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Mephisto's Guitar Club is an erotic fantasy novel by Jean Christos that focuses on the adventures of a group of adventurers referred to variously as “The Guild,” “The Guitar Club,” and “The Secret Squirrels.” It is notable for being the last novel published by Christos before he was involuntarily detained in Fogg’s Asylum For the Mentally Insane and Anally Adventurous.

Members of The Guild

 * Milo Cardildo, the story's protagonist, is a bard specializing in lyrical ballads and a proud owner of a metallic penis. Of the twelve songs he sings during the course of the story, only two of them don’t contain the word “dingus”. While dancing at the party at the end of the novel, he gets his doctorate in Making It Rain and subsequently adopts the name "Doctor Dollar." It is unknown what he did before joining the Guild Though he is often considered inexperienced by other members of the Guild, they eventually admit that his penis is "very impressive."
 * Lazarus Tsoumbanos is a self-proclaimed "Jack of All Trades," who carries swords and talks at inopportune times. He is described as looking "like somebody took a shit in a trashcan and then placed that trashcan in a larger trashcan." He has an affair with non-Guild member Snax Mudfig, a Southern belle with a body like nine babies stitched together. For this illicit act, he is banished from the Guild, but is soon reinstated after Milo hears his drunken rendition of "Seven Nation Army" played on a lute. In the epilogue, he and Snax establish a domestic partnership and are looking to adopt.
 * Elyine Usou is an elf with the ability to transform into a tiger. She is in a relationship with Milo, but this is kept secret from the reader for the first thirty pages. She defeats the main antagonist Killingyouguy while in elf form, which gives her confidence to be her true self. She then leads the Guild in a spirited dance to Bubba Sparxxx's song "Ms. New Booty," having no other choice since that's all Ariel's boombox plays. This dance sequence is mostly lost on the reader, given that the clumsy description of the dance is followed up with "You had to be there."
 * Harry Henderson is a bearded frontman and husband of Josephine. He is actually the smallest of seven Russian nesting dolls, which causes him great stress in the final battle against Killingyouguy, the largest of nineteen Russian nesting dolls. In the prologue, he secretly steals the surname of a nearby farmer. His face is described as "a sensual visage with an angular jawline and two expressive brown eyes." The unnamed narrator seems to harbor some romantic feelings for the character, as his epistolary epilogue is addressed to him. The novel ends with the narrator saying, "I just think that it's about time that I stopped falling for every beautiful set of brown eyes, just like your brown eyes."
 * Josephine Esser is the weary wife of Harry. She is described as "strikingly tall, with a face that resembles a composite of every cast member of The Goonies." She seems to be motivated entirely by eating Ariel's food, with no regard for the central dilemma of the novel.
 * Ariel is an asexual conjurer of deformed cats. She's the first one to bring up Bubba Sparxxx (which functions as Chekhov's gun) and carries a boombox that plays his song "Ms. New Booty" on a loop, as well as playing the same song over itself with an identical boombox. Her short dialogue with Elyine about the Bechdel test is the only reason why the novel passes the Bechdel test.
 * Liadrin Ajah is a human surgically attached to a thesaurus. She views this as a deformity for the majority of the story, until Milo gives his rousing “Thesauruses Are Cool” speech. Though she is irked by Milo’s poor word choice, she recognizes that her deformity is actually a strength. She then proceeds to mock Killingyouguy’s name, lowering his self-esteem enough to distract him from Elyine’s attacks, which leads to his death.
 * Katrana Sireina is a mystical user of runes and former telemarketer. She is called “The Poison Woman” by Killingyouguy’s minions, because one look into her eyes causes one to fall in love with her. While the minions are in this trance, she sells them defective perfume at outrageously marked-up prices. By the time the Guild gets to Killingyouguy’s castle, broken bottles of her perfume are strewn across the floors of every room, which causes the castle to smell like "a rank cocktail of rejected candle scents and unrealized dreams."
 * Anduin Tiresias is a personable swordsman with a winning smile. Much ado is made about his voice, which the narrator states is “a sonorous baritone that could so easily melt my butter heart.” The seductive quality of his voice plays a vital role in the novel’s main plot, and serves as a foil to Lazarus’s shrill, obtrusive wail. In the epilogue, he is stated to have formed a business partnership with Katrana, and to have procured a successful marketing career.
 * Auric Beau is a former elven ranger. He never appears in the story and little is known of him other than comments made in passing by other members of the Guild, who characterize him as unreliable but “quite handsome.” It is implied that his good looks are the sole reason why he is kept in the guild.

