By Dahl Botterill
I was very excited to discover that Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League: A Compendium of Evil existed. While I’ve never read The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, I loved the movie; it’s a ridiculous steamroller of uninhibited creativity that plays like a love letter to every bombastic film genre you’ve ever seen. To be perusing the shelves at a bookstore and see a sequel staring back at me seemed too good to be true, and I couldn’t wait to read it. I went in hoping for a wild and crazy thrill-a-minute mess in all the best ways, offbeat and colourful, full of weird characters and over-the-top twists and turns.
Well. It does have some weird characters. And it is indeed a mess.
It isn’t that nothing interesting happens, or that the characters aren’t weird, but the writing style is such that everything happens at a positively glacial pace. Twists and turns become long lazy arcs that the reader has entirely too much time to prepare for, and the bulk of that time is spent on tangents, blind alleys, and dialogue that goes nowhere. In a different book or genre that might work, but Buckaroo Banzai suffers; it feels like a book that doesn’t know what it is.
The writing often feels childish, with the frequent curses misspelled for some largely unexplained reason and a plethora of attention given to toilet humour and bodily functions. The expected audience is ostensibly declared to be young but what may be intended as juvenile comes off as crass and off-putting much of the time. Not only is the self-indulgent style hard to get into, but the language occasionally feels so out of place as to knock the reader right back out. There is certainly a dedication to the weird and offbeat, but it all feels overwritten. The end result is prose that feels manic but lacks any momentum, and the novel is crippled by this incongruity. Rauch takes hundreds of pages to cover what a classic science fiction author would have divulged in thirty, resulting in a story that suffocates under the weight of its own world-building.
I’m sure there are some folks out there that would enjoy this book. Given an effective editor and some very deep cuts, there might have been an entertaining sequel in here somewhere, but in its current form I find it hard to believe it saw publication.