There's nothing worse than a book that starts out good but gets worse as it goes, because once you're past a certain point you feel kind of obligated to finish it and you just get more and more pissed off until you turn that last, miserable page and can finally throw the goddamned thing into the river, where hopefully a duck will choke on it. As you probably guessed, this is one of those books. The first half - where the main kid meets Edgar Allen Poe and they run a savage burn on this entire town so they can outfit their little adventure - is awesome, but once they actually get to the Hollow Earth it's just a bunch of goofy crap. There's flying squids, flower people (ugh...), pterodactyls, surfing negroes, enough psychic links to keep Stephen King jerking off for weeks, and, oh yeah, God's there too (turns out he's actually a bunch of sea cucumbers, which, incidentally, don't taste anything like regular cucumbers so if anybody ever offers you one don't be fooled like I was). Eventually everybody goes right through the center of the Hollow Earth and ends up on Earth-2, where the Earth-2 Edgar Allen Poe stabs the Earth-1 version to death and then runs away and dies in an alley. That guy always was a drama queen.

So it's a dumb book, but it didn't totally piss me off until I got to the notes at the very end, where the writer says that the whole thing is actually a true story that he copied from some old manuscript. Is that a fact, Mr. Rucker? Well then, I guess you won't mind if I print up a few hundred copies and sell them on Amazon. Oh, you would? That's what I thought.