Skaters, Trekkies And Cool Dudes. Rock!

A while back we mentioned Skaters, Trekkies And Cool Dudes, which is the debut novel from Derek Lawrence.

The blurb on the back starts off… “When God and Lucifer go missing and Heaven and Hell start to descend into chaos, the Joint Darkness & Light Emergency Committee decides that urgent action is needed…”

This had me half smiling even before I’d started to read it. It mentions a punk rocker and a teenage skateboader arriving in the English Midlands, along with pop star and Star Trek look-alikes. Hmm..

I find fantasy comedy a bit tedious. Douglas Adams did it well (mostly) in Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett try a bit hard to be funny in Good Omens, and Prachett on his own is kind of fun in a ‘travelling on a train when you’re not on holiday’ kind of way. Mostly they got a good ‘heh’ and a half laugh, or a sigh when the jokes were a bit predictable.

So you can imagine what I felt like before starting Skaters, Trekkies And Cool Dudes. Anguish, a bit. Hopeful, a lot.

The way that God and Lucifer are described make them seem like down to earth, erm, human beings. Their interplay is amusing, as are the other key characters (the Head of a Cherbub, Archangel and a Three Headed Hell Hound). The humour ranges from plain hilarious to down right side splitting (as a few people will atest to sitting on train while I was reading it.)

This is a a nicely flowing story, which trekkies, cool dudes, geeks, nerds skatboarders, punk rockers, BMXers and trainspotters et al will find funny and be able to relate to it perfectly. The humour is in a natural comical, on the stage at Comedy Central, with three hours of floor time (including intervals), so not rushed, kind of way.

If you can get past the clichéd good vs evil in a biblical setting, and focus on it as a two overworked, important guys, who need a break from their job/career, and so persue their dreams, then you’ll probably like this. The narrative seems to ramble sometimes, but soon gets back on track, so it doesn’t really deter from the story, and as the jokes come left, right and centre, they’ll distract in a positive way.

Derek Lawrence certainly has a knack for comedy, and as this is the first novel in the Divine Cock Up Trilogy, I look forward to the next Divine Cock Up.