The story takes place in Denmark, Tennessee, a town polluted by its local industry, the Elsinore Paper plant. Wittenberg Academy student Horatio Wilkes is in town, visiting his school friend Hamilton Prince. Hamilton has had some recent family turmoil. His father, Rex, has died and Hamilton's uncle, Claude, and mother, Trudy, have gotten married. Do you get the picture?
One of the amusements that the novel provides the reader is a game of "Find the Allusion." They are myriad. Take the character names. We meet Olivia, Roscoe & Gilbert, Paul Mendelsohn and his son Larry, Ford N. Branff. Apparently the parents of Horatio had a bit of a Shakespearean fetish, naming their other children Desdemona, Rosalind, and Miranda. Oh, and Horatio has a school chum named Juliet. Admittedly it gets to be a stretch, but it's still good fun.
The prose, written in a noirish gumshoe fashion, at times elicits out-loud laughs.
- "Then again, lots of things take longer then his mother's remarriage. Like toast."
- "[She's] definitely the kind of soccer mom the ref takes a second look at."
- "Despite swapping husbands faster than Superman changes clothes in a phone booth..."
- In response to "He would have wanted it that way," "Nobody knows what anybody really wants when they're alive, so what makes us think we know them any better when they're dead?" (Not LOL funny, but quite resonant)
- "I tossed the bottle back to him and went and closed the door so Beavis and Butthead wouldn't go looking for a bathroom and overhear us." (Pop culture reference!)
- "Personally, I'm a little tired of every author without a bright idea of his own putting a modern spin on a 'classic'..." (Authorial self loathing?)
That last quote is a reference to the novel's version of The Mousetrap--a play entitled Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. This is where the plot of the story requires a Golden Gate-esque suspension of disbelief. The identification of the murderer hinges upon a gimmick inserted into a performance of Tom Stoppard's creation. The existence of that play, however, presupposes the existence of The Bard's antecedent to it. Have none of the characters in Something Rotten noticed that their world is a blatant rip-off of Shakespeare's Hamlet? Best not to think on that. Take the story for what it is and run with it.
The copy of the book I purchased included a preview of the next book in the series: Something Wicked. On page one, the reader is introduced to characters named Mac and Beth. Subtlety thy name is not Gratz. I stopped right there. Once was plenty in this canon. See the last bulleted quote above.
In this world where daily existence really has become rotten of late, Alan Gratz's book is a pleasant diversion. If you can find a copy at your local library (assuming that such are still in business when you read this), it's certainly worth a look!
