Fans of Vigorito’s originally self-published 2007 cult hit Just a Couple of Days
will have a ball with this hyperactive, zany novel. Twenty-year-old drifter Diablo spies on Bridget Snapdragon, the pagan wife of a Normal, Ill., actuary, skinny dipping in her backyard creek. He is soon arrested, and while in jail, flips a playing card onto the back of a bee, setting in motion an atmospheric disturbance that begets the storm of the century. Meanwhile, a select group of misfits are unknowingly thrown into the storm’s path. There’s J.J. Speed, a priest turned special agent after becoming “insane from celibacy”; Elizabeth Wildhack, Bridget’s stripper daughter; Billy Pronto, a man who speaks in terms of the here and now only; and Clovis, a ninth-century serf, who, with the aid of gnomes, time-travels to Normal. Vigorito has no trouble stringing together words and writes goofball fiction as well as anyone, but the book’s time shifts, innumerable eccentricities, chaotic narrative and 400 pages are enough to wear a reader out. (Oct.)
