Margins
Big Lizard book cover
Big Lizard
A Novel
2020
First Published
4.32
Average Rating
240
Number of Pages

Buster Nix, overweight and frustrated with his life, finally finds a new job through the help of his aunt who works at an employment agency. He has been given the position of security guard at the headquarters of a chain of fast food restaurants called Pick-A-Chicken. There, like choosing a lobster in a seafood store, you literally pick your own chicken for slaughter, and for a bit of extra cash, you can do it yourself with a company hatchet. It’s all the rage. Buster hates it. He even hates the fried chicken they make, and he has a discount. What he doesn’t know, is not only is Pick-A-Chicken the home of a radical new trend in dining, it is primarily successful due to supernatural intervention from a strange, denizen of Hell called the Lizard God. He provides the restaurant chain’s owner, Elroy Cuzzins, with incredible success in return for a few bloody favors. In fact, appeasing the Lizard God is a family tradition dating way back. One night, while checking doors, Buster hears chanting in a storage facility, discovers a supernatural ritual, accidently upsets a flaming brazier that not only destroys the ceremony, but sets his employer on fire with the literal flames of hell. The fire doesn’t do Buster any good either, not to mention the chickens set for sacrifice. Buster ends up in the burn unit, and not long thereafter, discovers that the botched supernatural ceremony has given him the power to transform into a big lizard who can run fast, has incredible strength, a large tail, and a hard time not ripping his pants. With a rag tag crew, including, Socrates, a surviving eye-patch wearing chicken scheduled to have been one of the sacrifices, a teenage tech wizard named Isaac who lives in the remains of a Biblical theme park dedicated to Noah and shaped like an ark, Buster sets out to battle evil. Prominent on his evil list is his old boss, Elroy Cuzzins. The same supernatural accident that changed Buster into Big Lizard, has transformed Cuzzins into an angry, giant chicken that drives a red sports car and commits serial killings. Through lack of imagination, Cuzzins is given the moniker, Big Chicken. If that isn’t bad enough, Buster can’t quite control his transformations into a giant reptile. The surviving brain-enhanced chicken with an eye patch, Socrates, can not only talk, but is an irritating smart ass. Socrates has helpful premonitions of the future, as well as visions of hell, and to activate these abilities an electrical shock and a spewing of chicken doo-doo is required. To make matters even more complicated, Buster is now the stand in for Issacs’s dead father, and the talking Noah statue in the theme park won’t shut up about boarding the ark “Two by two.” Being a superhero turns out to be far more complicated and personally devastating than Buster and his friends could ever have imagined, and stopping Big Chicken is no easy trick.

Avg Rating
4.32
Number of Ratings
37
5 STARS
46%
4 STARS
41%
3 STARS
14%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Joe Lansdale
Joe Lansdale
Author · 139 books

Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. His work has appeared in national anthologies, magazines, and collections, as well as numerous foreign publications. He has written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites. His work has been collected in more than two dozen short-story collections, and he has edited or co-edited over a dozen anthologies. He has received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, the Herodotus Historical Fiction Award, the Inkpot Award for Contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and many others. His novella Bubba Ho-Tep was adapted to film by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. His story "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" was adapted to film for Showtime's "Masters of Horror," and he adapted his short story "Christmas with the Dead" to film hisownself. The film adaptation of his novel Cold in July was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Sundance Channel has adapted his Hap & Leonard novels for television. He is currently co-producing several films, among them The Bottoms, based on his Edgar Award-winning novel, with Bill Paxton and Brad Wyman, and The Drive-In, with Greg Nicotero. He is Writer In Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University, and is the founder of the martial arts system Shen Chuan: Martial Science and its affiliate, Shen Chuan Family System. He is a member of both the United States and International Martial Arts Halls of Fame. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, dog, and two cats.

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