Review
A Lap Dance with the Lobster Lady
1998
Shadowlands Press
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #16 (November 2019).
Odd-boy-out Ronnie Desmond is growing up in Willowcreek in middle-of-nowhere America, with an odd father who has some less-than-professional embalming practices. Teaming up with even-more-odd-boy-out schoolfriend Delbert, they take a trip to the carnival where Ronnie encounters the Lobster Lady, a woman beautiful on the surface but with an unattractive crustacean side to her. Can Ronnie and Delbert fulfil her dream to be fixed up as a fully functioning woman?
A Lap Dance with the Lobster Lady is a far more grown-up affair when compared to something like Somtow’s Fiddling for Waterbuffaloes. The carnivalesque atmosphere is redolent of Weird Tales and the environment of a boring rural existence somewhere remote in the USA is typically well drawn. But even better is how the story pieces all fit together in a strange but tight-fitting alignment that makes this story work so well. If you’re into that 21st century genre known as ‘bizarro fiction’, given its year this may be an early example, or even a forerunner.