Hyperlink from Hell by Lindy Moone

I never did believe those disclaimers authors put up front in their novels: “This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to real-life people is coincidental.”

Lindy Moone was parented by mental health professionals, and her grandfather worked in or lived near a castle-ish Georgian-style manor house on the grounds of an institution like the one in Hyperlink, so there is some real-life inspiration that gives this unbelievable novel a bizarre authenticity. The mental patients in Hyperlink are so vivid and authentic, they can only be inspired by real life people–who are, after all, are stranger than fictional characters.

I must not be as unhinged as I’ve suspected, because for all my willing suspension of disbelief, I couldn’t tell what was going on in Hyperlink from Hell. I envy the reviewer who writes, “I’d nearly finished the book before I realized who Al and Jimmie represent.” I hate being obtuse! People often have to explain jokes to me, which makes me shake my fist at God for not giving me a fully operational brain. Then I get to thinking, and I shake my fist of rage at the people who try to convince me there is a God.

In other words, this book has me agitated. I dropped it cold at one point, early on, when things got naked and a boob-obsessed male couldn’t stop talking about boobs. But the author, in college (I stalked Lindy Moone on twitter and facebook for personal info), was the only female in a house shared with a bunch of guys, who sound like cast members of The Big Bang Theory, so I decided to grow up, set aside my squeamish (all right, prudish) disdain for male boob obsession, and see what the suddenly naked James and his bimbo lady friend would do next.

James is an idiot, but so are millions of real-lfe men. Win the lottery, buy yourself a reality TV show, become a celebrity. Oh, and have some weird, Aspie-like gift of remembering every arcane fact and trivia ever known to humankind. Again, I am jealous. My memory is wretched. Why do jerks win the gift of good memory AND a winning lottery ticket?

The opening chapter of this novel is riveting, eerie, beautifully written and compelling. I sampled Chapter One and bought the book because of it. Then the novel morphed into a madness of men fighting over the remote, only this isn’t an ordinary TV remote, it is literally a UNIVERSAL remote. I like the pun so much, I had to keep reading, in spite of potty humor and tongue-in-cheek references to other novels and TV shows, both things that I find off-putting in fiction and film. Lindy Moone writes so well, her prose is so polished and error-free, I had no choice but to keep reading like some helpless crack addict.

Also, in spite of murder and mayhem, things I tend to avoid in fiction, the tone is light. A killer cuts someone up into little pieces, and I’m not slamming the book shut? Something unusual is afoot here. My sister in real life was murdered (that’s her baby picture on the right side of my profile picture, my dad at the same age as she was in the photo, and his sister on the left with the pony she never owned). I mention the photo because it’s my own lame attempt at a parallel universe uniting people who lived and died in different generations. Deep down, I really love what Lindy Moone does in Hyperlink, and deep down, I hate hate hate the way we can’t know if we’ll ever be reunited with our lost loved ones in some afterlife or some other dimension.

Do my personal biases and bitterness make me fail to appreciate novels that hit my triggers? No doubt. Niels Bohr said some things are so serious you can only laugh at them, and Lindy Moone is the champion for making light of a thing like death without coming across as someone making light of murder and death. This is no small achievement.

I hate to be the first schmuck to offer up four instead of five stars, especially when it’s based more on my own squeamishness than the author’s talent. This is a clever, original, witty novel. I’m just annoyed that I still don’t know, at the end of it, if James is alive or dead, or both. Parallel universe James#1 versus James#2 and all the other cast of in-between characters torture my already feeble synapses and neurons. Fans of movies like Inception are sure to love a novel as challenging as this one. Fans of satires like Spaceballs are also sure to love it. (I confess: I do love that awful movie Spaceballs.)

Fans of the twisted and deranged, buy with confidence. This has the potential to be a cult classic like that Venus flytrap movie (Little House of Horrors, if my dreadful memory serves me at all. I saw it in college–not telling how many decades ago.)

Indie Author John L. Monk (see my blog post on his novel “Kick”) led me to Lindy and to Thomas A. Mays (I reviewed his novel in the June 2014 issue of Perihelion Science Fiction ezine). Go, awesome indies!

 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009NY159O/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_qyuVtb0WQQQKB 

From her Amazon Author Page — Here’s Lindy’s bio, fact-checked for your convenience:

The wildly enigmatic (mostly false) Lindy Moone comes from a short line of mental health professionals (true), and now lives far, far away from them: someplace warm and sometimes rainy, where she can play with her pencils as much as she likes (true). She trained as an artist (true) but always wanted to write (painfully true) stories — and always did, mostly in secret (mostly true). She is stunningly beautiful (sadly, false), twenty-two years old (Pants on Fire!), and is married to “The Great Fisherman Boo” (true). Lindy likes dogs, cats, TV and thunderstorms–but not at the same time, because it hurts. (too true)

Some say she is a pathological liar. She denies this, but admits to being a pathological blogger, at Belly-Up! (lindymoone.wordpress.com). She can be contacted via Twitter (@LindyMoone), on her facebook page (Lindy Moone, author), and through her in(s)ane website, Literary Subversions (lindymoone.com). It’s a veritable loony bin of wordplay, silly pictures, trivia about the book, and more. Please stop by, especially if you know an easy way to get cats to take worm medicine.
Some of her favorite books are “Catch-22,” The “Gormenghast” series by Mervyn Peake, “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy” (true). So that explains her writing (mostly true) nonsense.

Oh, and she has such a crush on Neil Gaiman (true).