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Jay Spencer Green

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Breakfast at Cannibal Joe's: Darkly Funny, Desperate, and Full of Rage Kindle Edition

by Jay Spencer Green (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Breakfast at Cannibal Joe's is a dystopian comedy like no other. It's debauched, depraved, delirious, delightful. The Bloomfield Review says, "Like an obnoxious spy-comedy seen through the eyes of a filthy drunk ... The language can be absurdly, almost heroically obscene." The TBR Pile says, "Bonkers. Weird. Surreal. Satirical. Politically incorrect. Clever. Absurd. Witty. Disgusting." Winner of the 2015 Lord of the Book Covers award. Voted No. 6 in the 50 Top Indie Books of 2015

Joe Chambers is a CIA operative working in Dublin. Assigned to an agency-fronted publishing house, his problems include, but are not limited to, errant MI6 agents, insane profit-making schemes, a Francoist dwarf, and a tapeworm named Steve. He is an utterly reprehensible character, fond of submerging his head in a sink-full of whiskey and fantasising about brutally murdering irritating teenagers. He is, in other words, the perfect guide to this bizarre and repulsive journey into Dublin’s gutters.

Jay Spencer Green presents a twisted and exaggerated, but wholly recognisable vision of Dublin. A place of suicide bombings, mass canine culling in the Phoenix Park, “cheap Moore Street socks (35 euros for 6 pairs)”, online divorce, and enough red tape and bureaucracy to drive a man to murder. A place where “cat’s cheese salad” and a dubious pork/human hybrid meat share the menu. It is a Dublin of no redemption.

A raucous mix of double crosses, brothels, triple crosses, and cocktail recipes, Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s is a dark, twisted, and picaresque tale, a transgressive black comedy like no other.

Print length

334 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

28 July 2015
File size

1201 KB
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About the Author

Jay Spencer Green lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of five novels, the first of which, Breakfast at Cannibal Joe's, has been described as "Hilarious," "Horrific," "Scabrous," "Scatalogical," and "Savagely Funny." He has worked as a factory laborer, college lecturer, van driver, court coverer at Wimbledon, database editor, theater stagehand, hotel dishwasher, and conveyor belt overseer. Over the years, he has also launched a number of projectiles into space, usually in the direction of the TV.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B012YKI5D2
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1201 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 334 pages

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Jay Spencer Green

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Rabelaisian, Experimental, Inventive, and Fun, the novels of Jay Spencer Green are like Goya's Black Paintings in literary form, the kind of enjoyment you get looking into somebody else's abyss to avoid looking into your own.

Comparisons have been made with Kurt Vonnegut, J. G. Ballard, William Burroughs, and the Marquis de Sade, none of them favourable.

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Top review from Australia

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zuzu burford

Black Humour

Reviewed in Australia on 14 June 2020

While enjoying the assignment as the CIA operative for Ireland dark clouds are gathering on the horizon for Joe when headquarters are thinking that there is no need for an office in Ireland. Determined to push back and save the operations leads to a series of failed attempts.
The black humor had me in fits of laughter and critique about modern society spread throughout the story was just genius and like all good stories a fitting end.
This is an independent review NetGalley / Books go Social

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Mike Robbins

Good subversive filth

Reviewed in the United States on 28 August 2016

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Joe Chambers runs Whetstone Publishing. Dublin-based, it’s a sort of super-clippings agency that produces abstracts of what’s published around the world and sells them to wealthy corporate subscribers. Joe’s not what he seems though. He’s American. Whetstone is actually a CIA front company. And Joe is a Company operative sent into this backwater job thanks to “one lousy indiscretion eight years ago with a bottle of Metaxa, a tub of Starbucks Java ice cream, and the spouse of a European leader.”

