Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Lord Vishnu's Love Handles: A Spy Novel (Sort Of)
    Lord Vishnu's Love Handles: A Spy Novel (Sort Of)
    Lord Vishnu's Love Handles: A Spy Novel (Sort Of)
    Audiobook8 hours

    Lord Vishnu's Love Handles: A Spy Novel (Sort Of)

    Written by Will Clarke

    Narrated by William Dufris

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Lord Vishnu's Love Handles is the story of a man who is teetering on the edge of financial ruin and insanity until a couple of secret agents teach him what it really means to lose his mind.

    Travis Anderson has a psychic gift. Or so he thinks. So far he's milked his premonitions only to acquire an upper-middle-class lifestyle - pretty wife, big house, and a shiny Range Rover - without having to make any real effort. But recent visions threaten his yuppie contentment. Haunted by omens of impending cancers, stillborn babies, and personal train wrecks, he is compelled to make a series of inaccurate and horrifying prophecies that humiliate him in front of his fellow country club members. The IRS gets Travis's number, too, demanding an audit of his sloppy bookkeeping.

    Drowning in mounting financial problems and apparent mental illness, Travis tries booze, pills, even golf to stay afloat, but nothing works. His wife and friends are forced to stage an intervention. Travis is in danger of losing his family, his career, and ultimately, his sanity. That is, until he meets a Hindu holy man in rehab who claims to be the final incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Suddenly, the tragically shallow Travis is saddled with the responsibility of bettering mankind and saving the world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 1, 2005
    ISBN9781400171750
    Author

    Will Clarke

    Will Clarke doesn't want you to know where he lives or what he's doing next.

    Related to Lord Vishnu's Love Handles

    Related audiobooks

    Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Self-publishing Satisfaction

      Jul 7, 2022

      ‘I took up creative writing during the lockdown to give myself a sense of purpose,’ writes subscriber Elizabeth Kelly. ‘Right away, I was hooked. I joined an online course, started with short stories and then progressed to completing an historical no

      1 min read

    • Article

      Cartier And The Maharaja

      Sep 20, 2021

      Cartier And The Maharaja
      3 min read

    • Article

      Always On

      Dec 18, 2018

      Always On
      4 min read

    • Article

      Eric Nguyen

      Jun 16, 2021

      Eric Nguyen
      5 min read

    • Article

      Banking’s Beginnings

      Apr 8, 2020

      Banking’s Beginnings
      1 min read

    • Article

      A Literary Feast

      Jun 11, 2021

      A Literary Feast
      12 min read

    • Article

      Humans Are Wired for Goodness

      Aug 22, 2019

      Nicholas Christakis and I are on the same page: We would definitely sacrifice our lives to save a billion strangers, perhaps even several hundred million, plucked at random from Earth’s population. But, for sure, not a thousand strangers, or a millio

      15 min read

    • Article

      Confessions Of A Failed Novelist

      Feb 16, 2022

      TWENTY years ago I published a short story called “Larsen’s Novel.” The plot was simple: A man named Larsen unexpectedly presents his best friend, Flem, with the novel he’s written. Flem spends the rest of the story crafting increasingly far-fetched

      8 min read

    • Article

      This One Sky Day

      Apr 21, 2021

      RELEASED OUT NOW! 468 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Leone Ross Publisher Faber This is the sort of book that gets reviewers wheeling out words like “smorgasbord” or “cornucopia”. We’ll go with “kaleidoscopic”. This One Sky Day is a feast for the sens

      1 min read

    • Article

      Good Boy

      Sep 8, 2020

      I’ve always had a problem with introductions. To me, they don’t matter. It’s either you know me or you don’t—you get? If you don’t, the done. Simple. Kick me out of the house at fifteen—a main thing you need to know is that I am a hustler through and

