Our Enemy's Friend

posted by Rob on September 15, 2009 08:58 AM

How often do I shamelessly lift a story from BoingBoing and retail it here? But often I can't help myself. And this time I have a really, really good excuse. It's a review of our Leila's new book, Enemy of Chaos. Cory seems to like it very much. And given BoingBoing's global influence, can the rest of the world be far behind? Continue reading to see the review or better still, jump to BoingBoing to see it in its natural element here.

Leila Johnston's Enemy of Chaos is a geekily hilarious modern choose-your-own-adventure novel in which you play a middle aged bitter geek who is drafted into a branching narrative in which your goal is to save reality, while negotiating many of the familiar indignities of modern geekish life, from over-exuberant role-players to nuclear apocalypse.

This is a sneakily funny book, a book that is so funny on a sentence-by-sentence level and so silly on its face that it's easy to lose track of the fact that there's an enormous amount of nostalgic heart here, a really affectionate remembrance of the whole RPG boom.

If you like smart obscure statistics jokes, wickedly funny observational humor about geeks and their place in society, and if you are filled with nostalgic warmth at the thought of a choose-your-own-adventure story written for the adult you became, this is for you.

Thanks Cory.

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Comments: 2


Great to see Leila get some much-deserved praise.

My, BoingBoing's 'If literary classics had been titled today' post is irresistible...

Example:

Then: Jane Eyre
Now: The Little Girl they Locked in the Red Room (and possibly Intended to Swap for a Packet of Cigarettes).


There's a website as well: www.enemyofchaos.com & iPhone app version www.enemyofchaos.com/app.

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