Vic Valentine: Space Cadet by Will Viharo

(pb; 2018: ninth book in the Vic Valentine series)

From the back cover

“Vic Valentine is lost inside the space between his ears. His lifelong slow-burning mental meltdown, sexual obsessiveness, fatal self-absorption, and epic existential angst have resulted in a complete break from conventional reality. Now convinced this entire life is a movie, he finds himself trapped on Planet Thrillville, encountering voluptuous alien femme fatales, mutated monsters, intergalactic gangsters, his own unleashed demons, and his arch nemesis, ‘Will the Thrill,’ the evil overlord of Vic’s own alternative internal universe.”

Review

Space is my favorite entry in Viharo’s self-described “Mental Case Files,” a sub-cycle trilogy within his Vic Valentine series. While it shares the most of the same elements of its previous books (Vic Valentine: International Man of Mystery and Vic Valentine: Lounge Lizard for Hire), it is the most focused and barebones tale within this sub-cycle. The aforementioned elements of the earlier novels include: hypersexuality, brazen pop culture mentions (when Valentine speaks of films he almost always includes their release year and background information about them), over-the-top humor and violence, genre-hopping situation (which make that leap in the blink of an eye).

Space, for this reader, is the hallucinogenic-swirl-and-transition apotheosis of the “Mental Case Files,” masterful in its distillation of its previous works, especially its last two books. Like all the Vic Valentine tales, this is worth owning.