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What Goes Around Comes Around
The Fanny Upping follows a Japanese girl living in a multi-dimensional mayhem who is trying to unravel everything that has turned upside down and backward in the world. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
As you say, I wanted to paint a world upside-down. Driving the story is what’s called the colloquium—where participants, always unwilling, learn a life lesson. For those that survive, it’s a valuable learning experience—though the unhuman entity that runs this colloquium seems indifferent to the fate of its participants. This story is just a natural growth from the first novel, The Cuckoo Colloquium, though I write the novels so that they can all stand alone.
What were the morals you were trying to capture while creating your characters?
Evenhandedness. Justness. What goes around comes around. The colloquium can be a harsh and unforgiving mentor. Self-indulgence will be corrected. Those who think themselves superior, or in some way better, will find themselves on the wrong, maybe fatal, end. It probably all comes down to the fundamental scruple of doing the right thing.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Coming of age is a big theme, of course, as we follow the maturity of Pinky Bell from gangly little girl into womanhood. But it’s also about honesty and being true to oneself. The stories look at what it means to assimilate into another culture, too, and play with the highs and lows of this exacting process. I hope the themes stray from mainstream novels and challenge social norms in ways that readers don’t usually get.
Will there be a follow-up novel to this story? If so, what aspects of the story will the next book cover?
No follow-up planned, but the themes and messages will continue into my next book called 33 Frivolous Pricks (out in June 2024) that returns to the theme of time travel and the human toll one inevitably must pay for the experience. The story, like most of what I write, is set in Kyoto and Los Angeles, two cities I know well. Like The Fanny Upping, 33 Frivolous Pricks is a wild ride, and I just hope readers are able to hang on and enjoy it until the end.
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The crazy colloquium is back, and it’s up to Japanese Pinky Bell to come to grips with the mystifying events of multi-dimensional mayhem all around her. The haves and the have nots—the system we’ve had throughout time has gone fanny up opposite: the poor and downtrodden find themselves owning vast fortunes, while the prideful, the selfish, the greedy, must now endure life as the objects of their past scorn in this wild, furious reversal of fortune. Unpleasant things are happening to Pinky Bell’s teachers too, giving what they call faculty development a whole new meaning!
And it’s up to Pinky Bell (again) to deal with all this madness.
Her exploits lead back to the rain forest of Sarawak, where the wildlife is set to unleash a brutal reckoning on unsuspecting tourists in a final, most frenzied, fanny upping of this crazy, new colloquium.
The Fanny Upping
In this wild adventure, full of talk of buttocks and backsides, The Fanny Upping is not what one would call a typical science fiction adventure. Our story follows the tale of 16-year-old Pinky Bell Asano, a Japanese teenager whose life focus seems to be dodgeball. As the tale progresses, we see the emergence of the TittiButt, a creature who has an unworldly eyeball for an anus. As it goes around, sucking people up, one thing is for certain that after reading this book you will never be the same.
The Fanny Upping, by Michael A. Greco, is a novel written to make its readers think about the world differently. Cultural taboos, teenage dramas, and investigations into supernatural occurrences that would make the most dedicated science fiction readers pause. Filled with Japanese influences throughout, this book brings a unique perspective on the world of fantasy and fiction.
Greco’s infusion of Japanese terminology lends an authentic cultural flair to the narrative, adding depth and color to the tale’s tapestry. The distinctive character names, such as Pinky Bell and Candy Buppie, are a testament to the novel’s creative spirit, though they may require the reader to pay close attention to the unfolding story. This element of complexity in character development adds a layer of engagement, encouraging readers to immerse themselves more deeply into the world Greco has crafted. While the journey through the character arcs may be intricate, it invites a delightful challenge to the adventurous reader, making the experience of unraveling the plot all the more rewarding.
The narrative of The Fanny Upping joyfully defies a linear storyline, offering a mosaic of events that invite readers to piece together the plot in a way that is as engaging as it is unique. The novel’s liberal use of humor, including its cheeky references, is a bold choice that adds to its distinctive voice and charm. While the unconventional structure may seem like a jigsaw puzzle with its scattered pieces, this quality makes it an intriguing read for those who delight in assembling the bigger picture from the whimsical details. This book is a perfect match for readers who relish the opportunity to think outside the box and enjoy a narrative that keeps them guessing.
