In the wake of The Onion's devastatingly funny riffs on 9/11 comes this satiric first novel about the fallout from a Columbine-like shooting in Martirio, Texas, the barbecue-sauce capital of America. Vernon God Little has been mistakenly identified as the shooter in a rampage that left 16 dead at the local high school. Stalked by the media, Vernon feels like his life has turned into a TV movie (he hopes Brian Dennehy will be his lawyer). His mother and her frighteningly simple-minded suburban posse of friends think that emotional support consists of a continuous supply of ribs from the Bar-B-Chew Barn, although Vernon is facing the death penalty. Every page is saturated with a humor that barely masks Pierre's contempt for the media, the criminal justice system, and the rampant materialism of contemporary culture. Scatological, irreverent, crass, and very, very funny, the novel is told at an absolutely manic pace and will have readers wincing even as they laugh out loud. Pierre is a comic anarchist with talent to spare. Joanne Wilkinson
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Review
DBC Pierre has a fiendish sense of humour, never turning down an opportunity to wrongfoot us. -- The Guardian (London), February 1, 2003
"Vernon has a gift for wordplay that would keep the shade of James Joyce amused." -- Boston Globe, October 26, 2003
This is a book about finding the good in yourself and in other people. -- The Independent (London), February 3, 2003
"A frenetic yet unexpectedly moving first novel...Vernon God Little is raucous and brooding, coarse and lyric, corrosive and sentimental." -- New Yorker, October 20, 2003
This is quite a debut. -- The Times (London), January 18, 2003
"Vernon God Little brings its timeless, twisted young protagonist to the front of an illustrious class." -- Time Out New York, October 27, 2003
"A scabrously funny debut...Pierre has channeled the most afflicted and endearing hero since Rushmore's Max Fischer." -- Entertainment Weekly, September 29, 2003
"Vernon Little's polymorphous voice is the star of the novel...his simmeringly funny monologue [has] the scent of cracked poetry." -- Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2003
Review
In a just world, this ridiculously funny first novel would come free with every television set . . . Not since reading John Kennedy O'Toole's masterpiece,A Confederacy of Dunces. . . have I laughed so much or felt such sheer delight at the discovery of a wholly fresh comic voice . . . this novel reads like a modern day fairytale ― Mail on Sunday
A showpiece of superb comic writing . . . Out of the detritus of a morally bankrupt society, Pierre has fashioned a work of comic art ― Sunday Telegraph
From the Back Cover
"If Huckleberry Finn were set on the Mexican-American border and written by the creators of South Park, it might read something like this."-San Francisco Chronicle
When sixteen kids are shot on high school grounds, everyone looks for someone to blame. Meet Vernon Little, under arrest at the sheriff's office, a teenager wearing nothing but yesterday's underwear and his prized logo sneakers. Moments after the shooter, his best buddy, turns the gun on himself, Vernon is pinned as an accomplice. Out for revenge are the townspeople, the cable news networks, and Deputy Vaine Gurie, a woman whose zeal for the Pritikin diet is eclipsed only by her appetite for barbecued ribs from the Bar-B-Chew Barn. So Vernon does what any red-blooded American teenager would do; he takes off for Mexico.
Vernon God Little is a provocatively satirical, riotously funny look at violence, materialism, and the American media.
Winner of the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel
A New York Times Notable Book
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
DBC Pierre is the pen name of Peter Finlay, who was born in Australia in 1961 and divided most of the first twenty-three years of his life between Texas and Mexico City. He lives in Ireland.
About the Author
DBC Pierre is also the author of Lights Out in Wonderland and Ludmilla’s Broken English.