      18 min read

    • Article

      Whisky Business

      Sep 20, 2022

      Whisky Business
      5 min read

    • Article

      Virginia Ironside

      Nov 16, 2022

      Q I'm sure you'll think I'm ridiculous: I'm a 70-year-oldwoman and I'm starting to wonder if I might not be gay. I did get married and had two children whom I adore, but I've always felt an outsider. I've always had very close friendships with women

      3 min read

    • Article

      Virginia Ironside

      Mar 6, 2024

      Q We live next door to two high-flying business people. They're lovely parents, when they're around – but the rest of the time the child is looked after by a French au pair and we can hear her screaming at the little girl. As a result the child is ve

      3 min read

    • Article

      Trying To Be Just And Pious In Crusader Kings III Part II

      Dec 29, 2020

      Quick recap: I’m trying to ignore the urges this game inspires in me and everybody else, and be lovely, kind, and noble at every possible opportunity; unless I catch anybody being in any way immoral, then they shall feel my pious wrath. After losing

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Lord Vishnu's Love Handles

    3.5/5

    65 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Absolutely entertaining, especially if you like psychics, spies, video games and karma...gotta love karma...
    • 3/5
      Lord Vishnu's Love Handles is unexpectedly fleshy and overly brash. Its protagonist spends so much time shooting his mouth off that I think the author may have forgotten that, as readers, we're probably more apt to enjoy his work if we don't hate its main character. There's no redemption here. There's barely a coherent plot. What there is, in spades, is a lot of unnecessary bawdiness.The premise is simple, and then convoluted. Yuppie man leads charmed existence, with a side of psychic abilities and a drinking problem. His life is turned upside down and he ends up making a deal with the devil (in this case a super-secret government ESP organization). Enter the bad guy and a dozen or so plot mishaps magically healed by convenient sixth-sense-iness. Sprinkle with lots of excessive aggression and pseudo-sexy undertones and viola! Don't get me wrong. I love a good silly yet dirty romp as much as the next girl, but this one left me feeling unfulfilled. Like I'd somehow just read a big mac and then wiped the grease off my hands onto a second-hand negligee.
    • 3/5
      the publishing equivalent of an album made in teh basement on a four track. Part independent/ part polished / part pure pop culture. This was a fun read that thankfully the Author printed instead of selling to a script agent and turned it into a weak sci-fi series with an 8 episode run on the Lifetime channel.
    • 3/5
      This is a funny book, a little sophomorish (genre bending some reviewers on Amazon said - big No to that.) But to his credit, Clarke takes on some existential questions. The story veers sci-fi'ish - Travis Anderson can see into the future, random things like knowing before the phone rings that it is his mother-in-law calling or beating the computer all day long guessing the color of the cow's udders on PsychicCow.com (yes, they created the site as a promotional tool, and you can do it all day long too if you're so inclined). So when he has dreams that his wife is doing his business partner, he believes it even though he's got no concrete proof something is going on. His wife it turns out is pregnant (is the child his or not, we never find out till the end). And if things can't get better, they really shouldn't get any get any worse - Travis' alcoholism gets out of hand and he starts seeing the blue skinned dude, the eponymous Vishnu of the title; his firm is audited and it is discovered that Reed Bindler, his partner has been swindling IRS of money and they collectively owe Uncle Sam something to the tune of 5 million dollars. IRS ropes in Travis to do psychic work for them in exchange for forgiving the 5 million debt. How he encounters enough dark forces for a lifetime and comes to love his wife and family in spite of her obvious promiscuity forms the rest of the book.Part of the problem with the book is the use of dreams, visions and other such hooey as literary devices. It just stretches the imagination a little too tenuous, so I cannot imagine anyone other than a die-hard sci-fi fan actually enjoying the book. On the other hand, once I realized this book was more sci-fi and potty humor, I stopped expecting anything like religion or spirituality, so finding it was a pleasant surprise. The spirituality Travis Anderson ends up espousing is part Hindu, part mysticism. There're very Hindu concepts - for example both the dark forces, represented by the characters Ikshu and SageRat, and the light forces (Travis himself) work for the same master - the US government.More interesting is the fact that this book was a breakout book on Amazon.com. Will Clarke went from being a self-publisher to having his book picked up by Simon and Schuster. Who says self-publishing has to be the ugly redheaded stepchild to traditional publishing? Not Will Clarke who's laughing all the way to the bank with the optioning of this book by Hollywood. (Refer the exclusive interview with Lord Vishnu - it gives a glimpse into Clarke's thinking)
