A Review of "The Jigsaw Man" by Gord Rollo

Originally written August 9, 2008

So I finished The Jigsaw Man by Gord Rollo this last week, and it was quite a fun book. I basically picked it up at work because the cover was so freaking awesome, and as normal, my impulse buy turned out to be a good investment.

Jigsaw Man is about a man, Mike, who basically has nothing left to live for after his wife and son are killed in a car accident and his only surviving child wants nothing to do with him, and he is planning on committing suicide by train when a man representing a brilliant researcher-doctor comes and offers him $2 million for his right arm. Desperate for the cash and a chance to mend things with his last remaining family, he takes the offer. Unfortunately Mike doesn't know what he's gotten himself into and he's suddenly plunged into a nightmare world of surgeries and ghoulish experiments all at the whim of a crazed doctor. His body is slowly spliced from him, with "new" limbs grafted on from other donors the doctor had picked up along the way, and soon Mike is barely the man he used to be, living in a "rented body", as he put it in an achingly simple way: "...with my rented heart... rented lungs... rented hands... nothing is mine anymore..."

I liked this book; it was a quick read with lots of creepy medical horrors and suspense, but all the while it really didn't try to be anything more than just a good horror story and a modern take on the whole Frankenstein genre. The ending was a bit confusing, and I thought it could have done more. It did a sort of full-circle on itself and Mike's ending was a bit of a let down on some level. Overall, I liked it and I'm glad I impulsively bought it! My rating, 1 (hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I would have to give this book a solid score of 8. It's a good fun read, like I said before, and if you want something for a lazy afternoon read, then this is your book.