Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal
By Keith Thomson
(MacAdam Cage, Hardcover, 9781596921726, 275pp.)
Publication Date: April 3, 2006
Categories: Humorous
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Moby-Dick for the blog generation.
Cat food cannery worker Gus Openshaw has one goal in life: to kill a whale. Not just any whale, but a big, blubbery whale that ate his wife, child, and arm during a vicious and unprovoked attack.
With a rickety boat and a heavily restrictive whale-hunting license, Gus sets out to exact his revenge. Along the way, Gus keeps an online journal–a blog–to keep the world informed about his misfit crew, his clashes with pirates, his near-fatal incarceration, and his infatuation with a certain island princess.
Complete with author-drawn scrimshaw illustrations, Gus Openshaw’s Whale-Killing Journal is the hilarious documentation of one man’s obsessive pursuit of a giant whale that would make Captain Ahab proud.
Keith Thomson wrote and directed the short film Cupidity, which played in the Sundance Film Festival and won the Laura Napor Award. He has also written feature films for Tri-Star, Paramount, and Disney. His first novel, Pirates of Pensacola, was released by St. Martin’s Press in 2005.
“[A] raucous comedy of errors…punchy and entertaining…Thomson is no Melville, but there’s no question who’s the better gag-writer. Dumb fun, smartly imagined.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Openshaw is an absurdist Ahab…amusing and entirely inconsequential — an anti-Moby Dick.”
— Entertainment Weekly
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