The Good Humor Man Book

A witty tribute to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, this surreal, futuristic narrative explores the highly topical relationships between obesity, government health care, pop culture, and body image. In a world where chocolate is worth more than cocaine on the black market, government-sanctioned vigilantes known as Good Humor Men patrol the streets, seeking to immolate all fattening food products as illegal contraband and summarily cancel the health insurance of any offenders. An evil nutraceutical company controls the food market with products engineered to keep the population painfully thin, while a mysterious wasting plague threatens to starve humanity. An ex-plastic surgeon whose father performed a secret liposuction surgery on Elvis Presley may hold the key to humanity’s future. Incorporating a colorful cast of characters—a civil servant with questionable motives, an acquisitive assassin, a power-mad preacher evangelizing anorexia, a beautiful young woman addicted to liposuction, and a homicidal clone from an experiment gone terribly awry—this satirical romp asks the question Can Elvis save the world 64 years after his death?

Publishers Weekly

Fox (Fat White Vampire Blues) pens a half-baked riff on Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 that imagines a near-future America where the government brutally enforces dietary laws through vigilante squads in repossessed ice cream trucks. When a raid on contraband cheese turns deadly, middle-aged Good Humor man Louis Shmalzberg, a former liposuction surgeon, predictably begins to question his vocation. When a pair of mysterious men demand that Louis turn over a vacuum jar of fat and stomach fluid removed during the botched lipo operation Louis's father performed on Elvis, Louis embarks on a contrived chase across the country, incidentally investigating a corporate conspiracy that's fast becoming a national health crisis. Fox's pseudosatirical premise could work as farce, but endless expository conversations and lifeless characters (including some eyebrow-raising racial stereotypes) make this contrived yarn unconvincing. (May)

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