Novel Hybrids

One of the highlights of reading Jincy Willett’s sly, entertaining novel The Writing Class were the gems she dropped carelessly along the way, the blog posts “authored” by the novel’s central character Amy Gallup, who was published too quickly and now endures the ignominy of college extension fiction writing classes to pay the rent and keep her flatulent Bassett hound, Alphonse, in kibble.

Along with lists of funny-looking words and sexy alphabet letters (B, V, and Y, if you’re curious) are some marvelous novel hybrids, some of which made me laugh out loud. Here are some of my favorites:

• Call of the Wild Duck – A plucky dog survives life in the frozen Klondike with the help of a symbolic duck.
• Old Man Riverdance – Paul Robeson is kicked to death by stampeding Irish robots.
• The Runaway Bunny Jury – Desperate jurors avoid being profiled by ingeniously disguising themselves as birds, flowers, boats, rocks, and fish.
• The Bell Jarhead – We are at war with terrorism, racism, and clinically depressed adolescents.
• Gone with the Windows for Dummies – Starting the Civil War; Customizing Your Decimated Plantation; That Scary General Sherman
• Stop or My Mom Will Shoot the Piano Player – A dimwitted cop meets a timid musician with a mysterious past, and together they push Estelle Getty out a window.
• Little Women Who Run With the Wolves – …try valiantly but can’t keep up, which is probably just as well.
• The Scarsdale Diet of Worms – Drastic weight loss through unrecanted heresy.
• Suddenly Last Summa Theologica – The prolonged agony and hideous death of an effete young man at the hands of ravenous street urchins brilliantly sums up all that can be understood of Christian theology.
• Beast in the Jungle Book – On his deathbed, Mowgli is horrified to realize that he has wasted his entire life in the damn jungle.
• National Blue Velvet – Dennis Hopper does something unspeakable with Elizabeth Taylor’s ear.
• Jurassic Mansfield Park – Fanny and Edmund avert their eyes while Mary and Henry Crawford are slaughtered by velociraptors.
• 20,000 Bottles of Beer Under the Sea – Al Gore attempts to befriend a giant squid. A struggle ensues.