Going Bovine by Libba Bray

Libba Bray’s Going Bovine is a seriously cool and funny story about a sixteen-year-old boy who is dying of mad cow disease.  It is a mindbending road trip meditation on the meaning of life, and might have been gimmicky and nonsensical in the hands of a lesser author.  Fortunately for us, we are in Bray’s very capable hands, with skillful allusions to Don Quixote and Norse mythology, both of which the author weaves through her narrative.

From the beginning, Cameron Smith is an authentic teenage voice, complete with snarkiness, melancholy, and attacks of adolescent mortification.  His relationship with his parents and sister is strained by the monotony of daily life – his parents are work-obsessed and going through the motions of a relationship; his twin sister Jenna has abandoned him for the popular crowd – early in the novel, Cameron remarks that the family didn’t go on vacations any more, because who wants to vacation with strangers?

When Cameron increasingly finds himself having physical and mental episodes that cause him varying degrees of embarrassment and trouble, he discovers that he suffers from the terminal Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome, or mad cow disease.  After his diagnosis, a punk rock angel named Dulcie presents him with a mission to save the universe from the mistake of a mad scientist who opened up a worm hole into a parallel universe and let in dark matter in the form of fire giants and the sinister Wizard of Reckoning.

What happens throughout the novel is kind of trippy, with ruminations on music, cartoons, pop culture, and science fiction fandom that calls to mind the author’s Rocky Horror Picture Show story in Geektastic, last year’s short story anthology from Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci.  Gonzo, Cameron’s dwarf road trip companion who becomes his best friend (ahem, Sancho Panza), sums it up well by saying, “This is a stoner conversation, and we aren’t even stoned.”

Ultimately, a more serious thread runs through this farcical and surreal story, so in addition to being really entertaining, it also grapples with the idea of what it means to really live.  Cameron’s adventures with Gonzo and Balder (a yard gnome who is the Norse god Balder in disguise) explore the nature of friendship, love, and viewing the world around you with both clarity and hope.