A BAT MAN IS NO MAN TO MARRY
A BAT MAN IS NO MAN TO MARRY
by RJ Okay
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Meet the Bat Man. He's real, apparently? Yes, a delusional billionaire vigilante who considers public urination a crime-fighting technique and believes his greatest enemy is John Chidsey, CEO of Subway, has been loosed upon America. Facing the biggest challenge of his superhero career -- boredom -- he is forced to assemble his "crime fighting" team of victims either too desperate for attention or too stupid to realize the danger of this whole "Bat Man" charade. Chief among this team is his trusty sidekick Robman, a lonely redpilled Best Buy employee whose qualifications extend only as far as his willingness to eat spider webs. Following his dream of being the Bat Man's "ward" ultimately becomes a harrowing descent into a living nightmare where heroism means instant gratification of one's own selfish desires, and justice is whatever the Bat Man says it is.This savage satire transforms beloved superhero tropes into instruments of psychological horror. Bear witness to the depravity that follows when a Bat Man escapes from Gotham and is loosed upon the small town of Niland, CA. There, armed with unlimited wealth, zero accountability, and a gun he calls his greatest invention, he wages war against the poorest and most marginalized in society... all while simultaneously finding himself in Bat-Love -- something far, far more heinous and destructive than regular love.-----------------------------------------"...a hero so monumentally awful that you’ll question every hero you’ve ever cheered for. This isn’t just satire; it’s an exorcism of American power fantasies, performed with a sarcastic delight that brings at least one genuine laugh-out-loud moment per page, and just enough of a glimmer of existential hope to not descend into the bitter nihilism displayed by the story's insufferable hero.”-Doctor Corbo"I honestly don’t know what I just read. RJ Okay has created something that defies classification... part superhero parody, part fever dream, part cry for help from the collective unconsciousness of witnesses to toxic masculinity. The Bat Man himself is a beast of a character, somehow weirdly sympathetic in his complete inability to function as a human being, despite being perhaps the most awful person to ever live. I’m not sure if this is brilliant commentary on American hero worship or just several hundred pages of someone having a very public nervous breakdown, but either way, I couldn’t stop reading.-Your Uncle Michael"Why are they so awful towards women? All the characters in this book are bat-shit insane... I'm just shocked there's even other characters whatsoever. This will be the voynich manuscript of our times. You should add drawings." -Maggie
AVAILABLE SOON (?)
SAMPLE CHAPTERS
PROLOGUE: THE BIG BAT-DAY
Presiding over their wedding was the same smarmily-dressed priest that had once attempted to save Cookie’s life as a child, on one of the many occasions when she fell into the furnace. As Cookie walked down the aisle, those memories came flooding back to her. They were flooding like the floodwaters that had saved her from the fires of the furnace she once fell into long ago. Yes, the very same floodwaters that had destroyed her childhood home. The memories of that tragic flood lapped at her mind, much like the furnace’s excruciatingly hot flames had lapped at her tiny body back then, scorching her plain, unremarkable brown hair... just before the floodwaters had lapped lappingly at the lapping flames of the furnace fires, extinguishing them with great abandon. “I sure hope the Bat Man is lapping my lap later…" Cookie obliviously said aloud.Even the people in the crowd who didn’t realize this was a terrible euphemism for oral sex groaned in disgust — just the sound of her voice was enough to elicit anguished moans.Cookie continued to think about oral sex with the Bat Man for a moment, before shaking the thought from her mind for the time being. She had a wedding to focus on, after all! She looked at the priest, which made her think about the furnace again -- not good! She needed to remind herself to think happy thoughts on this happy day, so she thought about the Bat Man giving her head again. No -- that was too much, now she was getting all hot and bothered! ‘Hot’, just like the flames -- cripes, now she’s thinking about the furnace again! Will her wedding be ruined??Nope. She started thinking about something else altogether. That was close.“It’s happening,” said Cookie, smiling, “I’m finally marrying the Bat Man! I’m happier than six clowns clowning and drinking strange red milk!” Cookie was unaware that the six clowns were, obviously, secretly crying on the inside… and the strange red milk they were drinking — it was blood. Yeah, these were some fucked-up clowns, alright.Meanwhile, the majority of her wedding ceremony had transpired already during these last few paragraphs where she was lost in thought.The Bat Man had arrived boringly some time ago. He was wearing his usual the Bat Man bullshit, except for a special ethnic Batmanian wedding mask of a strange pink surgical rubber. He had forgotten to wear pants and his flaccid, unsightly penis flopped around wetly as he shifted and squirmed in place.