Up until now, my experience with audiobooks has been quite limited. My father gave me Zig Ziglar's motivational sales tape "The Secrets To Closing The Sale" back in my Best Buy days, and I've taken in 45-minute snippets of P.G. Wodehouse's dry British humor in the book-on-tape format during long car rides into hockey games, back when the Hartford Whalers were still around.

They were nothing like this.

First of all Make Love! the Bruce Campbell Way is a million miles away from Jeeves, Wooster, or Mr. Ziglar, yet it still walks in their footsteps, as well as those of countless novelists before him. However, Campbell doesn't so much walk in their footsteps as he does hopscotch, dance, and pirouette in them.

Equal parts traditional comedic novel, swashbuckling high adventure, twisted autobiography, and what can only be described as The Tao of Ash, Make Love!, much like its author, is a tough act to classify. It follows the fictitious (mis)adventures of Mr. Campbell as he lands the Holy Grail of acting: the breakthrough A-List role, in his case as Foyle Whipple, the doorman in the Mike Nichols-directed romantic comedy Let's Make Love! starring no less than Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger. Beating out countless other top-tier celebrities (the list of names Bruce drops sounds like Oscar nominees from the last 5 years) based on the fact that Nichols thought it was "Bruce's turn to shine," he dives into his role with true B-actor fervor, coaxing devout Buddhist Richard Gere into scenes of over-the-top fisticuffs, inspiring Renee Zellweger into costumes that "show off the goods," and praising the cinematic brilliance of the "shaky-cam." Unfortunately for Bruce, his spreading of the alleged "B-Movie Virus" puts him at odds with the higher-ups at Paramount, including a overzealous production coordinator by the name of Rob Stern, who may have a tie to Bruce's past...

To give away more would be criminal, as most of the fun of Make Love! is finding out which way Bruce will be dragging you next, or which oddball character he'll be introducing to us next. By the end of Disc 6 (an ending which came far too soon), he's worked with several slimy "relationship experts," engaged in an old-style flintlock duel at a southern gentlemen's club (which both is and isn't what it sounds like), had multiple run-ins with Secret Service Agent Grunau, stopped a gang of eco-terrorists, and much, much more than can possibly be written about in this review.

Best of all, Campbell does it well, using his direct writing style to make the situations come to life, albeit a cartoonish one. He doesn't bog his writing down with excessive description or character development: his characters and situations are very two-dimensional, but so much so that they're easy to understand and wholly memorable. There are no shades of gray in Campbell's America: the good are good and the bad are bad, with very little deviation from this formula. However, Campbell uses this to his advantage in that I can not remember once being bored by the story, which says a lot. Best of all, Campbell forgoes the traditionally dry audiobook format for a piece that feels more like an old-time radio show. Multiple voice actors, raucous sound effects, and sparse music heighten the mood dramatically, and make the experience that much more gratifying.

Not that it's not without the lumps that any first time novelist may take. Bruce's fiction at times reaches such a fever pitch of absurdity that it can snap the listener out of its spell, and at times his name-dropping of famous Hollywood actors gets a little stale. Hell, there's one bit towards the end where he writes a thug-speak letter as "B-Dawg-C" that's completely stupid and offensive. But then he gets back into his rhythm and you're under his spell again. This is writing at its pulpiest and most fun, and reminding us why we love B-Movies so much sometimes. Like this book, they're bombastic, larger than life, and just damn fun. There is always a place for this kind of entertainment in the world, even with all of the more "serious" books on the shelf.

Bruce puts it best at the very end of his story: "B-Movies won the hearts and minds of viewers a long time ago. The A-Movies just don't know it yet." I couldn't have put it better myself.