HUGE by Brent Butt

A Christmas present, HUGE is the debut novel by Brent Butt, a successful Canadian comedian and screenwriter (who, I must admit, I hadn’t heard of) and it’s a fun, trashy, thriller if a little formulaic and predictable by the end, though one can argue that genre conventions are part of the pleasure of this kinda book…

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HUGE opens with a scene of hyperviolence, with a man who runs an out-of-the-way dive bar being burned alive on the small stage of his venue by a jilted, giant, comedian…

The next few chapters then cut between the various characters of the novel, moving them all into place for the action to come…

We have a seasoned working comedian (not a celebrity, but someone who has made a living from jokes for most of his adult life) who’s 40-something, recently divorced, picking up extra gigs for money for his daughter’s college fund, all while considering giving up the industry for a steady job…

We have a hotshot young comedian from Ireland who’s on the road in Canada to warm up for a massive gig at Montréal’s Just for Laughs festival that (if it goes well) will secure her a lucrative TV job…

There’s a thug gangster who’s owed money by a gambling-addicted comedy promoter and – most importantly – there’s a young psychopath amateur comedian wannabe hotshot professional comedian ([scott manley hadley waves, not youngly or psychopathically]) who has killed and tortured and killed again, and has adopted the stage name “Hobie Huge” because he’s a very big lad and he wants to be “huge”…

The thug gangster – Huge’s uncle – pulls a favour with the comedy promoter, and so the novel kicks off with two solid pro comedians – one on the cusp of superstardom, one who never achieved that but is depicted as competent and a safe pair of hands – suddenly saddled with a “new act” on their Winnipeg eastwards small town Canadian week-long comedy tour…

The big guy is weird and abrasive in person and on stage, though after some strong words from both of the pros, he does better on the second night of the run.

That’s the set-up, and soon enough the “Huge” comedian is murdering hecklers in the car park after the show, then he’s rigging up remote-detonated bombs so he can leave one of the two terrified comedians tied up in the back of a van with the threat that he will blow them up if the other comedian doesn’t perform comedy as if everything is a-ok, because he doesn’t want to lose the stage time, and knows he can’t perform an entire solo show yet…

It’s fun, it’s exciting!

The murder that opens the book comes back as an important plot point later on, too, as the bar where it happens is owned by a rival gangster to Huge’s uncle…

The novel follows the two desperate and terrified comedians as they hope and try to get out of the third one’s clutches (and literally out of the straps that tie the remote-detonated bombs to them), with their lives and their careers intact…

As I said, it’s fun, it’s frothy, it’s silly, it’s playful…

Lots of violence and lots of jokes, and also some useful advice on comedy writing and performance in the dialogue between the more experienced comedians and the new, young, one… until, that is, they witness him doing extreme violence (killing a heckler and then breaking his arms postmortem for kicks)…

It’s very obvious that the older comedian is the foil for the author, and though this is initially signposted in an embarrassing way (the comedian does an amazing set at a comedy club and afterwards the sexy young bartender propositions him but he’s like “no, I’m married” but she “shrugged as if to say that didn’t matter, but it mattered to me” (not a double-checked quotation)), the character functions far less as aspirational fantasising than this opening scene might imply (no comment on the ending).

Ultimately, yes, there is a clear and convenient narrative route through the whole novel, with the overall shape of the story being a rather traditional action thriller one, but – as with comedy and its long history of jokes/themes/styles/ideas recurring in new and interesting ways – the pleasure here is found in the journey to that resolution, the ways in which the road trip slasher and the comedy road trip coincide and play off each other…

The villain is scary and unpredictable, his motivation eternal yet engaging… he wants to be a star, baybe(!), but his ego’s fragility doesn’t match his self-confidence, though his propensity to violence does…

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It’s set in the mid-90s (presumably to avoid the need to account for phones and the internet in the plot), and though its depictions of small town Canada feel real enough (the novelist’s biggest hit was a TV sitcom set in a petrol station in this part of the world), when we enter flashbacks in Los Angeles offices or Chicagoan suburbs (or even conversations where an American and an Irish person discuss things people might think are weird about Canada that very much aren’t things a non-Canadian would even notice let alone remark on (I’ve spent almost four years in Canada as a non-Canadian (I can legally live and work in Canada indefinitely (for now) and have a technically (no accent and can’t ice skate) Canadian child))) the wheels do fall off a little bit…

All in all, though, a great, fun thriller that’s an enjoyable Winter evening treat – not the most ambitious book of its type you’ll read, but absolutely doing exactly what it sets out to do!