“Without further ado, I now pronounce you ARM AND HAMMER!" Screamed the priest with delight as he shot a proud glance at the Bat Man, who was barely managing to choke down laughter.Cookie knew immediately that the Bat Man had told the priest ahead of time to say this. This knowledge filled her with a sort of raging tragedy, if that's even a thing? She angrily turned her gaze towards the Bat Man, scowling and heartbroken... but then she noticed the Bat Man’s eyes focus in on the distant night skies over her shoulder.. Cookie spun around to see what had her bat man so transfixed. From her current position teetering on the edge of an open window on the 24th floor, there was no mistaking the luminous shape enormous and glowing in the night sky — it was… The Something Signal . Bat, she thought maybe?“Oh, I wonder wh — ”Cookie’s voice stopped as she turned back around. The Bat Man was gone.“Not again…” She said sadly, as she sighed sadly, sadly bowing her head like a sad, sad lady.“Not again what??” Said a voice from a few feet to her right. It was the Bat Man.“I went over here,” he explained, pointing toward his feet.Cookie’s anxiety only grew with this revelation. For deep inside, a large part of her had truly hoped that the Bat Man had taken off before he had a chance to inevitably embarrass her in front of the crowd of total strangers gathered for their wedding.“All joking aside,” said the priest, clearing his throat, “you may kiss the — ” suddenly, in a shocking display of instantaneous violence, the Bat Man punched the priest with all his might, cutting him off mid-sentence.Cookie screamed, holding her fat, fat hand to her comically large mouth in shock, and staring horrified as the Bat Man shook the blood from his Bat-Glove.Yeah, there was blood alright. Lots of it — that priest was dead.“Oh my god, the Bat Man!” Screamed Cookie, her fat hands trembling, “Wh-what did you do!? He said ‘joking’, not ‘Joker’!!”“What…? Like the Steve Miller song? I love that song, what about it?” Replied the Bat Man, shaking his head, “I was just tired of that talkman talk-talking during my party. You remember what happened at my last party... when my Uncle Michael called me an asshole for climbing on the roof of his shed when I got bored? I wasn’t gonna get called an asshole again, no sir -- not the Bat Man!”Cookie did not remember this incident. In fact, she was barely listening to her near-husband, as she was now sobbing hysterically and crouching beside the dead priest — or, “talkman," as the Bat Man had called him. But just to be clear, even if the talkman were alive, Cookie wouldn’t have listened anyway. She never listened. She was awful.“I’m going over there now.” Said the Bat Man, pointing 30ft to his left, and promptly began walking. He walked like such a jerk. He looked dumb.Of course the Bat Man wasn’t looking where he was going either, and he walked straight into a folding chair like a motherfucking butthead.The chair tipped over and clanked loudly onto the ground, shattering the silence. The silence had already been shattered by Cookie’s sobs, but not to be outdone, the Bat Man had managed to find a way to shatter it again.“You broke the chair now too?? That was my important chair!” Cookie’s lip trembled as she whined, “Oh my lord, the Bat Man, what else are you going to screw up!?” Then she burst into tears again like a little crybaby. “Mm, I like that —" came the Bat Man’s emotionless response, “Alexa, from now on call me ‘Your Lord the Bat Man’.”“My name is Cookie!” Sobbed the Bat-Bride-to-Be.“Oh, would you shut up for a SECOND,” screamed a now-furious Lord the Bat Man, “I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to my Amazon thing!” He lied. He did not actually own any Amazon products, and had genuinely forgotten her name.“You’re ruining Christmas!!" was all Alexa could sob in response to his anger. Yeah, it was Christmas too. And he had certainly ruined it.The crowd shuffled out in silence, shaking their heads, leaving Alexa alone with Lord the Bat Man and the body of the talkman, whose pockets the Bat Man was furiously rifling through while he nonchalantly sang the refrain from The Steve Miller Band’s 1973 sleeper hit “The Joker" which, despite the chart-topping success it found nearly two decades after its initial release, most people with taste would consider to be a truly insufferable song.The Bat Man suddenly let out a great whooping cheer and triumphantly thrust skyward his fist, which was now clutching a twenty dollar bill, two singles, and three nickels.“I’m a picker, I’m a winner!” He loudly sang in triumph in time with the music in his head, misquoting the actual song in the process. However, he needed every bit of money he could scrounge, because weddings were not cheap.“HEY WARD!” The Bat Man suddenly shrieked, causing Cookie to cry even harder, “Is $22.15 enough for you to do that Uber Applebees thing on your phone again?? ‘Sget some STIX up in this biatch!”The Bat Man simply called them ‘Stix’ because astoundingly, he could not pronounce ‘Mozzarella’, nor any other even slightly foreign word for that matter.The only response, however, was Cookie’s sobs and the approaching police sirens in the distance — both the result of the fact that his wedding had been punctuated by the murder of a clergyman.He whipped his head around, scanning the nearly empty room, yet he caught no sight of his boy partner anywhere. The Bat Man suddenly felt a twinge of a thing which a lesser man would have momentarily confused with an emotion. As he felt this thing, the Bat Man was momentarily confused, because he was absolutely a lesser man.