Eve Ottenberg

BOOBY PRIZE is a comic novel about how Carbon, the people's eco-socialist soviet of Florida comes to the Mid-Atlantic, determined to prevent Americans from eating meat, by the unlikely means of stealing the formula for a new erectile dysfunction medicine. The revolutionaries go on a kidnapping spree. But unfortunately, the assorted nuts, nitwits, idiots, weirdos, imbeciles, crackpots and morons that they have abducted are driving the communist kidnappers crazy. Readers of other books in this series -- CARBON, FURTHER ADVENTURES OF FECKLESS FRANK, BIRDBRAIN, TROGLODYTE, BONKERS, LIZARD PEOPLE and BUSYBODY -- will recognize lots of reappearing oddballs and their bizarre obsessions and complaints, from Maynard Ploshinsky, to the famously constipated undertaker Buddy Schlimizzle to the Space Force's chief of proctological hygiene, Dr. Elbert Posterior. And lots of others. While highlighting the preposterous, innately humorous aspect of the human body in a mildly subversive manner, this novel is one laugh after another.

BUSYBODY is a comic novel about someone who can't mind her own business and how that trait leads to chaos, mass hysteria and in general the confusion of assorted nincompoops. The novel follows the travails of characters familiar from previous books in this series, like LIZARD PEOPLE, BONKERS, BIRDBRAIN and others, the digestion-obsessed undertaker, Buddy Schlimizzle and his scatterbrained wife, Bunzi, the squinting, gimpy Lucas Flush, proprietor of Pest Patrol and other peculiar nitwits and, in some cases, lunatics. It also features the reappearance of the people's eco-socialist soviet of South Florida, called Carbon, and how they thumb their noses at idiots in law enforcement, in Carbon's obsessed mission to stop Americans from eating burgers.

LIZARD PEOPLE is a comic novel about the weirdos, nutcases, oddballs, nitwits and outright raving lunatics who think they are or associate with actual lizard people. Some in fact do have scales. It's also about their mortal enemies, the equally bonkers members of Q-Anon. Several characters transform into lizards, while the Q followers, obsessed with lizard Illuminati supposedly ruling the world, plot to hunt them down. LIZARD PEOPLE also recounts the hilarious perils and pitfalls of modern technology, in the hands of, well, the incompetent.

Roman Summer is a psychological novel about things not turning out as expected; about how the passage of time invariably means loss and how to calibrate that loss when it is not total. The expats who form the nucleus of this story are young and old, almost all parents, and none expecting the damaging blows fate aims at them. Even those spared are only ready at first to admit that they themselves are subtly altered, but then the truth finally heaves into view: the mundane disasters of life change everything.

"Hope deferred maketh the heart sick," says the biblical proverb, and it applies to most of the characters in this new novel, Hope Deferred. This is a story about people in their twenties, in Philadelphia, in the years leading up and into the Trump presidency. It is about the precariousness of life and sanity, and how just one mistake can ruin everything. It also depicts how weak the good is in the world, concerned as it often is with loss, family complications and the struggle of finding a way through life.

"Bonkers" is comic novel about a judge, who is, well, bonkers. Set in the pre-covid era, it flips between Maryland and Florida, as it follows the Rabelaisian misadventures of its very mixed-up characters. The novel also spoofs the disputes of litigious neighbors, people ridiculously flummoxed by simple modern technological gadgets, the routine lunacy of the military and more. Overall, it pokes fun at life in America in the Trump era.

From Montclair, New Jersey to Leningrad in the former U.S.S.R., the stories in this collection cover parenthood, death, mental breakdown and people just getting by. These 41 stories explore the offbeat byways of human existence, peeling back the surface of life in patches to reveal the inner workings, one small section at a time. They stretch from the 1950s to the present, shining a light on how events over decades mold human reality.

When Jeremy Spit, chief terrorism and alien abduction reporter for the supermarket tabloid, Scuttlebutt, encounters a psychotic government custodian, he recognizes that he has struck the journalistic mother-lode. The lunacy that then floods the pages of his publication and its competitor causes a national uproar from the halls of congress to the white house to the Maryland suburbs and a South Beach, Florida veterinary practice. The more outrageous the claim the better, from Spit's perspective. And his "source" is full of some doozies.