    • 3/5
      A fun, light read. Compare to two other books I've just read, in a sort of synchronistical way: Breakfast with the Buddha (terrific) and the old classic Cat's Cradle (not as great as I remembered). This is obviously a book hoping to become a movie, and reminded me of Jennifer Government, which is going to be a movie, I think. A first-time book by a thirtysomething who seems unable to write outside of his own milieu (his protagonist is obviously a self-portrait, and that always makes me think less of a book, whether it should or not). If you share his worldview and demographic, you may find the book very funny. It kept me entertained while recovering from the flu, but I don't think I would've read it otherwise. It's full of plot holes, and is totally unbelievable, not to mention how he's distorted and mis-used the work of Rupert Sheldrake and others. So, in summary, if you're a shallow thirtysomething, living the high life in Dallas and know nothing about remote viewing or morphic resonance, this book should be just the ticket. Otherwise, read it when you're in a flu-induced fog, and you'll have a passable time. I shit you not, dude. ; )
    • 3/5
      BOOK #18I found this book on the sale rack at Barnes and Noble for less than $5. The last clearance book I got was horrible, but I decided to give this one a try- my sister claimed her friend enjoyed the book, so that helped sell it! While the book wasn't great, it wasn't horrible either- just very, very odd. Part sci-fi, part political satire, I found Clarke tried too hard at times making a majority of the book absurd. If you get passed this aspect, the book is somewhat entertaining.FAVORITE QUOTE(S): Theoretically, you can be nuttier than Chinese chicken salad, but so long as your actions are normal, then so are you. What's going on inside your head is your own business. And nobody needs to know about it. // I have a date with Destiny, or at least her in-bred cousin, Circumstance. // I guess if your own beliefs don't get you, someone else's will. Hell, it's not H-bombs that are the problem here; it's the crazy beliefs that incite people to set them off.
    • 3/5
      This is one of those books where you keep thinking, "This is not a good book." Not pretty, you hate the main character, but you keep reading and reading a lot. The plot moves fast and you want to know what will happen next. I guess in the end I would reccomend this book as decent.
    • 4/5
      "Lord Vishu's Love Handles," written in the present tense using a wacky first-person narrator whose every other word seems to be of the four-letter variety, springs from an utterly absurd premise, uses cliched phrases when it wants to, and resists any attempt to pigeonhole it into a particular genre. Will Clarke's complete disregard for literary convention goes along way toward explaining why this entertaining work was spurned by traditional publishers until it proved its marketability by developing a cult readership as a self-published novel under the aptly-named "Middlefinger Press." Our hero is Travis Anderson, an alcoholic suburbanite whose obsession over his wife's possible infidelity and growing uneasiness with his psychic abilities drive him into financial ruin and make him easy prey for recruitment by a shadowy arm of the government that covets his unusual remote viewing skills. What follows is a series of darkly comical adventures in which Travis is forced to reexamine his comfortable, yuppie-fat-inducing lifestyle in the context of the Hindu religion, pit his talents against a rogue remote viewer who fancies himself as the second coming of Rasputin, and save the day in one of the most outrageous climax scenes imaginable. This book made me laugh harder than anything I've read since Carl Hiaasen's "Skinny Dip," all the while reinforcing some good old fashioned values, like the sanctity of all living things, the evils of jealousy and materialism, and the importance of family. We can only hope that Paramount exercises its option rights and that the film remains true to Clarke's offbeat vision. -Kevin Joseph, author of "The Champion Maker"