The Sky Done Ripped (Ned the Seal)

Nobody breathes new life into the genre of dime novels like Joe R. Lansdale, and for Ned the Seal’s final romp through the multiverse, Lansdale has whipped up a doozy of an adventure for everyone’s favorite time-traveling, fish-loving, fez-wearing, mischievous mammal.

In a clash for the ages, Ned finds himself on a strange world-within-a-world where a monstrous demon is running amok, eating and enslaving and crushing everything in her path. She Who Must Be Obeyed and Eats Lunch Early could be the end of the world if our plucky heroic seal and his friends can’t stop her. Along the way, they’ll traipse through Tarzan tropes, Planet of the Apes mythology, cannibal tribes, and a lost civilization where the people who still live there are somehow just as lost.

The Sky Done Ripped is a pulp novel for the ages, a gloriously strange and rambling adventure that deftly mixes different genres with a dash of slapstick humor and more than a little of Lansdale’s patented grotesquery for the villains that inhabit his unique worlds.

Embracing the quality with the cheese that comes part and parcel with dime novel storytelling, Lansdale makes the most of both, crafting a story so outrageous that “over the top” seems inadequate. The weirdness of the story never stops topping itself.