tibor fischer's "the thought gang" is a roar-out-loud book, ferociously funny as his backcover advertises, more entertaining and wicked than "the collector collector", landmined page after page with untamed puns and naughty allusions and sending up such explosions of ecstatic howls that i'm amazed no one's scraping me off the walls yet. in this book you will meet a one-armed, one-legged french thug and a lazy absconding cambridge philosophy lecturer and more words beginning with z than you thought you could encounter in a lifetime. (when i had finished the book i discovered that he had included, at the back of the book, a lexicon of words beginning with z, and i had a fleeting moment of indignation (i've been looking words up in the dictionary and encyclopedia!) and then i laughed so hard i didn't think my gelastic muscles could hold up. fischer can coin words faster than you can blink and do tricks with the english language that make you roll around like an experienced water buffalo. preposterous, zestful, absurd, self-indulgent, wonderfully implausible, astonishing and the most terrific fun i've had in ages.