Hello Devilfish! is a first-person (or first-fish) account of a giant blue Japanese movie monster stingray’s attack on contemporary Tokyo and his tragic morph into human form. Using elements of Japanese shock-pop and the infamous Hello Kitty meme, the story is told in comic narrative from the stingray’s point of view as he gleefully creams Tokyo into rubble. The stingray is soon pursued by Squidra, a love-struck giant squid. She demands love; he refuses. In an epic waterfront battle, she traps him in a human-growth hormone bath that changes him into a puny human — a reverse metamorphosis — monster to man. Refusing to accept his humanity, the stingray acts like his former giant self while trying to find food, shelter, romance — and avoid the destructive rampage of his stalker squid love interest. Hello Devilfish! is told in a readable, comic narrative occasionally spiced with Manglish words. Funny and very readable, underneath the outlandish plot is a truly fresh critique of contemporary culture and mainstream literature.
Industry Reviews
“The anarchist as social monster, scoffing at bourgeois values, is supersized into a 90-ft. 'gigantor' blue stingray in this rapid-fire stomp through pop culture and Japanese monster movies. Dakron (Mantids) tosses out a stream of cultural criticisms warped as puns ('You gotta fight for your Reich to party'), even as he admits there’s no point in trying to upset our all-absorbing entertainment-industrial complex ('Nazi jokes are so 20th century'). Resistance may be futile, but this book at least makes it fun.” —Publishers Weekly
"An audacious, laugh-out-loud novel that is brilliantly committed. . . . Recommended for fans of absurdist fiction."—Library Journal
“Clever, smart, engaging and completely unique. Ron Dakron is one of the most imaginative authors I’ve ever read.” –Carlton Mellick III, author of Quicksand House
“It is said that Frankenstein is the first myth of the anxiety of the Scientific Age. Godzilla is the anxiety of the Atomic Age. Hello Devilfish! is the anxiety of the Information Age. Dakron had created a living linguistic Kaiju composed of the interjection, syncretism, and meta burp. This novel is an inoculation against the future. -- Matt Briggs, author of Shoot the Buffalo and Virility Rituals of North American Teenage Boys
“I was sucked into Ron Dakron’s prose and the world he created. I read the rest of the book in one sitting because he had created a world I found interesting.” —410media.com
“Dakron draws from many sources in order to provide his readers with a side-splitting adventure that’ll give anyone the much needed laugh they deserve in life. A must for humor readers seeking something with a twist.” —Midwest Book Review
“Ne plus ultra bizarre, man! With cartilaginous prose, soft as fishbone, sense bending and scattershot as a Robin Williams shtick where lost meanings blast by, Dakron follows the comet trails of Infra and Newt with a morphological plot out of Ovid by way of Kafka.” —Kirkus Reviews
