This is by far the best review of Banjo Kazooie I've ever read.

Cooper is a singular thing. ( )

God Jr. is a very important part of Cooper’s body of work—partly because, unlike most of his other fiction, all of the physical violence in God Jr. happens “off-stage.” In the absence of explicit horror I could see and feel the psychic landscape of disconnection and escapism without the voyeurism and adrenaline that clouded my reading of the earlier books. The horror in God Jr. is heartbreakingly ordinary: the failure of a father to connect with other people, especially his son, drives him to absurdity and escapism. Jim doesn’t know how to solve his grief and unhappiness any more than he knew how to solve his loneliness before his son’s death (sex and drugs didn’t work?!). He tries to make sense of his loss and connect through the things he thinks were important to his son: getting high and playing silly computer games. Surprise, surprise, this doesn’t really solve anything, but allows him to build a fantasy of connection to replace the emptiness that is truly tragic. So we watch, increasingly saddened and frustrated, as his absurdity and escapism provide him with little else than an incomplete numbness.

In the end, what Cooper leaves us with is the gut-wrenching sensation of failed connections. It is clear as the novel goes on that Jim’s attempts to find meaning and beauty primarily through fantasy and escape always kept him from meaningful human relationships. As Jim discovers that he didn’t know anything about what was important to his son, he retreats further and further into fantasy, but even his fantasies refuse to allow him peace. He fucked up, over and over and over, and now that it’s too late the only option is to disappear. ( )