Lizard World is a Frankenstein brew of two alternating tales--the first written in an 18th-century style reflecting its period setting and the second offering a zany, macabre vision of Florida. Terry Richard Bazes's historical pastiche, channeling Smollet and Cleland, tells the tale of the Earl of Griswold, a self-made libertine who discovers a perfume that can be extracted from alligators. The quirky modern story introduces the Earl's distant, wacked-out relatives, led by Lizard World proprietor Lemuel Lee Frobey, and a poor dentist, Max Smedlow, who is imprisoned by Frobey's clan--including Earl, "a veterinary surgeon of genius"--after running over one of their gators.
Once you accept the notion (established in the 18th-century storyline) that a body part can be removed from one person--or animal--and successfully attached to another body, it won't take long before you begin to smell the fate of poor Max, his brain in particular, and its ultimate 300-year-old home. Bazes's subversively hilarious narrative of nonstop Marx Brothers zaniness sets one's mind a-spinning, but Lizard World itself is hard to classify. We could call it, perhaps, a "Shandyesque" concoction, with a dab of mash-up lit, and seasoned with gothic whimsy. In other words, one of those books in which many other works live, though some readers may find it a bizarro world that goes a little too over the top, a little too often. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher