Manuel Gonzales's quirky story collection The Miniature Wife blurred genre boundaries and in 2014 won both the Sue Kauffman Prize for First Fiction and the Binghamton John Gardner Fiction Book Award. His first novel pretty much obliterates those boundaries entirely. With a title like something from a B-movie, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is a wild mashup of comics, sci-fi flicks, fairy tales, shoot-em-up thrillers and literary fiction. The Regional Office is a secret global organization located deep beneath the Midtown Manhattan skyscraper that houses its cover company, Morrison World Travel Concern. Directed by the administrator, Mr. Niles, and his co-founder, the mystic Oyemi, the Regional Office is a complex hierarchy of women oracles and operatives with a mission to save the world "from destruction, from self-annihilation, from the evil forces of darkness, from interdimensional war strikes, from alien forces." And so they do--until their recruiter and trainer, Henry, and top operative Emma turn against the organization and stage an early dawn attack. Defended by Niles's loyal second-in-command, Sarah, with her powerful mechanical arm, the Regional Office is soon overrun with assailants led by Henry's well-trained, small-town Texas commando, Rose. A good chunk of the novel features this epic superhero battle, "an elaborate, somehow less fun game of paintball."
Gonzales's rambunctious storytelling reflects a youth of video games, Terry Brooks novels, Marvel Comics, The Day of the Triffids TV series and movies like The Black Hole and The Terminator. But his spitfire first novel doesn't shy from the more prosaic themes of identity, love, loyalty and ambition. Its violence and bot-war shenanigans are interrupted by excerpts from a presumed scholarly study of the Regional Office's history, as if it were an organization with a trajectory of growth and decline, like some sort of posse comitatus. Its disciplined insiders rarely consider that the outside world "might be full of nothing more than reality singing competitions and Donald Trumps and Kardashians and Angelina Jolie's cute ethnic kids, and Carson Daly, a world that hardly seemed worth saving." After the battle winds down and the few survivors on both sides attempt to regroup, they find themselves without the comfort of an organizational infrastructure. If given a chance for a do-over, can an individual really go it alone?
The Regional Office Is Under Attack! may occasionally go a bit over the top, but Gonzales brings it down to earth. When laser bullets are flying and severed mechanical limbs are crawling down the halls, he reminds readers that above this underground New York City fantasy world are a "piss-poor Mets team and so-so Affleck movies." When push comes to shove (as it often literally does), Gonzales pulls off an amusing winner. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.
Shelf Talker: Gonzales's wild first novel is part fantasy, part sci-fi, part thriller--and wholly original.