Crap Kingdom by DC Pierson
Reviewed by Steven
Ordinarily, I have little interest in the presumably exciting world of teen literature, but, when it comes to bizarre masterstrokes of creativity, my arbitrary genre preferences know no suggested age range. Therefore, when it was brought to my attention that DC Pierson, the mad genius behind the mind-bending bildungsroman The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, was trying his hand at the teen fiction game, my pretentious preconceptions were shaken off like a bad dream. Crap Kingdom is his latest contribution to the collected works of the human race, and, as its charming title suggests, it holds nothing sacred as it defies and exceeds expectations with its lyrical wit and dizzying plot. Borrowing from genre conventions while brazenly and hysterically subverting them, DC Pierson’s iconoclastic story of transcending the ordinary launches readers young and slightly-less-young into a controlled nosedive through whimsy, absurdity, monsters, girls, and trash – even pausing to take hilarious pot shots at the irreproachable Harry Potter through the fog of fantasy.
Character Tom Parking is remarkable in his mundanity, and his routine life is driving him bananas. Student by day, student by night, Tom craves adventure, spending his free time fantasizing about being plucked out of his universe to star in an alternate reality where life is more than just passing the time. When, out of nowhere, this exact fate befalls him, Tom is understandably through the roof…until he gets a glimpse of the lame world he has been chosen to defend. Now Tom must reconcile his heroic ambition with his justified distaste for Crap Kingdom, the otherwise nameless “blah” of a magical realm that only he can save from certain doom.
Crap Kingdom is more than just entertaining. Tom’s plight mirrors that of anyone who has ever wanted something more out of life but didn’t know where to begin. Like any great book for teens, the protagonist’s character arc is empowering and inspires confidence through unavoidable awkwardness and unbelievable adversity. Like any great book for anybody, Crap Kingdom challenges hackneyed ideals and posits autonomy and imagination as the driving principles of the human experience. As an added bonus, the author just happens to look exactly like me.
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