Part millennial romance, part meditation on life in the collision lane, Birdbrain is a comic novel about the mishaps of those who, instead of thinking or exerting themselves, prefer to eat. From corrupt and gluttonous politicians to insane judges and many addled members of the general population, the comedy sprawls from the halls of the Capitol to the saunas of a nearby fat farm with one hilarious misadventure after another

The fight for a ffifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage has come to Philadelphia in this novel, and fast food workers are walking out. But one shady restaurant owner thinks he can roll back this tide and is not concerned about possible fatal results. WAGES is the story of ordinary people trying to make ends meet and the activists, some quite radical, who help them. It also addresses other social issues in a large American city, from the opiod epidemic to homelessness, all woven together in a tale of protest and murder.

Readers of Carbon will enjoy this new comic novel, which picks up one of the earlier book's comic threads that ended with Frank Fart quite dead and lying at the bottom of his grave, in a North Miami suburb. The angels, however, desperate to keep Frank out of heaven, arrange for an ill-advised reincarnation. This leads to one mishap after another, as Frank bungles his way through his new life in suburban Maryland.

This comic novel follows a twenty-something on the make in the idiot world of climate change denial. Set in Miami and Washington, D.C., Carbon makes fun of buffoonery, ignorance, corruption and outright greed, all of which stand between humanity and a reasonable solution to the spiraling catastrophe of a rapidly warming planet. The story also satirizes the utterly shameless amorality of supermarket tabloids, as they plunge into the climate change debate, denying global warming is a problem.. This novel is above all a comedy and full of laughs from the first page to the last.

This fourth and final volume in the series "The Human Struggle," reveals much about the causes of the war off-world, in which angels assist fighters in their battle against humanity's fascist enemies. Meanwhile on earth, momentous developments are afoot, which could alter human history by deeply involving the divine feminine. But mankind's enemies, aware of earth, have established their own corporation here, outside Washington, D.C., devoted to the promotion of robotic warfare and the privatizing of prisons, among other things, in order to speed the planet's demise. As fighters from the previous books infiltrate this deadly corporation, another fighter, Rafael Orozco, finds himself sidelined, only to learn that his new job involves protecting someone, whose appearance on earth may be too momentous to hide in the big, second-rate, run-down East Coast city of D___, which happens to be crawling with death-worshippers. 

The third in the sci-fi fantasy trilogy, "The Human Struggle," this novel tracks the efforts of two fighters, Detective Orozco and Pavel Saltwater, as they race to save lives from an enemy determined to extirpate the human race from this and every universe. Mankind's enemies, including human storm troopers, are on the move, and once again humanity is a few steps behind. The fighter, Detective Orozco, hero of the two previous novels in this series, "The Human Struggle," is confronted with finding homes for the millions of fighters' orphans, stranded by the enemy's assault on their alternate universe, an assault that is leading to its collapse. Orozco's transuniverse orphanage is swamped, even assisted by angels, and to make matters worse, another fighter, hero of "Zone of Illusion," Pavel Saltwater, must crack the code of how, precisely, the enemy is destabilizing multiple human realities throughout the cosmos. And the prospects look grim.

Second in "The Human Struggle" series, this is a sci-fi fantasy about the collapse of an alternate reality and the human effort to avert it. In this novel, fighters attempt defend human life in a universe contiguous to earth's. The enemy, determined to extirpate humanity from this and all alternate realities, is sacking, burning, conquering and murdering his way through the cosmos, and now enemy storm troopers have found a doorway into earth and are filtering into our world. Fighters and the visionaries they work with, guardians, struggle to keep them at bay, while a lonely few of their number must journey far behind enemy lines to destroy the power which keeps humanity losing the war that has been fought off-world for millennia. From the first shot at the story's opening to the search for a guardian replaced by his doubles, to the white-hot fireballs with which angels destroy enemy commanders, "Zone of Illusion" portrays a non-stop sci-fi/fantasy war of the worlds.