April 7, 2020
Hucksterville
Ron Elgin
Aviva Publishing (2020)
ISBN: 978-1-947937-15-4
New Novel Provides Hilarious Look at Ad Agency Antics
Ron Elgin needs no introduction to advertising executives in the Pacific Northwest. He is the co-founder of Elgin-Syferd, one of the premiere ad agencies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If anyone knows about writing what you know, it is Ron.
Upon retiring, Ron wrote two collections of short stories based on his life experiences in the advertising world: Huckster and The Man Behind the Curtain. Now he has turned to fiction, and in Hucksterville, in which one of the characters has actually read Huckster, Elgin proves that he can be just as funny making up outlandish situations as he can retelling true ones.
The novel opens when Max Foreskin, the CEO of Tight Fit Athletics, ends up having his ad agency quit because its employees can’t stand him anymore. Rather than hire a new agency, Max decides to build his own in-house agency. He has no idea how to do that, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a task for those who work under him to figure out. Soon a former madam turned employment agency owner is assembling a team of creatives for Max so he can take Tight Fit Athletics’ advertising to a new level. Not that she cares anything about Tight Fit Athletics. She just wants the commission for assembling the team, and as long as she finds some warm bodies, whether they are good or not, she’ll get what she wants.
Because Max Foreskin is completely unreasonable, he provides an extremely tight deadline for when his agency needs to be up and running, so out of desperation, creatives are recruited from groups of people equally desperate for work, including from among the homeless. Fortunately, Megan, a down and out homeless woman, is also brilliant and has past experience. The rest of the surprising, and surprisingly talented, team includes a man with Tourette’s syndrome, a crossdresser, and several other quirky characters, two of whom are both named Herman and insist on being called “The Herman.”
Somehow, this diverse group of characters puts together an ad campaign that has every potential to be a winner until Max decides he wants inappropriate, sexist ads. Sex is about the only thing Max thinks about most of the time, as evidenced by his string of—sometimes deviant—relationships.
The team members of the new in-house advertising department fear they will all be out of work if Max’s ads are allowed to run. But little can they foresee the strange chain of events that will forever transform the fate of Tight Fit Athletics.
Humor runs rampant on every page of Hucksterville. If you thought The Office’s Michael Scott was out of control, you’ll discover after reading this book that you’ve led a sheltered life. So have some of the characters—but in different kinds of shelters. In any case, Hucksterville is not a book to be missed. It’s as funny as Vonnegut, but also with subtle social satire at work that will make you realize the situations are not as absurd as they may seem on the surface. Rumor has it Elgin is already working on a sequel.
For more information about Ron Elgin and Hucksterville, visit Amazon.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and When Teddy Came to Town
