- Curly hair and loved by all,though unsuspecting of the world- Little Boy, the very first verse of the very first poem in the very first category
"Raving Lunacy" is a 2013 e-book, available on Amazon.com, and the debut publication of independent author Blaine Munday. It's a poetry collection, but with a twist. It aims to deconstruct and reconstruct poetry, making the genre what it was meant to be, while trying to amuse the reader along the way. It consists of 46 poems divided between eight categories, including Munday's life, Self-Deprecation, Fantasy Literature and parodies of popular music. There are two sequels planned, the three forming "The Collection Trilogy", but Munday is currently focusing on the writing of his first novel, though there he is thinking of releasing a sequel or interquel of sorts to Raving Lunacy with a similar structure before finishing and publishing the novel.
Munday is an avid troper, and one of the poems, "An Ode to a Website", is about This Very Wiki.
This novel provides examples of:
- Absurdism: Repeatedly, most notably the entirety of "Absurd Bizarre Surreal and Thoroughly Whacky", a free-verse poem consisting entirely of non-sequiturs, and also in "Tipperaries".
- After the End: Intended, yet not overtly stated, for all the poems in The Goodbye Section, the last group of poems in Raving Lunacy. Most noticeable in "Toward the Sky (Smoke and Ash)" which is actually about the Earth just having been destroyed and still burning and filling the atmosphere with toxic fumes.
- Blatant Lies: In "Who Am I", Munday says he is, among other things, "the sunshine, the moonlight, the good times and the boogie" (an obvious reference to Michael Jackson) and "the reason why some believe the moon landing was a hoax" (a subtle lampooning of conspiracy theories).
- Conspiracy Theorist: "Conspiracy" is a parody of inane conspiracy theories.
- Insane Troll Logic: The narrator of "Non-Falling Towel" posits that a towel he saw may have been made by aliens (from an alternate dimension, no less).
- Dedication: To Munday's family.
- Double Meaning: In "Watching Her Back (Depressed Waitress)" the word "back" is used to mean several different things, often at once, or it's at least ambiguous, including whether or not the narrator literally/physically watches his crush's back, if he wants to be there for her and look after her, or both.
- Also in "Little Boy", where the title, which also is the opening words of the poem itself, on one hand simply refers to Munday at the time being a child, but on the other, Little Boy was also the name of the bomb used on Hiroshima towards the end of the Second World War.
- Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Not thoroughly explained, but in "Different Things Would Happen" Munday posits that through the butterfly effect small events, coincidences and being at the right place at the right time can change the course of history, as one thing acts upon another and that upon another and so on. Adolf Hitler is even mentioned by name, as is a hypothetical third world war. The poem mentions historical people and events, laws of physics, cartoon characters and things that world affect individual people at first, and then perhaps more later.
- Hypocrite: "Labelless Labeller" is about Munday being this, as is hinted at in the title.
- Sdrawkcab Name: Gnikeht from "The Ballad of Whoufey and Draeja (Gnikeht's Lament Rhobbaduiann's Song)" reads "the king" backwards.
- Self-Deprecation: An entire category of poems is called "The Deprecation Shelf" and is about the things Munday hates about himself.
- Separated by a Common Language: Munday tends to avoid this by sticking to some sort of lowest common denominator version of English when it comes to vocabulary, and the vocabulary is largely American(ised), but he strictly sticks to British spelling throughout Raving Lunacy.
- Shout-Out: To Michael Jackson, Nancy Sinatra, Keira Knightley and Capital Cities. And The 'Verse of Donald Duck. And This Very Wiki. Heck, even the pen name Blaine Munday is a Shout-Out: Blaine is a reference to Darren Criss of Team StarKid (his character in [[Glee]] is called Blaine); while Munday is a reference to Jason Munday of Ministry of Magic YouTube fame, both of which the author became familiar with through his interest in Harry Potter, Darren Criss through Harry Potter podcasts and Jason Munday through [[filk]] music videos on YouTube.
- Shown Their Work: Being a geography nerd, Munday knew very well that the waters around Cape Horn is the only place where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet, and so of course he named his poem where those two bodies of water do indeed meet after it, officially making that the poem's spatial setting in the process.
- Shrouded in Myth: "The River Giant" contains this, largely about the identity of the narrator, despite the poem being about himself, but also about the places he describes, and the people who supposedly created him, how they did it, why and when. Also happens to an extent in "The Ballad of Whoufey and Draeja (Gnikeht's Lament Rhobbaduiann's Song)", where there being several shamans and countries are mentioned in passing, but we don't get to know what kind of world the poem is set in, though we know there is magic there and that it can be used to heal those wounded in battle.
- Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: The poem "Thumbe-Hearte" is written exclusively as an extremified parody of William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, and is only barely decipherable at best, and utter gibberish at worst, being written in faux Medieval English.
