Island survival has never been this strange.
Eight desperate castaways find themselves stranded on a mysterious deserted island. They are surrounded by poisonous blue plants and an ocean made of acid. Ravenous creatures lurk in the toxic jungle. The ghostly sound of crying babies can be heard on the wind.
Once they realize the rescue ships aren't coming, the eight castaways must band together in order to survive in this inhospitable environment. But survival might not be possible. The air they breathe is lethal, there is no shelter from the elements, and the only food they have to consume is the colorful squid-shaped tumors that grow from a mentally disturbed woman's body.
From the crazy imagination of Bizarro Fiction master Carlton Mellick III comes Tumor Fruit - an intense survival story full of eccentric characters, nail-biting suspense, and the kinds of twists and turns that you'll only find in a Mellick novel.
It's what the television series Lost would have been if it had been darker, weirder, and a hell of a lot more insane.
This work contains examples of the following tropes:
- Alien Sky: Barrack has a bright pink sky, and (at least at first) there are two suns.
- Awful Wedded Life: Adam and his wife were not happy together, something made worse by the fact that her religion required them to be surgically attached to each other at the elbow.
- Cloud Cuckoolander: Peter wanders around in own cheerful little world, something that only escalates at time goes on. This does have the benefit of letting him keep his spirits high even under desperate circumstances.
- Companion Cube: Peter talks to his dead brother's teddy bear, Captain Bearbeard. He's not just being weird - the toxic atmosphere of Barrack is causing him to hallucinate that Captain Bearbeard is answering.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: In the end, Peter, Zana and Jill remain stranded on Barrack for life, and Jill is permanently crippled. On the bright side, they've found a large number of other stranded humans who are planning to form a colony, and Barrack's ecosystem is changing to become more Earth-like and therefore possible to survive in the long term.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Without any food left, Adam takes to carving pieces out of Morgan and Jill while they're still alive for the three of them to have something to eat.
- I Take Offense to That Last One: In a flashback, when Morgan and Chase are saying goodbye.Chase: Nice working with you. For a slanty-eyed Muslim commie, you're not such a bad guy.Morgan: Who said I was a commie?
- Karma Houdini: In the end, Zana gets clean away with all her destructive and abusive actions over the course of the novel. It helps that she's got a Freudian Excuse and that she did do some good and heroic things as well.
- Kill It Through Its Stomach: Peter gets swallowed by a giant worm and then bursts out of it, showing how surprisingly strong he is.
- Manly Gay: Jim is a man's man cowboy who just happens to be homosexual.
- Sanity Slippage: All of the survivors suffer from this as the novel goes on, as Barrack's atmosphere only has enough oxygen to keep them alive but not enough for their brains to function at 100%.
- Space Pirates: Peter and his brother would play at being these, and Peter still pretends to be one in his brother's memory.
- Take That!: Morgan, who is from Kazakhstan, irritably states that the people who created the character of Borat knew nothing of the country.
- Unproblematic Prostitution: Ziggzagged. Zana would be perfectly happy being a prostitute if she didn't have to deal with so many assholes who saw her as being less than a real person... but she does in fact have to deal with said assholes, so prostitution isn't nearly as much fun as she thought it would be.
- Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: As much as Zana is annoyed with Tori being judgmental against her profession, Shane agreeing that prostitution is awesome doesn't make her feel any better.
