Raise the Gipper! Chapter 8: A tea-party of ghosts:
This is an unusual chapter of Raise the Gipper! in several ways. For one thing, it's the only one that has generated any negative fan mail; a couple people thought it was some form of just too mean, although the person who used that phrase also added but not inaccurate.
I found that George Orwell quote irresistible for reasons that ought to be apparent.
Also, it's one of just a couple of chapters in this book with no scene breaks; funny generally means short, which generally means starting a scene as late as possible, so the scenes throughout are very short and cut to the chase very quickly, and the average scene is probably only about 1500 words.
So this is one of the few "long shots" (movie sense, i.e. the camera is continuous, without cuts to other cameras and angles) in the book. Nevertheless I took the long shot, because, frankly, it's the chapter where I get to beat up Newt Gingrich, and who wouldn't want to spend some extra time on that? The Newtie Toot Toot might be the best comic foil since Dick Smothers and possibly since Oliver Hardy, but I'd rather watch him work with Moe Howard, actually.
Or maybe I just like the idea of a long shot.
And for those of you who are kind of thinking of this book as a civic duty, because you like my writing, or you like zombies, and you don't like Mitt, or Republicans, or you want to support politically progressive satire (oh, god, please, not that), this chapter is probably the single best chapter for pretending you read the book; you'll be able to say "I hope this isn't a spoiler but I loved the part where ...."
Of course a zombie novel kind of intrinsically has spoilers, now doesn't it?
If nothing else, read till the end to find the place where Callista Gingrich reveals which part of Newt is an exceptionally teeny little target.
(Big hint .... from another literary classic by another chronicler of the fantastic ...
But I think that the most likely reason of all ....)
