I
Read Odd Books

So, for the four of you left who read here regularly, you may have noticed that the site was offline this weekend.   I had some… issues.

I am conflicted because I would like to tell you all what is happening but if I do, it may just get worse.  But before long, someone is going to have to go jail.  I’m not kidding.

Multiple DMCA notices were filed against this site and Houdini’s Revenge, all of them bogus.  Complaints were also made about the content I produce on IROB.   It was alleged that I have reproduced child pornography and wrote entries to incite people to commit acts of pedophilia and rape.  None of these complaints had any basis in reality (no shit).  My hosting company had limited choices because I was less than cooperative but they were on my side and all of this has been resolved in my favor.   Seriously, they were very professional and very sympathetic.

Because I am very tired I have cancelled ANSWER Me! week because I can only imagine the complaints that will get lodged if I discuss all four issues in the depth I prefer.

If you are a writer who suspects your work may have been twisted up in this mess, please know this nonsense was wholly directed at me.  There was no vendetta against any writer involved, and especially no vendetta against Jim Goad, whose work I planned to tackle this week.

I genuinely don’t know how I am going to get this weirdness to stop.  Mr Oddbooks and I have explored legal options but then we decided we couldn’t justify the hassle or the expense so we’re gonna lie low and hope it doesn’t happen again.  I plan to write here, probably next week, but I have a limited capacity to deal with much in the way of bullshit, which is why I collect books and write online rather than have a real job.  So we’ll see how this goes.

Also, while I’m feeling a bit testy, I need to let everyone who has sent me books to read know that I have made a decision about how I plan to handle the books that remain to be read.  If I count more than ten grammar, spelling and/or punctuation issues in your book, I won’t be discussing it.   It’s harsh but really, it’s not.  Lately a lot of the literature I have read has been difficult to appreciate because of all the errors, which makes me tired as I try to find ways to praise good ideas with crappy editing, and I need to recharge my mojo, which will be hard in a world without Ray Manzarek, but I’m going to give it a try (note: avoid using sentences like this one when you write books).  I’ll handle rejected novels quietly.  Thanks for your understanding. (Edited because I found a nicer way to say what I needed to say.)

Hey everyone, sorry to have been so quiet since the end of the NBAS week but I’ve been busy over on Houdini’s Revenge. In fact, I knocked out an attempt to debunk of one of the more involved “it was staged” theories regarding the Boston Marathon Bombings, as well as writing about some of the backpack theories. I hope eventually to amass a clearinghouse of all the theories, debunked (or confirmed – it could happen) and in some sort of order. For those who enjoy conspiracy theory, have a look.

I made an interesting decision about discussing ANSWER Me!, issues 1-4. I have been working on these discussions for months, almost a year. And when I say I “these discussions,” I really mean Issue 4, the infamous Rape Issue. I have never hit the backspace key more in my life. I have read almost all of Andrea Dworkin’s body of work to make sure that I have my ducks in a row if the Andrea Dworkin Lie Detector types show up. I have agonized over word choice, trying to make sure I conveyed the point I wanted to make without offending the usual suspects, even as I sort of want to call out the usual suspects (:cough:melissamcewan:cough:) for trivializing rape to the point even ardent liberals are sickened by their penny ante and Penny Arcade antics, making rape seem trivial as they wage war against fictional creatures committing impossible acts against cartoon characters that in no way represent any living person, past or present. And I will have to mention Peter Sotos. Sotos is a polarizing dude, and by polarizing, I mean I get rape and death threats when I talk about him. I can cope with that sort of shit – welcome to the Internet, Baby Girl! – but it can get a wee bit demoralizing.

All that agonizing has let me to this interesting decision: I am trashing everything I have written and will begin again on Saturday morning, cranking out text quickly and from a place of reaction rather than contemplation. When I am forced to write quickly, I have to stop dithering. When I stop dithering, I can say what I want to say and not worry about who may be offended or that people I want to offend may find my POV to their liking, which is almost as bad.

I may be cranking out Friday’s entry Thursday night but, even if it is rushed, it will be better than the tentative semi-turd I have right now. Hopefully raw writing will encourage raw and interesting discussions.

