Ah, yes, Family Ties. What started out as a TV show about 1980s kids mocking their hippie parents quickly deteriorated into a seven-year national nightmare that only ended when the main star - Michael "Lame" Fox (heh) - got so drunk with power and Teen Wolf money that he decided to forge ahead on his own, leaving the rest of his co-stars choking in the dust of obscurity. Except for the dad, who ended up playing the gun nut in all 47 of the Tremors movies.

Obviously this novel is based on the show, but it isn't just a bad book full of dumb jokes that aren't funny. This book is so divorced from reality it's like something from another planet. It's like some alien spy who never even bought the book when he took the class on Earthlings was cornered and asked to write a Family Ties novel and had no choice but to do it for fear of being found out. How else do you explain a line like this:

"I see what you mean," she said, giving him another intimate smile. This one caused his toes to turn into french fries.

Or bizarre-ass exchanges like this:

In structure it seems like a joke - someone asks a dumb question, and someone else fires off a smart-assed response - but what the fuck is it supposed to mean? Only the alien knows; he was just copying human behavior the best he could in the hopes of fooling his hapless Earth employers long enough to escape to the mother ship. Only through the grace of X'gjgtw'jky-llyll the All-Consuming Star God did he luck into being assigned a project that, apparently, no one bothered to edit or read until now. All hail X'gjgtw'jky-llyll! The enslavement of mankind is nigh!