“Um… everybody’s gone but me!?” The Bat Man said, shamelessly ignoring the presence of his sobbing fiancee, “My boy wonder fuckin’ ditched out on my goddamned special day??” By the time he reached the word ‘fuckin’, he realized that what he was actually feeling was just his old companion anger.While it was nothing new for him to be seething with anger, this statement nonetheless placed the Bat Man firmly into a very, very rare state of being — for what was surely one of the first and only times in his life, he was right about something: his ward — his boy wonder, and special boy friend — had failed to show up for his wedding. As this reality sunk in, Batman continued to stand in place, staring deadpan at nothing in particular as the ramshackle gears in his head slowly turned. Methodically, his gaze turned to the camera, into which he stared directly for thirty-five excruciatingly long seconds of silence, in a ludicrous attempt to solicit sympathy from the audience. He then broke the silence with a solemn vow… and certainly not the vow he had come prepared to say on this day, at his wedding:
“I shall have my ward again, in the flesh. Be that flesh living or dead, I care not, so long it is mine.” The Bat Man had already cocked the entire upper half of his body backwards in preparation of a mad dash out the door to seek his missing ward, when he was distracted by a loud crackling sound and the sickening smell of rancid BBQ meats. As he looked around for the source, his eyes caught sight of his bride-to-be.Since being shouted at, Cookie had remained in place crying on the floor. However, at some point since then she had inexplicably managed to catch herself on fire somehow, and she now sat engulfed in flames, and was already several dozen very, very long and excruciatingly painful seconds into desperately trying to get the Bat Man’s attention before he finally did notice her.“Ah shit, not again!” Exclaimed the Bat Man, as he patted his utility belt pockets hopelessly searching for a bat-fire-extinguisher he had never owned to begin with. “Well ain’t this just too good to be true! I can’t take my eyes off of you for even a second, or *poof*, up in flames again, huh??” For some reason, the Bat Man was stealing a line from the actual vow he had come prepared to say, which itself was paraphrasing a Frankie Valli song — because the Bat Man was far too lazy to have written his own original vows. There was absolutely no readily apparent reason for Cookie being ablaze to be considered “too good to be true” however.And then, as it was, even taking into account their disastrous Christmas-cum-wedding, and somehow despite the horrifying absence of concern and lack of immediacy the Bat Man displayed all throughout the next several minutes which he spent bumbling about and lackadaisically extinguishing his blazing fiancee — what would not be extinguished was the eternal flame of love Cookie still felt in her heart for the Bat Man. Nor, for that matter, would anything ever extinguish the raging fires of reckless apathy which burned brightly in the heart of the Bat Man… brighter even than the disappointment he felt upon realizing that although it was Christmas, clearly they would not be having a cum wedding as advertised.
“I shall have my ward again, in the flesh. Be that flesh living or dead, I care not, so long it is mine.” The Bat Man had already cocked the entire upper half of his body backwards in preparation of a mad dash out the door to seek his missing ward, when he was distracted by a loud crackling sound and the sickening smell of rancid BBQ meats. As he looked around for the source, his eyes caught sight of his bride-to-be.Since being shouted at, Cookie had remained in place crying on the floor. However, at some point since then she had inexplicably managed to catch herself on fire somehow, and she now sat engulfed in flames, and was already several dozen very, very long and excruciatingly painful seconds into desperately trying to get the Bat Man’s attention before he finally did notice her.“Ah shit, not again!” Exclaimed the Bat Man, as he patted his utility belt pockets hopelessly searching for a bat-fire-extinguisher he had never owned to begin with. “Well ain’t this just too good to be true! I can’t take my eyes off of you for even a second, or *poof*, up in flames again, huh??” For some reason, the Bat Man was stealing a line from the actual vow he had come prepared to say, which itself was paraphrasing a Frankie Valli song — because the Bat Man was far too lazy to have written his own original vows. There was absolutely no readily apparent reason for Cookie being ablaze to be considered “too good to be true” however.And then, as it was, even taking into account their disastrous Christmas-cum-wedding, and somehow despite the horrifying absence of concern and lack of immediacy the Bat Man displayed all throughout the next several minutes which he spent bumbling about and lackadaisically extinguishing his blazing fiancee — what would not be extinguished was the eternal flame of love Cookie still felt in her heart for the Bat Man. Nor, for that matter, would anything ever extinguish the raging fires of reckless apathy which burned brightly in the heart of the Bat Man… brighter even than the disappointment he felt upon realizing that although it was Christmas, clearly they would not be having a cum wedding as advertised.
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