Mrs. Caliban

The weirdest thing about this little novel is not the six-foot-seven avocado-loving frog-faced humanoid named Larry who escapes from a local research lab. It's the tone in which that fantastic event is recounted: a deadpan, almost banal style, like Philip K. Dick at his pulpiest, that's a perfect fit for the supermarket-and-adultery suburbs Larry wanders into and the eager, nonjudgmental embrace from desperate-housewife Dorothy he finds there. It's a literal fish-out-of-water tale that manages to be both hilarious and unsparingly tragic as it lays bare a gulf of human (and inhuman) loneliness and loss.