Resume With Monsters

Taking a night-shift job in Austin, Texas, in the hopes of rekindling a relationship, Philip Kenan confronts the surreal phantoms of his past and present employment situations, and seeks help from an unorthodox therapist. IP.

Amazon.com Review

A dark-humored employee-angst novel, seasoned liberally with the Cthulhu Mythos. Spencer has a wonderful antic wit -- he reminds me of Thomas Disch, as in The Businessman. His hapless hero bounces from one dead-end job (Ralph's One-Day Resumes) to another (corporate giants with names like MicroMeg and Pelidyne), but he can't seem to get away from those monsters. Great scenes in which Xerox machines and fax machines and the industrial sprinklers they install overhead in offices interact with Lovecraft's Elder Gods. Lightweight, as horror novels go, but unusually good fun. Winner of the 1995 International Horror Critics Guild Award for Best Novel.

From Publishers Weekly

Word processor Philip Kenan is not just stuck in a series of dead-end jobs in this satirical novel, but trapped in delusional fantasies about undead co-workers and monsters from the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft as well. An unsuccessful novelist himself, Philip possesses an imagination that creeps out of the shadows and sucks up quotidian reality like a B-movie alien, a quality appreciated by neither his ex-girlfriend nor his semiretired therapist, much less by conventional employers. As Philip struggles with temping, therapy and a new love affair, his sanity gradually crumbles to reveal a far more bizarre universe than that in his unpublishable manuscript. Spencer's goofy conceit of an office-life horror novel spoof is kept afloat by a cast of eccentric co-workers at Ralph's One-Day Resumes and the Pelidyne Corporation, easy cracks about data entry and some ingenious narrative tricks (a flashback related as an out-of-body experience, for example). Although this oddball work is often appealing, Spencer (The Return of Count Electric) ultimately fails to unite satisfactorily the workplace comedy and Philip's deranged imagination. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The connection between modern corporate America and the terrible monsters of classic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's imagination is the unlikely yet oddly compelling theme of this harrowing satire. We have all, at one time or another, been forced by the exigencies of finding and keeping a job to think of the world of employers and employees as one of brutal demons and powerless pawns. Spencer illuminates that world. Philip Kenan begins as the essential everyman faced with everyday horrors but gains dimension as his outr{‚}e past builds labyrinths of nameless terrors around him. Spencer's sure sense of character gives vibrant life to an engaging supporting cast that ranges from Kenan's idiosyncratic therapist to the corporate ghouls threatening his girlfriend, his life, and his sanity. A horror tale enlivened by a dark and vital humor, this little gem contributes a soup{‡}con more paranoia to the fictional world also reported on by Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus! and Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. Dennis Winters

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