"...Reading with My Pussy: I Gang-Bang the Canon, which featured her fantasies of sex with famous canonical authors-- adopting the missionary position with Rudyard Kipling, enjoying mutual cunnilingus with Virginia Woolf, letting Plato do her doggy style like a boy. As a result, all over North America, young academics were doing 'pussy readings' of canonical authors, dragging hapless dead authors into increasingly elaborate fantasies: fisting Henry James; Emily Dickinson in leather; and three-ways between W. H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway, and Edna St. Vincent Millay."

As Nelson begins to exploit his newfound power to impose his will on the department, the tightly wound faculty begins to unravel. Things start slowly, but quickly pick up steam, moving faster and faster on their way toward a firey end. One by one, the members of the department are brought low by poetic justice (in the unassuming form of Nelson Humboldt), and Nelson climbs his way toward the chairmanship-- excuse me, chairpersonship-- and his own doom.

The book isn't nearly as bitter as that summary makes it sound, though. Various trendy schools of criticism come in for vicious mockery, but it's always funny, and the tone stays fairly light most of the way through. The plot never gets away from the author, not even when Nelson finds himself duelling a Serbian swordsman in the library, and he keeps it moving quickly enough that some fairly nasty stuff passes while you're laughing at the deconstruction of the English faculty. This is what, in my not so humble opinion, keeps it from really qualifying as horror- while it the "be careful what you wish for" plot and a few of the classic horror elements, it never dwells on the bad consequences, and despite the closing pyrotechnics, almost every character leaves the story in a better state than they entered it.

This book is highly recommended, even for those who have had only passing contact with the insane arcana of modern literary theory. The plotting is tight, the satire is biting, and the writing is superb. If you cracked a smile at any of the excerpts or descriptions above, buy this and read it at once.

(Originally posted at The Library of Babel.)