Fantastic fiction fosters a certain kind of melancholic anti-hero, an amoral, luckless mess of a messiah destined to do more harm than good. Now, to the ranks of Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné and Donaldson's Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever comes Gaston Glew, a pickle, narrator of Cameron Pierce's The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island: A Tragedy for People Who Eat Food. Sixteen and hereditarily-depressed, Glew escapes the confines of the pickle planet, launching himself into space in a vehicle built and fueled--literally--via the deaths of his parents. Coming to Pancake Island, Glew proceeds to indulge his every sour whim, romancing princesslike pancake Fanny Fod even as he murders her fellow pancakes with impunity, poisons the environment, and destabilizes the sun, kicking off the titular apocalypse. Strangeness abounds in a world where the fauna includes bacon vultures and an imprisoned cuddlywumpus (the source of all happiness), and the plot wickedly spirals through an absurd--if doomed--landscape toward catharsis. Like a demented children's story for adults, The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island: A Tragedy for People Who Eat Food is inspired weirdness in the Bizarro tradition from the author of Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden and Ass Goblins of Auschwitz.