[Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use by emailing us here.]

Four of our contributors guessed the premise of Morten Ramsland’s Doghead with only this cover image available to them. Now it’s up to you: which paragraph below is based on the real novel? The answer, and who wrote which fakery, will be posted in the comments later today.

1.) Hampton J. Beagle is among the last of a dying breed. After spending his life steadily climbing the corporate ladder at the investment firm, Dogman Sacks–starting in the mail room and working his way to CEO–he now spends his days listening to the advice of entitled MBA’s who believe they know the corporate world better than he does. When he makes the decision to steer clear of an iffy real estate bubble, and invest instead in soup, dog food, and a company that makes ascots, Many of his underlings call for his resignation. Will Hampton be able to convince the board of his worth, or are his days as Top Dog numbered.

2.) Doghead is the bizarre saga of three generations of a spectacularly dysfunctional family. Patriarch Askild is a naval architect who becomes so obsessed with cubist art that his ship designs become cubist, which gets him fired by one shipyard after another until he’s forced to move to find work. It’s also the story of Askild’s wife, Bjork; their sons, Knut and Jug Ears; their nephew, Applehead; and their grandchildren. Although the book is often mordantly funny, its dominant themes can have overtones of tragedy: World War II; marital, generational, and class conflict; superstition; cruelty; violence; the absence of love; lack of communication; Scandinavian reserve; and sheer loopiness.

3.) A man wakes to find his head transplant has gone horribly awry. He now has the head of a dog. Needless to say, his life as a lowly zoo keeper will never be the same. But the world is never as it seems, as his new dog senses make perfectly clear. A funny romp through a zany world of humans, filtered through the mind of a simple, dogheaded man.

4.) Sofie Sorensen is riding high as VP of Affairs at one of Denmark’s top marketing firms — she may not be pretty, but she’s quickly becoming known as one of the best young minds in all of Copenhagen. But when NordMark hires Sven Jensen, a former classmate, to write copy, Sofie’s troubled past is unleashed. Newly haunted by her memories of being named head mutt in Sven’s “Doggie Pound Club,” Sofie slowly begins to lose her grip on her goals, her staff … and her hysterical hypertrichosis.

5.) Gnut is an ugly man. He was born that way. But that’s never deterred him when it comes to the ladies. Except one. Sera in an ex-pat from Brussels, and is immune to Gnut’s charms. So he determines to do anything to bed her, no matter how outrageous. This is a madcap novel full of twists and shenanigans. Brimming with hilarity and just a dash of wisdom, Doghead is the best novel to come out of Denmark in ages.

 Loading ...

[Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use, or volunteer to write a blurb, by emailing us here.]

JABBIC is kind of like Balderdash with book covers. Based only on the cover at right, four of our contributors made up a one-paragraph premise for this week’s contestant, Shadow Play, by Rajorshi Chakraborti. Can you reverse-engineer their fabrications and pick out the book’s real plot? (The answer will be posted in the comments later today.)

1.) An internationally renowned novelist and commentator has disappeared from public view. What’s worse, the police want to question him about a murder; he was the last person to have met a young journalist who was later discovered dead on her doorstep. Then his editor receives a package of papers in which the writer claims to explain his part in recent events and his reasons for not surfacing. The material includes chapters from his latest work of fiction about a serial killer turned hired assassin. Is the novelist right to believe that he is being hunted, or is it his past that has finally borne down to haunt him?

2.) Professor Hugo Schmidt has discovered an entire society living in the shadows that follow us around every day. Using specially designed goggles he has studied their culture, and come to a shocking conclusion: the “Shadowkind” are preparing to invade our reality. Both a taut thriller and dark meditation on the costs of imperialism, Shadow Play represents the stirring of an exciting new political voice.

3.) Roger Tupman first saw the shadow when he was nine years old. It danced along the side of his family’s summer cottage, mimicking his movements, and taunting him to follow it around the property. For the rest of the summer, the boy and the shadow enjoyed an uneasy friendship; Roger nervous about the shadow’s intent, the shadow mocking and teasing him. As the years pass, Roger decides the shadow was a product of his overactive imagination, but he still can’t help but be nervous when his mother announces that they are returning to the lake house for another vacation. Will the shadow be there, with its twisted games? And how much worse with the games be now that Roger is sixteen?

4.) Cold War-era America has turned Alan Walsh into a paranoid patriot. A proud McCarthyist, Alan spends his days and nights fending off the Red Scare, mostly by chronicling every move his neighbors make. Alan even goes so far as to sift through their trash, looking for any sign of a communist take-over. But what happens when Alan finds a shadowy figure fishing through his own rubbish one damp night? Is he being targeted for his own out-of-the-ordinary antics? Find out in Rajorshi Chakarabori’s suspense-filled Shadow Play.

5.) Three years after municipal clerk Leonardo Forrester goes missing, renovations on his wife’s foreclosed home reveal a secret bomb shelter that leads to an intricate labyrinth of underground alleys—and unearths a conspiracy dating back decades before Forrester’s disappearance. Now detective Paul Sander must learn to play the diabolical games of a civilization of people who only leave their subterranean lair at night.

 Loading ...