I had planned to host a giveaway for this themed week but I am 86ing it for two reasons. One, all of the ANSWER Me! books are out-of-print and the last I looked on Amazon, the affordable copies were in crappy condition (acceptable on Amazon means someone’s cat shat on it), all the reputable dealers want way too much, and easily half the listings were from dropshippers, the scourge of the online book purchasing experience. I could give away Goad’s other books but that seems weird since I’m not discussing them. Two, the last two giveaways I hosted had really lukewarm reactions. I’ve seen hundreds of people freak out at the chance to win a $10 card at a coffee shop and I had 26 entries for a $50 Amazon card, and those entries represented nine people. Maybe 10. I’m too tired to go back and look. At any rate, though I really like sharing the book love, there is a fine line between Sharing the Love and becoming That Girl Who Looks Like She Is Begging For Readers. I love you guys but I feel like I’m forcing my love down your throats. Which seems an appropriate way as any to end this entry that basically bemoaned my neurotic inability to write from the hip about rape.

Funny how that works.

Tune in Monday for ANSWER Me! week. It should be interesting.

Thanks to everyone who supported me this week! I really appreciate the comments and hope the few new names I saw stick around.

I assigned all the first comments from each entry a number and used the random number generator at random.org to determine the winner. Donald Armfield won the giveaway! Donald, check your e-mail. I sent you a message about the giveaway and what form you want your gift.

All hail Donald, the King of Bizarro Week.

I’ll be back next week with something, though I don’t know what exactly. I will also be writing some over on Houdini’s Revenge so if you are conspiratorial in nature, check me out over there.

Thanks again, and have a good weekend!

Book: House Hunter

Author: S.T. Cartledge

Type of Book:  Fiction, bizarro, action, novella

Why Do I Consider The Book Odd:  Because it appeals to my animist tendencies to see inanimate objects as living creatures.

Availability:  Published by Eraserhead Press in 2013, you can get a copy here:

Comments: We end NBAS week with S.T. Cartledge’s House Hunter.  I am torn about this book because it has so much going for it yet pings a lot of problems I have with female characters in fringe literature.  It’s almost become a cliche to me that when a badass female character is introduced and she has an unnatural hair color, I’m gonna hate her because her hair serves as her personality.  Imogen, the heroine of this book, has blue hair and is not my cup of tea, so my dayglo-hair theory is still intact.  The characterization in this book, as a whole, isn’t great but it’s also a plot-driven book.  In fact, it’s a pretty decent plot, but like so many NBAS books, it suffers from being novella-length.  This is another one that really needed space to expand and develop its plot.

The gist of House Hunter is this: Imogen is a House Hunter.  Houses, in this novel, are living creatures, some domesticated for human use, some still running wild.  Imogen is a very good house tamer and is pulled into a plot wherein a cabal of architects are trying to use a legendary house called the Jabberhouse that can destroy homes and create new ones, entire communities, that will permit the architects to take control of the houses and control all the communities and the people who live within them.  The wild houses will be stamped out and liberty will be lost.  Imogen is drawn in by a man named Clint and they engage on a quest to stop this from happening.  Clint is not who he says he is, and that plot twist really doesn’t change things as much as you might think.   There are interesting details, like cockroach people and pygmy houses and overall, this is a pretty good first effort.

This is a very action-oriented book, and when Cartledge gets into a tight action scene, you can see his strengths.  However, action-oriented books are hard for me to discuss because one has to be an excellent storyteller to pull off an action book.  Storytelling is not necessarily the same as wordsmithing and as a result storytellers tell amazing and interesting stories without engaging in the sort of writing a reader wants to quote.  Rather, the reader who loves the book is more likely to recount the plot than the beautiful writing.  Think of most Stephen King books – though King is, in my opinion, a very good writer and one of the best horror writers ever, one generally does not find oneself quoting him at length, outside of trenchant one-liners that often come up.  I explain all of this because I want it to be clear that my failure to quote much is due to this being a plot-driven novel.

This is also a book that is an homage to others authors, yet draws on influences without becoming a pastiche.  There is some clear Mark Danielewski-love in this book, with sentient houses and a character with the last name of Davinson (House of Leaves hinges on the Navidson record, this book involves the Davinson Initiative).  There are shades of Palahniuk in here, too, with a character identity revelation at the end that makes sense and is interesting but doesn’t really change much (think Invisible Monsters). There is also a video-game feel to this at times, especially during the scene wherein Imogen uses a controller of sorts to have a house duel with another house hunter.  I am not well-versed enough in video games to be able to assign scenes like this to a specific game but gaming is undeniably there.

