God Bless Us, Every One!

Caution: Literature purists may be offended.

God Bless Us, Every One! cannot be called a sequel to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol because it's different from the classic in too many ways. Yet it does use it as backstory. The opening scene mirrors the first paragraphs of A Christmas Carol by reporting the death of Scrooge in a similar fashion to Dickens's announcement of the death of Marley. Coombs extends the wordplay, furthering the jokes Dickens makes to set the tone for the book. And he borrows other tropes and style features from Dickens for comic effect-surreal grotesque characters with suggestive names populate this novel rife with puns and malapropisms of all types.

The style of God Bless Us, Every One! might be described as faux-Dickensian, but the work draws inspiration from a long line of humorists right up to today's edgiest writers. It's a trenchant satire that mocks cultural norms, genre fiction, predatory capitalism, ethnic stereotyping, and religion all through the vehicle of a ludicrous storyline of dark comic fantasy.

Tiny Tim is the atypical hero of the story. Reduced to a vegetative state, he becomes an empath with the magical ability of picking up emotions from others, then radiating them out into the world. Without a will of his own, he becomes a tool of unscrupulous people who use him to manipulate markets and political sentiment-often to disastrous ends.