Insecticide: A Republican Romance, by Douglas Robinson

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It ain’t history. None of this happened. Yes, technically, most of the incidents are inspired by books and websites claiming to tell the “truth” about the Bushes and right-wing politics in the U.S, but let’s get real-it’s all made up.

After all, the novel suggests that W. Averell “Dogsbody” Harriman convinced Prescott Bush to set up a new Republic of Texas in 1931. That obviously didn’t happen. None of it did.

So, a boilerplate work-of-fiction disclaimer for us would include at least the following: Prescott Bush wasn’t a closet Nazi, George Bush the Elder wasn’t a CIA tool, George Bush the Younger wasn’t an early cloning experiment gone bad, and Dogsbody Harriman wasn’t a giant 10,000-year-old bug from under the sea. Abraham Lincoln isn’t still alive, chilling at the bottom of a lake in Texas with his devil-water-cow Bessie. Lincoln was never a giant beetle from ancient Lemuria. And, of course, a spray can of insecticide decidedly did not wipe out all reality at the stroke of midnight, 1999. Y2K bug our asses!

In short, don’t believe a word you read in this book.

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Douglas Robinson is neither a former Professor of Ichthyorhetoric at Liberal State University in Kansas (a land-locked state!) nor sadly deceased. Nor is he the author of The Seventeen Most Explosive Ichthyotopoi or the best-selling comic book Fish Rhetoric for Dummies. He is certainly not the celebrated host of the podcast Why Fish Argue (And Why You Should Care). His previous original novel with Atmosphere Press was a pseudotranslation of J. I. Vatanen’s The Last Days of Maiju Lassila.