'THE IMPOSSIBLE FORTRESS'.....AN 80'S NERD PRAYS FOR VANNA FROM HEAVEN....

The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak (2017)   We'd been planning a post to overview the slew of 1980's movies in which bullied, outcast nerds emerged triumphant....winning a variety of contests, schoolyard fights and oh yes......the prettiest girl in school.....

          And then along came this gem of a novel, which condenses all of those films and their various characters, tribulations and victories into one entertaining package........it's like reading the novelization of the ultimate 1980's teen comedy romance that somehow no one ever got around to making......

            Everything's in place for a fantasy-film that might have been produced by Spielberg and directed by Robert Zemeckis.......starting with our fourteen year old dweeb hero, Billy Marvin and his two equally dweeby sidekicks, Alf and Clark...

            Like many 80's film nerds, Billy's an underachiever at school but a wiz on his Commodore 64 console, struggling to create his own game, "The Impossible Fortress".  His buddies have an altogether different agenda.......breaking into the local office supply store to swipe off its magazine stand their personal holy grail, the current 'Playboy' featuring nude photos of 'Wheel Of Fortune's Vanna White.....

             In joining this ludicrous caper, Billy reluctantly becomes an inside secret agent.....in order to learn to the store's alarm code, he befriends the owner's daughter Mary Zelinsky, who turns out to be a kindred spirit and expert computer game aficionado. Puberty hormones rage and puppy love blossoms.......but dramatic storm clouds gather and we'd rather not tell you the details and spoil the fun of finding out for yourself.   Take our word for it, the plot swerves into some wild ups and downs for Billy, Mary and friends,  with a few major poignant twist reveals.

             Taken strictly as a novel, none of what unfolds in the book's second half is all that believable......but if you envision it in your mind as a snappy, feel-good mid 1980's movie with River Phoenix, Corey Feldman or Corey Haim, it's damn near perfect. Laughs, heart-tugs and the Jurassic age of computer technology.....and ending as all such stories should, at a hotly contested computer game contest judged by a master gaming guru.

              We promise to get around to that BQ view of the films that inspired this book.....but in the meantime, we recommend you take the impossibly engaging "The Impossible Fortress" for a spin, one of the best reads we've come across this year.  4 Megabytes (****)  We almost felt like playing an upbeat Huey Lewis song as we finished the last chapter.....