying customers, scheming spiders, interfering cops, and just generally being penetrated by Life’s Wiener, he flails on in vain. Sick with worry, he turns to a God he has despised since his abomination of a childhood. A childhood that he ended… with murder. For the first time since then, he prays, asking with clenched fists and gritted teeth for help. Knowing from bitter experience that God wouldn’t spit on him without payment, RL offers it. He’ll be sorry.
Deena realizes RL can’t possibly find her; she’s on her own. And the doctor, bringing a bestial creation, is coming for her.
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Disney it ain’t! BUT, like an upper-cut punch to the chin, this story is uplifting. Sort of. So is hanging. — Aid the greedy: BUY IT NOW! — Paperback and eBook”