While I don’t really like Imogen that much – blue-haired heroin who complains more than the average action heroine and isn’t particularly interesting –  I can admit that my distaste for her at times is strictly personal.  However, there are some concrete problems.  This book achieved a new editorial issue for me.  While it was peppered with editorial problems here and there, most notably with word repetition (“and and”), it had a glaring continuity error.  A character loses an arm and then throws her hands up in the air in a moment of anger.  Now she’s not throwing her severed arm up in the air – this sentence is written as though all limbs are still connected.  Very shortly after she tosses her arms into the air, another character notices her missing arm.  Sigh…  Another problem is that the novella length forced Cartledge into the dreaded “telling” rather than “showing.”  There was a lot of plot handled via conversations between characters.  I generally think telling and not showing is a garbage complaint – all science fiction requires this, especially books with this much world building, which Cartledge handles admirably.  But toward the end, it happened enough for me to notice and it became a bit tiring.

But even as I found Imogen lacking and despaired at some of the editing problems, there is a real kernel of fun in this book. The concept is unique and can easily be seen as an allegory to modern farming wherein corporations are using patents to destroy independent farmers and eliminate crops that are not genetically modified, but this connection is made without any preaching. As I mention above, the world building in this book is quite something and Cartledge creates a world the reader can immediately focus in on without feeling forced into the sort of heavy-duty otherworldliness that I find so wearying about a lot of fantasy and science fiction.  He really does give us details about the world almost effortlessly:

Imogen followed Mary around the side of the house and across a paddock of funnel web ponies.  They stopped at the gate to a paddock with a big acorn tree and at a two-story farm house behind it, standing about a foot off the ground on hundreds of matchstick legs.

Funnel web ponies may not make sense now but in the context of the story they will not trip up the reader.  It is in his worldbuilding wherein Cartledge really does show and not tell, and he’s able to create an at times sweet other world full of rich details that never verges into the outlandish.

Because this is an action bizarro novel, here’s a passage of some excellent action writing:

The old farm leapt and quivered.  Imogen’s head slammed into the porch. Sparks flew from the lightning cannon and danced across the timber deck.  She banged her fist hard on the steps.  A hoof flicked up on to the porch, brushing over her shoulder.  Imogen squeezed the trigger on the cannon and punched it into the steps.  The front legs buckled then flew up, throwing Imogen into a puddle of pigs’ blood on the sloppy ground.

The house came at her with frantic, toothy legs scraping and ripping apart the soil.  Imogen switched the cannon to scorch and fired at the front of the house.  She held her arm up in the general direction of the centipede legs and held her fire until she could no longer feel the feet clawing at the blood-soaked ground.

This is some pretty decent action writing, I think.  Action writing does best when it is simple, without a lot of flourishes.  When a character is wrestling with a house with centipede legs and brings a cannon into play, we don’t need a whole lot of extraneous details.  And to be perfectly frank, I was never one for overly descriptive novels.  I love the mystery novelist Ruth Rendell but tune out whenever she goes into great detail with plants and architecture and the arrangements of high streets.  I am partial to writing that is less baroque and Cartledge appeals to me on that level.

But that is not to say that this book is wholly without some pretty writing.  This scene comes from when Clint and Imogen are in a labyrinth and realize it is alive and is moving.

They came out of one passage into a wide room filled with plants and trees that flickered with light instead of fruit and flowers and leaves, and filled the room with the scent of peaches and roses and eucalyptus.  The plants grew from little islands of red soil that were surrounded by a black liquid sea. Along the walls, eyes watched them.  Imogen went out into the sea, knee deep.  Ellis followed.  In the centre of the room, a tree spiraled like a staircase, disappearing into a hole in the roof.

Overall, there was enough good in this book to distract me from what I didn’t like.  There was little in the way of character development, Imogen’s got the dreaded blue hair that often serves as a place marker for personality, and there were editing issues that were really distracting.  But the world-building, the action sequences and the plot were spot-on.  I recommend this book and hope that if you read it you come back and tell me what you think of it.  But as I have mentioned before, the New Bizarro Author Series writers have a limited window in which to sell enough books to be offered a writing contract.  If this book sounds interesting to you, then get a copy sooner rather than later.

