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Pet, Pet, Slap

Pet, Pet, Slap

By Andrew Battershill
Categories: Fiction
Paperback : 9781552454763, 240 pages, June 2024
Ebook (EPUB) : 9781770567993, 240 pages, June 2024
Ebook (PDF) : 9781770568006, 240 pages, June 2024

Rocky meets Elmore Leonard meets Miranda July as Pillow Wilson, a past-his-prime boxer, trains for his last title shot. Shenanigans ensue.

 

Boxer ‘Pillow Fist’ Pete Wilson should be preparing for his big comeback fight. But, having recently undergone an ethical awakening, the new vegan is busy trying to find humane new homes for his menagerie of exotic pets (including Jersey Joe the sloth and Rigoberto the shark). His roommate, Sherlock Holmes, who faked his own death by waterfall, is now Pillow’s in-house doping expert.

Pillow just can’t get motivated to train, and he’s further distracted from his push-ups when both his car and Rigoberto mysteriously disappear. Luckily, Sherlock is a master of deduction. What follows is part underdog sports story, part work of neozoological surrealism, and part existential mystery novel.

 

"Reckless, desperate, and achingly human, Battershill remains funnier than anyone else on your shelf." – Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold

"The adventures of Battershill’s returning protagonist Pillow are witty and occasionally absurd, but the story never trips on ironies. Battershill twines the humanity of pulp noir with the unsettling play of surrealism to build a world in which pet sloths, Sherlock Holmes, and skilled drug pushers all seem to have found their ideal home." – Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time

"Pillow Wilson is one of my favourite characters in CanLit, and he is in fine form in Pet, Pet, Slap, a deeply funny, inventive, bizarre, heartbreaker of a book. Andrew Battershill not only writes with that magical alchemy of humour and pathos that most writers only wish they could pull off, but he somehow also balances surrealism and profound humanity in a way I’m sure I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out. I haven’t had this much fun reading in a long, long time." – Amy Jones, author of Pebble & Dove

 

 

Reviews

"In the hands of a less capable writer this unlikely and erratic combination of literary and stock characters and genre tropes from detective, noir, and underdog sports stories would likely prove too complex to navigate and depict with any sense of cohesion. Fortunately, Battershill (Marry, Bang, Kill) demonstrates the skill required to weave these various strands together in a compelling and compulsively readable way." – Logan Macnair, The British Columbia Review