If you like stories about getting very, very drunk, looking for trouble, starting fights, and above all sleeping with and insulting random women, then this book is for you.

Tucker Max, a real person, mind you, is a tough guy to define. He’s a law school student who treats women like objects and drinks too much and is proud of it. I think I knew a few of him in college. He’s the guy who is self-aware enough to start the back cover of his book by saying, “My name is Tucker Max and I’m an @**hole…” and make you like him for it. And why not? The stories are almost all very funny, that is if you are into frat boy humor and are able to laugh when you read something that strikes you as, “Man, I remember when that happened to me/my friend/ that guy I heard about.../ etc.”
My point is, his stories are the stories and dreams of frat guys and college boys across the country, no matter what school you are at or what time period you grew up in. Drink beer with your friends, make fun of each other, try to hit on women and occasionally get lucky and wake up wondering how you got to go to bed with this person.

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is a book that celebrated debauchery in its most elemental form- getting drunk for the sake of getting drunk. Max does his best to avoid any sort of moral or ethical points to his stories- indeed, it is hard to imagine much around morals and ethics going on in the vacant, beer-drenched soul of this guy. He says everything you can think of that is rude to women and he says it to their face just to see what they will do. He has a rating system for how hot or ugly a girl is, and he goes into detail with it as an appendix.

The title is taken from a moment of almost unemotional self-awareness late in the book, and it reveals a lot about how Max looks at himself- he is almost a sacrificial lamb, self-sacrificed that is, to the life of the male id- the male id if it were constantly caffeinated and lived inside of a stereo with 80’s heavy metal playing.

He routinely drops that he is shotgunning 6 beers in an hour, or doing 12 shots in a night- and if you’ve ever hung out with hardcore bar-loving frat guys, you know he’s not lying. Well, not by much…
The drinking stories each disintegrate into either a fight between him and his friends and whatever bar they are in that they shouldn’t have been in (i.e. country western, sorority fundraiser) or some exploit of his with a woman (how he is ever conscious enough to have sex I am not sure) that can include anything from public sex (ie Vegas bathroom, outdoor festival) or something gross (I’ll let you use your imagination- or not- here). Like I said before- he has a knack for getting you on his side even though he is a total jerk on purpose, and the stories are quick and entertaining.

Photo Credit: (CC) Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com (via Flickr under CCL)