Grape City by Kevin L. Donihe

Grape City Reviews

• 
  Chuck Byrd

  Good premise...maybe not fully developed..still fun..
• 
  David Barbee

  Grape City is kind of like A Clockwork Orange. They’re both set in stylish dystopias filled with dehumanizing ultraviolence, and they both use a lot of cool weird wordplay. They’re also both named after fruits.
  
  But while A Clockwork Orange is a tale of raw energy, Grape City is told from a perspective of quiet desperation. You see, humankind has become so violent and depraved that Hell had to close. People everywhere are horror-banging and slam-raping, cannibalism is chic, and you’re lucky if you can find anyone who can at least pretend to be sane.
  
  So when Hell closed, the demons were sent up to earth as refugees, only to learn that humans’ violence is far worse than the pure evil of Hell. Charles is our guide through this world. As a demon living in this screwed up world, he’s sad, pissed-off, lonely, desperate, vulnerable, and utterly humiliated. Charles makes it by with only the tiniest of comforts. Grape City has a few flaws, but Kevin Donihe has created a really great character in Charles. This book should be read even if it’s just to watch Charles make his way through this ultraviolent world.
  
  The ending is a little awkward and rushed. It didn’t seem to fit the rest of the story, but I think that’s forgivable. I feel like this book was a kind of catharsis for Donihe. The story basically follows Charles on a few exploits in this world and we get to see his desperate attempts to find a place in it. Everyone can relate to that. Now imagine that sort of universal struggle set in a culture so unintelligent and needlessly violent that it makes a guy with Hellraiser pins in his face wince. That’s what you’ll get here.
  
• 
  Christy Stewart

  This is a great sequal to District 9.
• 
  Missy (myweereads)

  “He uttered a demonic chant under his breath as he left the bedroom on route to the stairwell. It was just for luck. Demonic chants didn’t work in the world.”
  
  Kevin L Donihe introduces the reader to Charles. A demon forced to work crappy underpaid jobs since Hell went out of business. He lives in one the worst cities in the world, Grape City. He passes his time working two jobs, writing emails to Satan and trying to fit in with humans however it’s difficult when chaotic absurdities have become the norm.
  
  This Bizarro story was weird and messed up. The idea that Hell is now out of business so the demons are forced to live on Earth was an interesting concept. The way in which the daily grind is described is oddly relatable to some extent.
  
  Life on this Earth is not easy for Charles. He is struggling daily to fit in, he is faced with constant challenges. The blending of dark fantasy and horror made this a disturbing read. It’s almost on par with A Clockwork Orange in many ways.
  
  Although this was a violent messed up story it was also entertaining to read.
  
• 
  Mirko Liang

  Alright, fun premise.
• 
  Bob Freville

  
  I'm fairly new to Bizarro, although you could also say I've been a lifetime fan of Bizarro who has loved it the way one loves a girl whose name one doesn't know but whose beauty and personality inspires one to stalk her all the same...metaphorically speaking (no restraining orders, please).
  
  As a writer and filmmaker I find myself in the same situation with literature as I so often do with cinema--it's increasingly harder to find something which speaks to me now that I've seen what lies on the other side of the curtain and the magic has largely been wrung bloody from the bells and whistles for me. Once you've written a book and studied accepted and unaccepted structures it becomes difficult to appreciate just any old work of art within that medium.
  
  It's the reason why I went from reading thirty books a year down to three books a year within the last quarter of a decade. I simply see through the artifice and bull shrift (sic) too easily now that I've played with literary frameworks myself.
  
  So all that said it is seldom if ever that I come across something that not only takes me by surprise but reinvigorates me with the desire to write! What's more it's rare that I've found a book in this century that speaks to me and inspires me simultaneously the way my lifelong favorite scribes (Barker, Vonnegut, Burroughs, Camus, Houellebecq, Palahniuk, Ionesco, Mamet, Labute, MacDonagh, Thompson, Bierce, Twain, Westlake and Warren Ellis, amongst others) have.
  
  Kevin L. Donihe is one of those authors who proves the exception to the rule and Grape City is one of if not the only book(s) I can think of, of recent vintage, that did this to me.
  
  Grape City is the book that turned me on to Bizarro, gave my passion a name (Bizarro), justified my preoccupations as a reader and writer, and made me laugh so hard at its lampooning of pop culture (kill bangs and such) that unnatural things shot out my nostrils and I peed a little in my pants (Bizarro).
  
