Pest Control
Bill Fitzhugh
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Buy Bill Fitzhugh's *Pest Control* online Pest Control
Bill Fitzhugh
Harper Paperbacks
Paperback
320 pages
March 2005
rated 4 of 5 possible stars

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Bill Fitzhugh has worked in radio, television and film, and the sensibilities of those media show in this strikingly funny (if not unpredictable) novel of mistaken identities. It's no great leap to imagine Pest Control as a comic movie, but the novel avoids the banality of other books (usually "thrillers") that seem to be written as screenplays without the stage directions. Offbeat and engaging, Pest Control succeeds as a light and ridiculous feel-good read.

Curled Up With a Good BookBob Dillon (yes, it's a name that's brought him a lifetime of bad jokes and calls for songs) is an exterminator who can't take it any more. He's a bug man with a dream, an idealist who won't do his work one day longer with the way-beyond-safe amounts of chemicals his employers use to eradicate infestations of the insectoid variety. Quitting in a fit of hilarious pseudo/near violence, Bob is finally free to pursue his dream of all-natural pest control. For years he's been hybridizing insect predators in his basement "bug room," and now he has to tell his patient, down-to-earth wife that it's time for him to try to make his dream reality. All Bob really wants is a a fine pickup truck with a fiberglass bug on top, but his pragmatic wife Mary has an almost obsessive need to keep her credit rating pristine. She's waitressing double shifts to keep the bills at bay and their daughter fed. Dubious of the success-potential of Bob's plans, she agrees conditionally to his dreamchasing.

Assassin bug after hybrid assassin bug fails to achieve total cockroach eradication in the various businesses and abandoned buildings where Bob tests his little babies, including an uproarious episode in a fine French restaurant. Even the terminally upbeat Bob begins to sink into despair as the bills keep coming and Mary leaves him, taking their daughter. While drowning his sorrows in beer (bought by a friend), Bob finds an classified ad in the New York Times wanting a "Professional Exterminator" and offering $50,000 for a weekend job in Zurich. Bob sends his "resume" (a flyer with a skull and crossbones advertising his fifteen years experience), but the episode is forgotten with his hangover.

Thus begins the hapless Bob Dillon's unwitting foray into the world of high-paid assassins -- the human kind. When the man whom Bob doesn't even know he's agreed to kill dies in a car accident, the premiere hitmen (and women) of the world find themselves threatened by an efficient newcomer who has no idea of the danger he's in, who's done nothing to deserve his new reputation. As drug lords, governments and the world's top ten assassins all converge to try to take him out, Bob Dillon, using New York City as a weapon, will make an unlikely friend, win back his wife and find success in a way that even this perpetual dreamer could never have imagined.

Pest Control is just plain funny. A delightful, accessible story, it can serve as a perfect 'tweener book for a break from the heavy stuff. Bill Fitzhugh's got Christopher Moore's sense for the absurd without the injection of the truly surreal. Pest Control is a worthy comic debut.



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