Fool by Christopher Moore (2009, Hardcover)

Christopher Moore's novel, "Fool," is a twisted and insanely funny tale that both channels and chides Shakespeare and his work. Moore confesses that he borrows from at least a dozen of the Bard's plays for this patchwork quilt of tragedy, comedy and medieval porn. Had the "The National Inquirer" been around at the time, King Lear would probably have looked like this. There's more murder, mayhem, mistaken identities and scene changes than you'll ever remember, but Moore turns things on their head with an edgy 21st-century perspective that "makes the story line as sharp, surly and slick as a game of Grand Theft Auto."

It's 1288, and the king's fool, Pocket, and his dimwitted apprentice, Drool, set out to clean up the mess Lear has made of his kingdom, his family and his fortune- only to discover the truth about their own heritage. In the course of fixing Lear's catastrophic kingdom, the two "find themselves caught up in a plot filled with enough twists, mistaken identities, and sexual innuendos to make Puck chuckle and Falstaff's head spin."

"Fool" is a bawdy tale- a rousing buffet of plots, subplots, counterplots, betrayals, war, revenge, bared bosoms, unbridled lust, and a ghost, as seen through the eyes of a man wearing a codpiece and bells on his head. It is filled with gratuitous sex, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as shaky grammar and split infinitives. The story is a foolish fantasmagorical farce- a real hoot!