I’ve never read a book that started with an epilogue before, so I found Minister Faust’s 2004 The Coyotes Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad singularly intriguing. This book at once pays homage to genre conventions, like the denouement epilogue and the stereotypical pragmatic skeptic’s conflict with the mystical creative, while expanding from its influences into a layered, Afrofuturist narrative questioning fandom itself. This humorous romp through friendship, science fantasy, and apartment life is less concerned with telling a straightforward story than interrogating the stories we use to explain our own lives.

Set in the Canadian city of Edmonton in the summer of 1995, self-styled “Coyote Kings” Hamza and Yehat share a bachelor pad filled with Yehat’s kooky inventions and Hamza’s sporadic poetry. But their friendship threatens to snap when Hamza meets a cryptic, sagacious genre nerd named Sherem, churlish white gangsters intrude on their neighborhood, and Coyote King ex-partners Heinz and Kevlar Meaney offer Hamza some unexpected bargains. To survive a week of murder and mystery, Hamza and Yehat must dive into relics of the African diaspora and their own past.

Faust offers a thoughtful balance of humor and pathos accompanying this quest narrative. In addition to the sheer absurdity outlined by the title, each point of view character comes with a fact sheet with such traits as “armor type” including “hipster coat” and “goatee” and “wisdom” including “fortune cookie” (5). Much of the prose extends this humor through wry or blustering character voices, yet Faust also details hollowing grief and righteous fury, including poignant discussion of blood diamonds and the Ethiopian-Eritrean War alongside daily friction between roommates.

Unfortunately, Faust’s narrative scales demonstrate their twenty-year-old age in their weight toward exploring the “space-age bachelor” than his funny, introspective “Coyote Kings.” While the datasheets offer bold introductions to each character, they ultimately highlight an egregious oversight of women—of twelve point of view characters, only often-absent Sherem is not a man. For all the mental space estranged mothers and ex-lovers occupy for the bachelor protagonists, half of the points of view belong to blundering, chauvinist henchmen who mainly demonstrate Faust’s facility in developing voice and poking fun at racist white people. Amid this plot-bogging downpour of tomfoolery, I found Sherem’s character an overburdened pillar upholding any complexity in Faust’s depiction of gender, forced to be mysterious, enchanting, funny, nerdy, dominating, and vulnerable with scant time to understand her as a complete person. Faust might have been better served paring back the story to focus on the Coyote King point-of-views and Sherem while granting more time to the women Hamza and Yehat howl about.

Notwithstanding these weaknesses in point-of-view and gender dynamic development, Faust’s Afrofuturistic vision and hilarity make The Coyote Kings a singular experience. I sometimes find it hard to engage with the cookie-cutter suburbia of genre writing focused on straightforward narratives in conventional settings of medieval Europe or distant space. But I enjoyed this roaming, chortling first novel, and I’ll happily rummage through the bins alongside coyote kings.