Trouble is, Dublin’s not a sinecure anymore. Because Joe’s under pressure to cut costs. In fact the book begins with a tense online meeting between Joe and his superior in New York, the Chief of International Trade (United States). Or to use her full acronym, COITUS. And things sort of go downhill from there, until Joe’s up to his neck in vice and crime. Not that that stops him jotting down cocktail recipes now and then. (My favourite was The JFK: 1 oz. Green Spot Irish Whiskey, 8 oz. Tomato Juice, 4 oz. Cuban Rum, Three slugs of Harvey’s.)

Jay Spencer Green’s Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s is very funny. I have rather a dry sense of humour, and I suspect I laughed less than most readers. But I still some serious snort-my-coffee moments, including one or two while riding on the New York subway at rush hour (and trust me, that doesn't happen often). Joe’s CIA drinking companion Frank, torturemeister from the US Embassy, refusing to watch tennis: “If I’ve got to watch two lesbians grunting and squealing, I expect at least one of them to be wearing a strap-on.” Asked how he got on with a date the night before: “Excellent. I’ve always liked Stiff Little Fingers. Just never had them up my ass before.” Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s is not only funny; it’s also filthy.

But it’s also very dark. We’re in a dystopian Dublin in what seems to be the very near future, cynical, with everything for sale. In passing, we hear that troops have shot 15 Travelers dead near Kells; and that they drive around the city at night, spraying homeless people with sewage so that they’ll inspire disgust and will be easier to persecute. It gets worse. A virus strikes the pork industry and the government takes action to save the pigs: “For years, pigs’ organs had been used to keep human patients alive. Why not the reverse? Who’s going to miss a few winos and Travelers so long as there’s bacon on the plate of a Sunday morning? China showed us the way years ago, executing criminals to order.” Late in the book things start to take a very sinister turn, with bombs and disorder that don’t seem like an accident. Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s is very funny, but I wondered to what extent Green wanted the readers to laugh, or to think about the world post-2008 crash, and where it’s going. I think he mainly wants to make us laugh. Even so, the black humour is part of a book that is intelligent and subversive as well as funny.

As Joe’s friend Delia says at one point: “It’s what’s known as gallows humor, Joe, Gallows being a small town in Scotland where Methodists go for their annual comedy festival.”

One person found this helpful

TJ Fitzpatrick

and brilliantly. Sharp

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 August 2015

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Who could imagine, a CIA front company managed by failed sleeper, operating in the immediate aftermath of the economic bust, in Dublin - Jay Spencer Green did, and brilliantly. Sharp, incisive, dark and hugely entertaining: each chapter is a gem, complete with cocktail recipe and insightful and whimsical lists of odd and interesting "facts". Nobody escapes, not even the Sligo ex-pats train saboteurs. Fact and fiction are woven together to create a dark satirical novel, that gets more plausible as it unfolds before veering off into another dystopian LSD trip . I know I'll read it again, if only to ensure I understand and appreciate every dig,reference, nod, implication and acknowledgement that lurks deep in the text. Tom Sharpe fans should enjoy it.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Should have been better.

Reviewed in the United States on 7 December 2020

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This book was was strange, a good thing, but not strange enough for me.

