A walking, talking, crime-fighting sock monkey... sorta

Unless you've been living under a rock or inside a "panic room" for the last, oh, I dunno, decade and a half, you're familiar at least in passing with the comedy/magic duo of Penn & Teller, who do a stage show in Las Vegas. They also have a program on Showtime entitled Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, have made appearances on "The Simpsons" and "The Late Show with David Letterman," and on top of serving as Visiting Scholars at MIT, they have even lectured at Oxford University and the Smithsonian Institution.

So, needless to be said, they're eclectic guys, and Penn Jillette, the speaking half of Penn & Teller, has penned (forgive the pun) his first novel entitled "Sock." A thin volume that's surprisingly dense, it's a murder mystery told from the perspective of a police diver's sock monkey named Dickie. The diver, who Dickie calls the "Little Fool," discovers the body of one of his ex-girlfriends while working, and this sets off a chain of events that results in several close encounters... of various kinds.

Penn has always been adamantly Atheist, and this mode of thinking is by no means excluded from the novel--on the contrary, nearly every character in the book, with one notable exception, seems to share nearly all of Penn's beliefs (i.e., there is no God, everyone's at least a little bit gay, and so on). Maybe that's a byproduct of this being Penn's first novel; after all, the experts always say to "write what you know." But that's a relatively minor quibble. The book is written in the same snarky, opinionated way that Penn talks while Teller performs cringe-inducing, injury-seems-eminent illusions to the side. In fact, could Penn's actual sock monkey talk--he does say he has one, and it really wouldn't surprise me in the least if it actually can talk--I'm pretty sure it'd sound like this.

Article Author: Ryan Eanes

Ryan Eanes is a freelance writer, designer and producer based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of Wake Forest University, and is completing a MA in Media Studies at The New School in New York.

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