  What Grape City does so well is take the fantastical (a demon loosed on Earthbound society) and make it uncanny if not wholly normal and banal. Which is really effin funny, to say the least, and it's also what makes it the perfect example and paradigm of what Bizarro is at its best--A genre which makes the extraordinary seem ordinary and the ordinary seem extraordinary (see also: Donihe's Night of the Assholes, Shane MacKenzie's All You Can Eat, Carlton Mellick III's The Menstruating Mall).
  
  The Hell-born protagonist is relegated to a shitty urban purgatory of sorts on Earth and forced to work a fast food gig since he's been abandoned, more or less, by his old boss Satan. This is really bumming him out since he's forbidden to hurt the patrons who annoy the piss out of him around every turn and can only fantasize about what he'd like to do to both them and his sawed-off nefarious dweeboid of a boss, some gnarly little nincompoop who proves more evil than our demon bro could ever be. When he's not stuck doing his food servicing labor, he's trying in vain to maintain a long-distance bromance with the Devil who emerges as every bit as aimless and doomed as he is, working as he does a lowly Mcjob and hoping to land a telemarketing career.
  
  It's funny because it's both pathetic and sad and, as any comedian would tell you, comedy is born of tragedy.
  
  What first got me about this one, the thing that made me want to snap it up in the first place, was the cover design/book jacket--the anguished, bug-eyed, pursed-lipped and writhing demon-geek on the cover reminded me of the short-lived and long-lost MTV! cartoon The Brothers Grunt, a far-out, subversive block of animation that was, unfortunately, overshadowed by its predecessor Beavis & Butthead.
  
  And like 'Grunt,' Donihe's Grape City gives us a unique and avant-garde approach to the bro comedy as well as the bildungsroman (if you can even call it that). There are shades here of everything from Coupland's Generation X and Ridgway's Three Squirt Dog to Palahniuk's Choke and the aforesaid Beavis & Butthead, but Donihe's doesn't skip a beat in delivering something wholly inimitable as well--Even Trey Parker & Matt Stone could not fashion a more pathetic Devil nor could they make Earth look more like Hell than it does here. And that's fuggin funny!
  
  There are hearty chunks of queef-meat here for fans of everything from existentialism and absurdism to Adult Swim and adult film. It's gotta be the most consistently enjoyable and appetite-inducing book I can remember reading in my life! By appetite I mean the way the book leaves you hungering for more and resenting the thin page count.
  
  I'm hoping and praying that somewhere in his seemingly infinite bag of imaginative literary tricks Donihe's got some more awful-amusing Apocrypha for us! Grape City would work well as a Biblical or Demonic trilogy, though as it stands it's one Helluva stand-alone!
  
• 
  Kelly

  Kevin L. Donihe is brilliant. One of the most creative, most original authors out there, Donihe is in my top five list of sure things. When I need a little surrealism, a little thought to my scare and tear, it’s him I sprint to. Only come to find out, and I say this with a frown that would move Hitler to empathy, even Mr. Donihe can have a bad day.
  
  In what was one of the most banal storylines that I have ever read, Donihe managed to make hell about as interesting as an Iowa cornfield*. That’s right, feel my pain. Without even so much as a clue or explanation on why Hell has gone out of business, the plot centers on Charles – a former minion from the ninth gate in hell – and his daily life. Charles, more moralistic than any priest I’ve ever met, spends his days doing the 9 to 5 thing, while still finding time to bitch and moan about the good ole’ days in hell. You see, apparently when Hell closed down shop, the world’s deviants took over on earth.
  
  Well, at least that’s my guess since Donihe never quite explained it. Anyway, so while society maims, defiles, and murders their friends and strangers alike, Charles just moves about the day in what can only be the best advertisement I’ve ever seen for Zoloft. Oh, and he’s not the only one. Overweight, needy, and pitiful, Satan is actually more pathetic than Charles. And that, people, is a hard thing to accomplish. Bravo!
  
  So, aside from the plot and characters, how was the rest of the book you want to know? I’m glad you asked, but first, to be fair, let me say this: after I received this book, I got an email from the author explaining that he knew there were some typos and that they would be fixed the following day. Said author was even sweet enough to email me a list of the boo-boo’s and their corrections. But, and you knew there had to be a but in there, I found more issues. Which, compiled onto the list of already discovered typos, made this novella one of the most marked up books I own.
  