Pages: 234 | ASIN : B0CKPJ9LZM
The Monsters of Their Imaginations
Hollyweird Needs is a wild SciFi story following a group of kids from a special needs school that discover a portal to the past in a new arcade game. How did this idea start and change as you wrote?
I started with my own fantasies about characters lost in space and time, and then played with all the possible twists involved with jumping through these dimensions. I should credit Steven King’s 11/23/63 for the following idea: What if these forces of space-time resisted change? I took this a step further with the characters ‘breaking’ the continuum, allowing all the fun stuff to happen, with the monsters of their imaginations pouring through.
There is a lot of interesting characters in this book. Who was your favorite character to write for?
I suppose my favorite character would be Chester. Even though there is no outstanding lead for this story, as it’s more of a buddy story, Chester is the one with the greatest understanding of how the time-jumping works, and she undergoes the most change, including how she rejects the moniker of Chester for her real Assyrian name as her self-actualization develops.
This seems like a very imaginative book. Was this an outlet for your natural creativity or was did it take some effort to put together?
I write within the genre of what I call comic fantasy, but my last couple of books (“Project Purple” and “Assunta”) wandered quite a bit from that category. You can say I got the HORROR out of my system. I probably should have published those under a different name, but I didn’t. And so now I’m back to doing what I enjoy the most—trying to be funny.
What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?
The next book is in the comic-fantasy realm, out this summer called “A Labyrinth for Loons”, about an American tourist stuck in Covid lockdown in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He’s given the body of a corpse for storage because the family of the deceased is not allowed to drive it home for burial during lockdown. The dead man begins to haunt the guy, and he slips into a psychosis, losing his sense of identity and taking on the characteristics of the corpse—when it was alive. This action takes place with the day-to-day life and culture of Kuala Lumpur in the background.
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But the adults, especially those in the nearby screenwriting workshop, catch wind of the teens’ exploits, and in their own clumsy attempts to leap back into the past, tear a hole in the dimensions of time and space.
That’s when the monsters come through.
The Butts Plaza shopping center falls under siege, what with giant man-eating worms, dragons from the under-world, brain-eating zombies, killer monkey-birds, a deadly, gargantuan bouncing head, and even the Terminator–on a mission to terminate.
It turns out that forays done willy-nilly through the time continuum have consequences–mainly that the monstrosities featured in the adults’ screenplays come to life. Now the little shopping center has turned into a mish-mash of horrific goings-on.
The teens, all on various stages of the autism spectrum, must rescue the adults in Butts Plaza (and maybe the whole wide world!) from the horrors pouring through that hole in the sky.
And all of this begs the question–Who are the ones with special needs, anyway?
Hollyweird Needs
![Hollyweird Needs: when monsters fell from a hole in the sky by [Michael Greco]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41K1ithchfL.jpg)
Michael A. Greco’s Hollyweird Needs is one of the most unique books I have ever read. The first word that came to mind as I read it was “peculiar”. From the characters to the storylines, there seems to be an eerie vibe to this book.
It follows the life of Chester, Smegman, Wordsworth, and other autistic teenagers living in a Los Angeles special need school dubbed “Special Kneads”. Although most of these teens don’t have any other caregivers, the school staff and neighbors play a huge role in their everyday lives, some even taking the place of family.
Havoc ensues in the shopping center that houses the school (Butts Plaza) when a new arcade claw game mysteriously shows up. Although the game seems harmless at first, it begins sending those who play it to the past, something that eventually results in devastating consequences. It is ultimately up to the teens to save the adults and restore order.
Not only is this book’s storyline unique but it also goes to great lengths to explain what goes on in an autistic person’s mind. I particularly appreciate the author’s efforts to not paint any of the teenagers as victims but rather as masters of their own destiny. Their individuality really did shine throughout the book.
The use of wordplay throughout the narrative is also a nice touch. For instance, the fact that that Wordsworth doesn’t speak and the claw game is called Dimensional Needs is quite a treat. But while the plot of the story is quite solid, but the execution is wanting, some dialogue seems out of place, and there seems to be a large cast of characters to keep track of. Apart from brief family history and information about their journey with autism, we didn’t get much about who the main characters were, and I really wanted to know because I found the characters interesting and wanted to know more.
With a solid concept and a large dose of creativity, Michael A. Greco’s Hollyweird Needs is an interesting science fiction story that will appeal to readers who like a little dark comedy in their urban fiction novel.
Pages: 264 | ASIN: B08SJ2XGMS
LITERARY TITAN 