I've never read anything quite like The Library at Mount Char. It's unabashedly weird, and doesn't try to over explain or justify it's bizarreness. And I think that's why it works so splendidly. This is a world of alternate realities, populated by human and non-human gods like an iceberg with tentacles, tigers that talk, a living dead girl named Margret, and a tutu-wearing mass murderer who wields a golden axe on a chain. Other players include an army of flesh-eating domesticated dogs, a lion named after an atomic bomb, zombie-like property managers called the dead ones, and a kindly old lady named Mrs. McGillicutty. Still with me? Okay. At Garrison Oaks, a family of gods lives. The family is comprised of Father, Carolyn, Margret, Michael, Peter, Jennifer, and David. Each member of the family lives in a giant library (literally) and is tasked with studying a certain catalog that cannot be shared with another. For example, Carolyn studies all languages known to man, Michael studies animals and their ways of communication, David studies war and violence, Peter studies foods and cooking, Jennifer studies the art of healing and medicine, and Margret studies the land of the dead. To share knowledge of one's catalog with another is grounds for punishment usually resulting in repeated painful deaths, resurrected in between by Jennifer only to be killed again by Father. At the start of the book, Father has gone missing, and chaos ensues amongst gods and man. The world is thrown out of balance. Carolyn meets a guy named Steve and frames him for murder in an elaborate plan to find Father. As Steve and Carolyn's lives intertwine, wild and magical things happen. To talk details would be to give away an excellent story that relies on discovery. It's the kind of book that has you trying to piece everything together like a puzzle as information and clues are slowly and methodically revealed. That's the whole fun of it. It's genuinely funny, gruesome, heartfelt, mercilessly violent, and overly ridiculous simultaneously. The back cover promises that I'll be shuddering and chortling in equal measure, and I have to say that I was, over and over again. One minute I'm horrified by an act of cruelty followed by a laugh-out-loud scene less than a page away. If there was an exercise for your emotions, than this book would be the total gym. I rarely find books funny enough to make me burst out chuckling when I'm alone, and that must have a lot to do with my choice of genre, but The Library at Mount Char satisfied my horror/thriller itch while tossing in loads of magic, laughs, and mystery. Think if Clive Barker and Monty Python got together and wrote a book and you might not be too far from Scott Hawkin's masterpiece. I don't think I've ever had so much fun reading a book.