In the first entry in My World of Flops, my long-running column on historic cinematic failures, I coined the phrase "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" in a 2007 A.V. Club essay on Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, then watched with a curious combination of pride and confusion as the phrase entered the cultural lexicon. 

It's been a wild ride. In the ensuing two decades, I've published ten books, the last of which is my first satirical novel, Five Nights at Freddy Got Fingered. As the world's preeminent expert on "Weird Al" Yankovic, the subject of three of my books (Weird Al: The Book (with Al Yankovic), The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al (with Felipe Sobreiro) and a leading authority on bad/weird films, writing a Freddy Got Fingered-themed parody of Five Nights at Freddy's was a logical next step in my career.

I am going to follow it with Maniac Pixie Dream Girl, my second satirical novel and the definitive comic take on a ubiquitous pop culture archetype. It follows sad sack protagonist Robin Yount as he falls hopelessly in love with Zoe V, a beautiful and quirky blue-haired eccentric who reinvigorates his lost lust for life and shows him how wonderful life can be.

But can she be trusted? No, she can not, as she's furtively a hyper-sophisticated android powered by AI that combines all of the Manic Pixie Dream Girls in film, music, television, and literature with autism, ADHD, and bipolar disorder and, just for fun, the personalities of several of the world's most prolific and notorious serial killers.

Will our hapless hero survive his dalliance with a captivating and entrancing figure created to destroy him as part of an elaborate revenge plot? Read Maniac Pixie Dream Girl and find out!