  But what kills me is that through it all: the emaciated storyline, the ever-elusive atmosphere, the apathetic cast, and a pace that seemed to move with the speed of a tortoise, Donihe’s style of writing – his imagery, his ability to string words together that can create a sense of clarity and awe in the reader, and his originality is still there…barely. You just have to look, preferably with a magnifying glass and a big margarita.
  
  My rating? I give it a 1. Now, maybe it’s because I have my own presuppositions of Donihe or maybe it’s because I hold him so high on a pedestal, but I expected a lot more from him and you should to. My advice: skip this novella and wait for his next release. From what I hear, he has quite a few coming out soon.
  
  
  -As posted on Horror-Web.com
• 
  Ty Kaz

  It was a beautiful Saturday morning when I awoke to a completely empty house, with a few hours to kill, when I decided to give Grape City a whirl. It's only about 100 pages (minus the fact that the actual narrative starts at about page 12, and has at least a page and a half of blank paper between chapters, leaving it in all reality at about 85 pages.) so I decided, what the hell?
  
  
  Have you ever had a dream? Of course you have. But have you ever had a dream that was so innately bizarre at the time, you could kick yourself for not realizing it was a dream? That's how Donihe comes across for me. He has a great sense of making the narrative and events inside the narrative seem organic within the context of its own little world. For how amazingly surreal, bizarre, and whimsical Donihe can weave a story, it all seems to make perfect sense within that story. And for that reason I would give this book 5 stars. For its cohesiveness.
  
  
  
  But in all, the plot was rushed. The pacing was misaligned, the characters were flat, and the plot just fell short for me. In Grape City, Donihe just assumes that the reader will accept the events prior to the beginning of the story, and because of this, leaves the narrative threadbare, and full of simple questions the reader will never know the answer to.
  
  Why was Hell shut down? Who shut hell down? Why did the inhabitants of earth suddenly become hellish and perverted? Too many basic questions left opened, and I could honestly say if he spent a little more time fleshing out these details Grape City could have been a five star book. But as is (without even going into how half baked the character creation was), I'll take it for what it is---which is still an entertaining read--but can't give it any more than that...
  
  
  
  
• 
  Zoe

  Life in in Burger hell is rough for anyone, but it's even worse for a former denizen of the real Hell, which has closed due to competition from Earth. Humans have completely lost control of themselves, and their world has become filled with random acts of bang raping, among other perversities. And in this world, a demon named Charles must adjust to life in a city which makes Hell seem pleasant by comparison. Between a clueless social worker who can't remember his name and a sociopath for a boss, Charles is getting frustrated enough to consider taking dire steps...by looking for a new job. Add in a few interviews gone horribly wrong and a true "date from hell", and you've got a great bizarro story with plenty of laughs and gruesome visuals in generous portions... served with fries on the side.
• 
  Allison Renner

  I love the concept of this book: Hell has gone out of business, so demons are forced to live on Earth in a human-like lifestyle. Some elements of Hell, however, have come to the surface, and life is cruel and violent - nothing like it is now. That means “Charles,” a demon who had to shed his frightening name for something more acceptable, lives in an apartment and works at a fast food place and a used car lot. He gets set up on blind dates and tries to stay in touch with demons from Hell. The book is witty in some parts, but overall I wanted more. I think there was a lot of room for details to be expanded, and I would love to see more of the world without Hell - since that means that there is Hell on Earth. The ending is kind of open enough for a sequel, though it was written in 2006 so I need to look into the author’s other works and see if there’s a follow-up.
• 
  Andrew Stone

  Review coming... But in a nutshell, I love Kevin L. Donihe. He's one of my favorite writers. Unfortunately, this book isn't nearly as good as anything else he has written. If this is all you have read by him, you're doing yourself a real disservice if you don't read more by this guy. (This is a 2.5 star review)
• 
  Rhonda

  Book #1 for the April 2011 read-a-thon. This was my first read by Kevin Donihe. The book was humorous at times as well as witty throughout. Donihe definitely has a warped sense of humor, which I like. Interested in reading more by him in the future.
• 
  Tanya

  You know it's bad when a demon is distressed by humanity.