What do you get if you splice Shakespeare with Kafka and force this new spliced being to have vigorous sexual intercourse with William Burroughs which produces an offspring better resembling a drug-addicted anti-christ than a cherub? You get Eric Mays’ Naked Metamorphosis.

I’m a big fan of surreal books. I might have mentioned that a few times. For me, surreality is where writing becomes art. I’m a bit sick of super-reality, and absolutely sick of books wherein the characters are drawn slowly over coals as though to show how much pain they can endure before their final triumph reveals how unbreakable the human spirit is. Pish and twaddle, that stuff. So it’s kind of amusing for me that Mister Mays takes the incisive melodrama of Shakespeare into his surrealist’s bosom, and weans it on a healthy dose of “the author is god to his creations” and dummies it up with some spiffing little drug-induced hallucinations.

Seeing Hamlet reduced to a drug addict crawling up the wall in the belief he’s turning into a cockroach is well worth the price of admission, and you do feel awfully sorry for Horatio. Poor Horatio.

You might also say to me, “But, Lucas! How can you actually like this book? It’s got no ninjas in it!”

But guess what?

It does. Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are transformed into ninjas. Now, can it get better than that? Well, I would have liked to see them get more ninja badass but I was content with just having them there.

Mays’ style is easy to read and while I wasn’t overly fond of the “God” moments, I did greatly enjoy the overall fun of it all. While the concept of characters striving to meet their creators is hardly new and certainly over-done (I’m sitting here trying to convince myself the Red Dwarf movie is worth buying when I haven’t seen it, just because I’m never fond of the “meet your creator” plot), there’s an added little twist at the end which makes it worthwhile. It at least turned the concept from being unsubtle and uninteresting into something like a cosmic joke and philosophical at the same time.

That is, it makes you think with a sloppy grin on your face.

The reinvention of the characters from Hamlet is interesting, and Mays has certain given them a damn fine shake to come up with something intriguing. Every character dragged into Mays’ creation is given a breath of fresh air and a new depth of character. That’s what I liked most, I think – that I could see each character represented as merely a shifting of perspective rather than an attempt at parody. It’s this shift of essential character motivations and traits that make it all work. That and Ophelia’s obsession with taters. Everything seems off-centre in the way only a good Star Trek anomaly can create. You can see why Horatio is so bothered by everything throughout the book. Nothing seems right, though it all seems as it should be…

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, and found it amusing, entertaining and a fitting homage to several very influential works which no doubt inspired Mister Mays in a very positive way. His obvious respect for the texts he’s toying with shows in his handling of the characters which seem pushed in just the right way. It’s a successful project, and I’d be very interested to see more from him.