A book narrated by a sock monkey? I love sock monkeys! Or so I thought before diving into Penn Jillette’s fiction debut. The tone is immediately dark and grimy. The monkey is foul-mouthed and crude. The characters are barely likable, and set up in situations to test a reader’s ethics and squirm threshold. The basic story, a murder mystery, is nothing too original, but the way it’s told is the key. The rhythm of it took me a while to get into, but then I was hooked. Each paragraph is punctuated by a line from a song or a pop culture reference. It’s like Wesley Willis finishing every song with a random commercial slogan–at first it’s jarring and annoying, but pretty soon every other singer sounds strange for not doing it.

Sock is like The Book of Penn: all of his famously unpopular beliefs distilled into story-form. If you’re not already a fan of Jillette (the vocal half of the Vegas comic magician act Penn and Teller), this book probably won’t win you over. If you like his opinionated commentary and articles, you’ll most likely enjoy his cleverly-written novel.

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