As those of you who feverishly follow this blog know, I was the fortunate recipient of a couple of autographed books (gratis) a number of weeks back — Dreaming of Gwen Stefani, and Small Town Punk. I posted on Gwen Stefani earlier, and I had the pleasure of finishing Small Town Punk, by John Sheppard, this week.

Small town punk cover

I would have finished Small Town Punk (and posted on it) earlier, except I’m a dope and accidentally left my copy (did I mention it was autographed?) on a plane as I was a mere fifty pages from the finish line. So I had to track down another copy and forge the author’s signature on the front page.

Anyway, this was a fun book. I was initially a little slow on the uptake and didn’t quite get the characters at the beginning, but in no time I was along for the ride with them and enjoying the heck out of it. Sheppard’s main character/narrator, Buzz Pepper, is a little bit Holden Caulfield-esque, had Caulfield grown up in Sarasota, Florida, in the eighties. He’s not afraid to cuss, and he has no warm and fuzzy feelings for the Establishment. One difference between them being that Buzz actually has a couple of friends (Dave and Albino) and is close to his sister, and following the dynamic between all of them is a blast. They like to smoke, lie to their parents, badmouth the Pizza Hut where most of them work, and look down on the rest of the world as they try to capitalize on every opportunity they come across to score someone’s meds and pop pills.

Examples of Buzz’s attitude are represented by the following excerpts:

I’d already [broken into the jukebox at the Pizza Hut] dozens of times, replacing the more noxious songs with punk singles. Hated Youth, Roach Motel, Voodoo Idols, Street Kidz, the Panics and Lethal Yellow replaced Phil Collins, Michael Jackson, Tommy Tutone, the Oak Ridge Boys, REO Speedwagon and Kenny Rogers. The top forty shit went to the inside floor of the machine after spending some time Frisbee-skipping across the parking lot.

Or:

I hated Tolkien. All he wrote was ponderous escapist bullshit that bore no resemblance to real life. Evil is too evil to be actually evil. And good is impossibly good. And it’s written like a high school history textbook, so that the d*cks who read it can pat themselves on the back for being smart.

I expected this book to be along the lines of King Dork, another recent fave, but they are very different (although both use the word “ramoning” at some point). Both of the main characters are sort of outcasts, but they’re completely different kinds of outcasts, with completely different outlooks on life and their peers. And while I’m not sure Buzz and I would have hung out much together, he, like Chi-Mo from King Dork, is a guy you can’t help rooting for.