Product Description

What would you do if you were a few months from collecting early retirement—a pension for which you’d sucked up and sycophanted almost twenty years—when your obscenely overweight and extremely crass boss told you that if you didn’t raise the company’s market share by the end of the year, you’d be out on your ass without a dime?

If you’re Sky Thorne, Senior V.P. of Tailburger—a fringe fast food chain whose specialties are batter dipped, deep-fried meat patties and 96-oz. beef-flavored shakes—you’ll get to work on as many harebrained, desperate schemes as you can think of. And if that means launching a marketing campaign that asks the public, “Why just abuse your body when you can torture it?” then damn it, that’s what you’ll do! Because Sky Thorne is ready to fight dirty and do anything necessary to earn the pension he sees as the reset button on life, liberty, and the pursuit of unadulterated deep-fried happiness.

Red Meat Cures Cancer is a hilarious and poignant romp through a world of excess, and marks the arrival of a great new satirical voice in American literature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2262001 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
O'Dwyer certainly picks a rich target for his satiric debut novel, but this sendup of the fast food industry has a lot of empty calories, including enough sophomoric humor to make many readers gag. Sky Thorne is the 46-year-old director of corporate communications for Tailburger, a fast food outfit whose primary product is a waistline-busting fried burger slathered with mayonnaise. Faced with the prospect of selling the product in a world of low-fat, slimmed-down fast food choices, not to mention a class-action law suit, Thorne ditches the high road and concocts a new ad campaign that emphasizes the raunchy, hedonistic culinary excess of the Tailburger. The campaign draws ire from several quarters, notably the comely but strident Muffet Meaney, leader of the antimeat lobbying group S.E.R.M.O.N. (Stop Eating Red Meat Now), whom the widowed Thorne is trying to bed. Thorne's comically unscrupulous boss, CEO Frank Fanoflincoln, is threatening to fire him, and that possibility only becomes more likely as public relations catastrophes pile up: a gargantuan Belgian pro basketball player, who's just signed an endorsement contract but who dies of a heart attack after bingeing on Tailburgers ("Belgians in body bags don't sell burgers, Thorne"); a scandal that ensues when Thorne runs Tailburger ads on a porn site; a legal setback from an E. coli incident and a bribery fracas with a legislator named Plot Thickens. O'Dwyer's humor is considerably less sophisticated than Christopher Buckley's, but there are some undeniable gutbusters buried here. And with plot twists like these, he deserves points for sheer chutzpah.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover
“Deep fried comic genius.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Red Meat Cures Cancer is wildly irreverent and wickedly funny.”—Terry Hummel, former Publisher, Rolling Stone magazine

“One funny novel.”—The Knoxville News-Sentinel

About the Author
Starbuck O’Dwyer is a graduate of Princeton, Oxford, and Cornell. Originally from Rochester, New York, he currently makes his home in the Washington, D.C. area.