Having reached the end of my NBAS week,  you guys have until 6:00 P.M. PST to leave comments in order to enter my giveaway.  I am giving away a copy of each book I discuss this week OR I am giving away an Amazon gift card in the amount that the paper versions of these books would cost.  All you have to do to enter the drawing is to leave me a comment in each of this week’s entries.  One comment on each discussion is an entry into the drawing.  Leave a comment all five days and you will have five entries into the drawing.  Only one comment per day counts as an entry but don’t let that prevent you from engaging in conversation about the books.  For all the details of this contest, visit this entry.

I will announce the winner of the contest in a separate entry and will contact the winner via e-mail.    Thanks for all the support for this endeavor and happy reading to you all.

Book: Avoiding Mortimer

Author: J.W. Wargo

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, novella

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Just take my word for it, it’s odd.

Availability: Published in 2013 by Eraserhead Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This subtly weird little book is perhaps my emotional favorite of the bizarros I’ve read for this themed-week. It’s got its gross moments – vomit, biting into insects and earlobes – but even the grossness was sweetly restrained given what I have come to expect from the Bizarros. But it must be said that sweetly restrained bizarro is not going to be awesome in and of itself. No, I’m far too sophisticated to be taken in by sweetness. But I do have to say that it is nice to be able to read a bizarro book that I can describe to my mother without making her cry. (And Mama Oddbooks is no lightweight. She was the chief text editor for Deutschland Erwacht when it was published in the USA in the 70s. She knows some stuff. She’s seen some shit. And I still hesitate to share most bizarro plots with her. In short, most of you are monsters.)

The main reason I like this book so much is because I get Mortimer. I’m an Avoider, though I don’t experience anything close to Mortimer’s level of neurotic and thanatotic depression. I love avoiding people. Not because I’m mean or cruel but because I am introverted on a genetic level. It’s actually considered a psychological disorder on my part but I sort of don’t care, even though I enter therapy for it every few years. I prefer not to leave my house and, interestingly, “I prefer not to” is a perfect way to sort of ground yourself when reading this book. There is something very Bartleby about this novella. Though Mortimer ultimately finds a way to stop preferring not to, at least when it matters, folk who just feel tired and itchy around other folk have a hero in Mortimer, whose essential nature is eventually how he manages to become a hero.

I kind of lost the thread in the plot near the end where the exact mechanics of Wargo’s world were concerned, because there were sort of Kafka-esque layers of bureaucracy that I sort of refused to absorb (and I really hate to use the word Kafka-esque because it’s so woefully misused, but there were definitely elements of Kafka in this book, and now that I think of it, I don’t really like Melville or Kafka so it’s surprising I like this book as much as I do). But the gist of the book is this: Mortimer is born to schizoid parents. His sister is avoidant, and as the most socially normal member of a really abnormal family, Mortimer resists when his family undergoes a process that is sort of a living suicide that puts them in a realm between life and death. He eventually gets a factory job that is sort of gross, he has an ant-farm as a pet, and before long he sees no reason to live on. After he cracks in a magnificent manner, he commits suicide and ends up in a bureaucratic hell-hole of an afterlife. Mortimer finds himself with a job in a factory exactly like the one he had in the living world, down to the same boss. He recognizes a woman in the hereafter whom he saw die in the living world and with her he discovers that all is not right in the hereafter. Ultimately Mortimer stages a confrontation with God himself and helps the woman solve some very troubling problems and he ends up in a sort of heaven of his own, a place wherein his essential nature is loved and embraced.

There were some scratchy places in the plot, as I mentioned. But there was enough silliness, even in this novel of a depressed avoidant who loathes being around others, that I didn’t feel too pressed or upset that at times I had no idea what was going on. For example, before he dies, Mortimer eats his ant farm and then barfs it up. The ant farm puke forms a mutant ant-blob that becomes integral to the plot. Ant farm puke saves the day! When there were not enough strange details to absorb me, I just sort of grooved on Mortimer’s avoidance.

In my honest assessment, I fear I may be turning you bizarro extremists off with my wallow in the mild, so let me share some of the more awesome prose in this book. This is from the first page:

To understand Mortimer’s death, we must first focus on his life.

Simply put, Mortimer’s life was shit. It was pure unadulterated liquid feces in which he swam daily -rarely, if ever, coming up for air.

Whether or not this ocean of excrement came from outside forces or was created by Mortimer himself is a moot point. Rather, it is important to ask why Mortimer so insisted upon drowning in a world of filth when he could have just as easily swam to shore, toweled off, and worked toward removing even the very smell of shit from his life.

