Entertainment, Books - Army Times

Gory, grim ‘Reaper’ has giggles, too

“Beat the Reaper,” Josh Bazell’s outrageously funny novel about a hit man turned doctor, is one book the American Medical Association won’t prescribe for you.

Ignore their advice. This may be the most imaginative, albeit the most violent and profanity-laden, debuts of the new year.

Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwa morphs into a hit man as a teenager when he follows his uncontrollable urge to find and kill whoever murdered his grandparents.

Many murders later, Brnwa, fed up with organized crime, has a chance to enter the Witness Protection Program. He takes it. Years later, he’s Dr. Peter Brown and working at Manhattan Catholic Hospital. Things are great until a former Mob acquaintance being treated for cancer recognizes him and gets the word out to Brnwa’s enemies.

The result is a hyper-violent account of Brnwa’s life as a hit man and what can best be described as a very ugly look at day-to-day hospital life.

If you don’t like extreme gun violence, blow-by-blow descriptions of surgical procedures performed by doped-up, angry doctors, the lack of care administered by bitter nurses, misdiagnoses and a huge dose of vulgarity, this novel is not for you.

If, however, you can take all of the above, you’ll be treated to a story that gets at the heart of one man’s immense loneliness and heartbreak. Be forewarned: One of the final scenes reaches new heights for gory.

How then, you might ask, does this novel earn its comedic stripes? Bazell, a medical resident at the University of California, brings a “Scrubs” mind-set to his story and jacks it up to an outrageous level that will never be seen on network TV.

———

“Beat the Reaper”

By Josh Bazell

Little, Brown, 304 pp., $24.99