Other characters

 * The narrator is the most mysterious character, who never explains his connection to the Guild. He often invokes Harry as his muse to write the more flowery descriptions of the scenery. He frames the novel as a true account of true heroes, complete with references to historical texts, but he is often cited as an unreliable narrator because of his peculiar fixations on seemingly trivial aspects of the story. Many readers go as far to claim that the vast majority of the novel’s sex scenes are completely fabricated by the narrator. Some readers have conflated the narrator with Jean Christos himself, who responded to such claims with, “Please, let me out of this madhouse! I don’t care about the book anymore, just let me go!”
 * The metrosexual suitor is a seemingly insignificant character who derails the plot by proposing to Josephine in the middle of battles. He dies by stepping in front of Killingyouguy's sword, a heroic sacrifice which saves Harry's life. Literary critic Bob Dojo developed a popular theory that the narrator is actually the “metrosexual suitor” first mentioned by Josephine during one of the rare moments in the story in which she is not eating. In this theory (dubbed “The Gay Suitor Theory”), the suitor is actually in love with Harry, and is plotting to murder Josephine. This is supported by the narrator’s description: “Though the suitor was undeniably interested in Josephine, he couldn't help but notice Harry’s muscular build, as is normal for all heterosexual males.” This theory would explain why the suitor seems to take so much pleasure in Harry throwing him out of his house, and also why he proposes with a vial of poison instead of an engagement ring.
 * Killingyouguy is the main antagonist of the story. The Guild agrees to fight him after he uploads pirated copies of Jean Christos’s novels to the internet, but this is followed by the narrator saying “I assume it must have been that. That was certainly Killingyouguy’s greatest transgression.” His brother was the farmer whose surname was stolen by Harry. Many students of Mephisto's Guitar Club point to this detail as a much more likely explanation for why Killingyouguy tries to destroy the Guild.
 * Snax Mudfig is Lazarus’s love interest and composer/lyricist of Robocop: The Musical.

Reception
Reviews of Mephisto’s Guitar Club were decidedly mixed. Ronald Bartleby of The Washington Post called the novel “unreadable trash...full of gratuitous sex scenes and meaningless digressions on topics as irrelevant as the constructions Great Pyramids, the use of ‘your ass’ as a pronoun, and (most baffling) what color shirt the author is currently wearing. Avoid this corncobby chronicle like it’s the plague, because it is.” The New York Times echoed this sentiment, saying the book is “uneven and given to inexplicable changes in tone” and “kept together only by its paper-thin plot and intriguing characters.” Other reviews were more positive. Eugene Strigth praised the novel for its “whimsical painting of its characters. Its characters...are described with a deft, loving grace that makes the whole experience feel like reading a history of the friends you didn't know you had.” Bob Dojo called the novel “a unique, understated masterpiece. Christos takes the reader into a new world full of lovable, three-dimensional characters; a world where anything can happen, and anything does happen.” Harold Bloom later wrote several theses on the book, which were collected in the anthology A Dissection and Hazy History of Mephisto’s Guitar Club.

Controversy
Argentine author Daniela Fuentes accused Jean Christos of plagiarizing her short story “Viviendo La Vida De LARP.” When asked about this, Christos said from his padded cell: “Why do you keep asking me about that stupid book? I’m being held here against my will! Does nobody care?! I’m not even sure where I am! I just know that what is being done to me is illegal, and I shall not stand for it!!!” Fuentes pointed out that “during no point in his reply does he deny my accusations.”