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Orion Publishing Group/Allen & Unwin, Nov 2006
Reviewed by Sally Roddom
Robert Rankin’s Toy City is located somewhere over the rainbow and just
off the yellow brick road; it is where Toys live. The Toys are very much
alive; they walk, talk and go to work just as we do. There are even Toy
religions, such as The Church of Mechanology and The Exclusive Brotherhood
of the Midnight Growlers. The Toys don’t believe there is a whole world of
humans, and although they are aware that ‘meatheads’ exist, the Toys think
that these are just aberrations, rather than a whole species. The citizens
of Toy City, however, have more things to worry about than whether humans
really exist. There has been a spate of STC (Spontaneous Toy Combustion)
across the city, the first of which were the last surviving twelve
wind-up-cymbal-playing monkeys. The police have no idea where to start the
investigation, so they call in Eddie Bear and his side-kick Jack. Eddie
and Jack have recently re opened their old detective agency and are
looking for work, any work, so they take on the case. The only problem is
that Eddie Bear and Jack themselves have been seen at all the crime
scenes, so they are the main suspects. On top of this, just who is that
mechanical spaceman, and what is with the chickens?
THE TOYMINATOR is a sequel to THE HOLLOW CHOCOLATE BUNNIES OF THE
APOCALYPSE and is nowhere near as good as the first. Don’t get me wrong,
THE TOYMINATOR had its funny moments, but not laugh out loud and disturb
other people in the lunchroom funny. The plot started out on a high, and
had a huge potential to go somewhere great. But it very quickly got to the
point where I was struggling to keep reading it. I found the plot started
to wear thin, with the feeling that Rankin was just cracking one-liners
for the sake of it as if putting the jokes in was more important than
hanging them off a really good story. I felt that he had lost interest in
the whole plot and wasn’t quite sure where he was going to go with it. THE
HOLLOW CHOCOLATE BUNNIES OF THE APOCALYPSE was a great book, and comes
highly recommended. Maybe because it was so good, I expected as high a
standard with THE TOYMINATOR but it is definitely not of the same calibre.
I think that Rankin should leave Toy City alone now. There cannot be any
puns left to use; the concept has run its course.
Dec 2006 Review originally posted on Murder & Mayhem
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