jim english

A Fast Uncomfortable Screw

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 August 2015

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Ireland’s brief economic boom saw the country transformed from a sleepy European backwater to a swelling fountain of financial hope. The Celtic Paper Tiger could not survive the puncturing of the over-inflated property bubble and the Irish people now languish in a stagnant pool of negative equity, dole queues, middle-class unemployment and social anguish. Jay Spencer Green’s cruel, witty and at times brilliant satire is positioned in the midst of a chaotic post-boom Irish future where heartless corporate restructuring runs parallel to the physical restructuring of supposed dissidents - both processes are operated under the aegis of the CIA. We witness the seemingly absurd meltdown of civil society mainly through the eyes of Joe, a misogynistic, gullible and wilfully naïve CIA sleeper who resorts to drug dealing in an attempt to sustain the wages of the employees in the CIA front company that he manages. The CIA is, like the best multi-national corporations, desperate to cut costs without regard to the livelihoods that it wrecks and Joe is tasked to instigate downsizing initiatives that even he finds unpalatable, although no doubt Michael O'Leary would cheer the slick and effective amorality of Joe’s senior - known as COITUS – Chief of International Trade (United States). Nevertheless, Joe is difficult to warm to; his friendship with the repulsive Frank Prendergast, an abominable bureaucratic torturer, is testament to the contingencies of his morality. In fact, none of the main characters have much to redeem them, which is what makes them so deliciously fascinating and darkly funny. The events of this extremely entertaining book at first seem preposterous, an ambience that is reinforced by the hilarious interjections of scraps of putative journalistic inanity that Joe’s HR director (the duplicitous and highly erotic Sinead) gleans for his pleasure. Yet, beneath the amusement, one is drawn to reflect upon the atrocities committed in the story and consider that the only thing that makes them absurd is their location in a former sleepy European backwater. The horrors that Green describes are reality in many countries where scarcity and civil dissent rub against U.S. interests and thus “morality ends” (although the U.S. does not hold a monopoly on torture, murder and corruption). How much stagnation must occur before what seems ridiculous in fiction becomes our actuality? Still, shouldn’t dwell too much on that, you might get nightmares; talking of nightmares, anybody who has encountered the hideous, Iberian, fascist dwarf Manuel Estimulo via his blog will be delighted by his involvement in this narrative. I am sure I will be re-reading this very funny book again, if only to sample each and every cocktail recipe for real, starting with the Yeltsin Sunset.

One person found this helpful

Marie L Chopper

Just the right amount of depravity for my linking

Reviewed in the United States on 29 January 2019

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Joe Chambers, a CIA operative with booze acquisition front of mind, fronts a publishing house in Dublin.

But it’s not the Dublin of now. It’s a dystopian Dublin; a surreal version. It’s a city declined – or in a fast trajectory toward the bottom. The city, food and streets are grotesque. The people cynical. We are not told why, but ‘Travellers’ are the enemy and uprisings and political upheavals simmer in the background. A bomb goes off in the city and MSN News reports, “Antiterrorist experts say it has all the hallmarks of a dissident group, which narrows the suspects down to two and a half million people.”

Joe never questions the means and ways of the CIA world, his colleagues and friends. It is his world.

At the publishing house, where the mostly recent college graduate staffers ‘summarise millions upon millions of magazine and journal articles’, Joe is directed by head office to cut costs. His closest work colleague, Shinead, is there to help. Joe’s motivation to save staff’s jobs doesn’t come from an altruistic place - his moral compass permanently spins – and he doesn’t even know his staff’s names. Simply, Joe’s desire is to not leave Dublin.

The scenes are absurd and darkly bright – if that’s a way to describe brothels, embassies and restaurants serving torture and tortured seafood. There is enough well-crafted dialogue and bizarre scenes to disturb and delight, and just the right amount of depravity for my liking.

Double-crosses, twists and turns; drug dealers and prostitutes. This book is clever. The author’s affinity for language and larger-than-life characters presents gem after gem of crafted prose with a cadence just right. The dialogue flows. I could feel the author having a good time.

Some of my favourite parts are the mad imaginative digressions around pop culture topics or references generally unrelated to the storyline. The ‘Kennedy derivatives’, for example. These digressions start quite logically before developing into strange and fanciful ruminations, the best part is it’s as if the author is unwilling to control his imagination. “… Jackie was only climbing out of the back of the car to retrieve one of his contact lenses.”
Much of the book is quotable.

If you want a surreal and cynical read that tickles your brain funny bone, then give Breakfast at Cannibal Joe’s a read. Encourage the depravity.

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Breakfast at Cannibal Joe's: Darkly Funny, Desperate, and Full of Rage Kindle Edition

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About the author

Jay Spencer Green

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