Jack Diller is a loser in denial, a failed actor who keeps the bills paid (barely) by delivering food to Los Angeles’ upper middle classes, staring in awe at their mansions while trying not to think about the tiny rental house filled with old pizza boxes and empty Mountain Dew cans that waits for him after twelve hours of driving. Jerry spends much of his shift staring at his phone, and one night sees an obnoxious ad for an audiobook. It’s a self-help book by Hector Bruno, an action movie star from the 1980s. Although Jack isn’t much for audiobooks, out of curiosity he gives it a shot, and……finds Hector talking to him. Jack’s not just listening to a washed-up actor give vague life advice, he’s being confronted and coached by a man with such an audio presence that he can’t help but listen — and as Jack does, he finds something rising in him: THE KILLER INSTINCT. The polite pushover finds a sudden and inexplicable fount of self-confidence and cunning, and is soon well off the straight and narrow, culminating in a flight to the desert with a young hostage. (Not to worry, Iris, Jack’s really a nice guy. Really. ) 

Self Help made me hurt with laughter, though it helps that I’ve been in bed for several days with a savage chest cold so any amount of laughter hurts a bit. The voice acting in this is utterly brilliant, and I’m sorry that there’s no excerpt on YouTube to share, and that the ‘sample’ on Audible only demonstrates Wil Wheaton’s performance, and not Ron Perlman. I know Perlman chiefly through his role on Sons of Anarchy, where he plays King Claudius in a Hamlet-meets-bike-gang crime drama, and it was hilarious to hear him here, hamming it up with a soundtrack and turning a listless failure into an assertive if bumbling criminal. Wil Wheaton has never disappointed me in his audio performances — he is, in fact, the reason I’m an Audible member at all – and he’s up to his usual standards here. Although there’s some interest from the reader/listener wondering what the nature of the audiobook is (is Jack hallucinating? Is it some some of AI?), given that it appears to be conscious and reacts to Jack’s real-world choices, the meat is Wheaton’s delivery of a man-child discovering how to assert himself and move toward a goal, but quickly going off the rails and rationalizing all along the way. It’s dark, funny, sometimes surreal, and always thoroughly entertaining.