Read the rest of this entry »

Book:  Janitor of Planet Anilingus

Author:  Andrew Wayne Adams

Type of Book:  Fiction, novella, bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd:  With a title like that, how can it not be?

Availability:  Published by Eraserhead in 2013, you can get a copy here:

Comments: We begin day three of my New Bizarro Authors Week with Andrew Wayne Adam’s Janitor of Planet Anilingus and, in all honesty, I started this book with no small amount of trepidation.  As it is, about 35% of the search strings that bring people to my site involve necrophilia and horse dildos.  I wondered what legacy this book would leave behind in the searches I view daily in my site statistics.  Moreover, the title itself is enough to give one a bit of pause, I think.  Planet Anilingus was likely to be a place wherein a tired woman would find little solace as she read late into the night, her husband snoring lightly, the suburban street silent as the normal people slept on, unaware that there was a place in the literary landscape dedicated to anus-licking.

Luckily for me, Janitor of Planet Anilingus is not the utterly ass-centric debauch I thought it would be.  It has its moments of sexual lunacy but this is mostly a quest novel wherein a man loses everything as he tries to save the woman he thinks he loves.  It has some atrociously gross moments, don’t get me wrong, but one of bizarro’s secrets is that the stories are the same as those you will find on the best-seller list.  The stories differ only because they are peppered with unusual sex, weird species, grotesque details and strange and over-the-top humor.

The hero of this novella, Jack, as the title implies, is the janitor of Planet Anilingus.  Planet Anilingus is a sort of destination spot, a DisneyWorld of sorts, for people deeply involved in butt-licking.  Jack is completing a 40-day period, a time of Lent, wherein the planet is closed to visitors, spending his time tidying up and doing a deep clean before the revelers return.  He is the only person on the planet, until a hairless, humanoid woman with helicopter blades that shoot up from her back lands on the planet.  Someone is trying to kill this hairless woman, Nimue, and Jack does his best to protect her.  In the course of his interactions with Nimue, he stops going to work and his boss, Bishop Eichmann, replaces him with his nephew Tommy.  Tommy and Jack enter into a rivalry for Nimue’s attention and both end up, god help me, pregnant after her sexual ministrations.  What the pregnancy does to the men is easily the grossest part of the book but I enjoyed it because poopy stuff makes me laugh.  Nimue ultimately is not what she seems and even knowing of her sexual perfidy with Tommy, Jack still wants to save her from the rocket launching lunatic chasing her.  Jack is not a man given to much in the way of emotion, probably because all the ass licking he witnesses has numbed him, and it’s an interesting choice on Adams’ part to insist that Jack be so removed emotionally because in the midst of all the chaos, any one else would have freaked out.

Before I begin telling you why this is a very good, funny, gross quest novella, I need to say that hallelujah, kiss the ground, this book is cleanly edited.  I mean, there are a few errors, but this is the cleanest Eraserhead Press book I’ve read in at least two years.  I swear on all that is worth discussing, half the battle with me is editing.  I hate to seem like my standards have been lowered so much by the small presses that just reading clean copy makes me want to give a rave review but it’s getting to that point.  However, I am going to show why this book is a good read on top of being edited well enough that nothing distracts the reader from the text.  (Well, the content can distract a certain kind of reader, but it won’t be because the comma usage is maddeningly bad.)

Jack enjoys his time alone on the planet, except that being the only person around makes him the sole target of the cupids, a mutant insect.

One more week and Lent was over, and then the cupids would not bother him.  His only trouble then would be the hundreds of thousands of people licking each other’s assholes day and night.  They blanketed the planet, an orgy visible from space.  Nonstop until next Lent.

At first there is nothing exceptional about this passage until one finishes the book.  Jack is not a man who exaggerates and the third-person narration in this story follows suit with flat and earnest descriptions.  After finishing this book, I realized the orgy likely was visible from space, and as a result, I felt extreme despair alongside Jack.  A week of that sort of thing?  Might wear thin after a few days.  Months and months of so much butt-licking it is likely affecting the cosmos?  Poor Jack.

And it just gets worse.  Poor Jack, indeed.

His normal uniform consisted of nothing but a pair of lace underwear and a bow tie.  It was crucial that no irregularity should sully the planet’s atmosphere of total debauchery and a stinky janitor intruding upon the middle of an orgy would certainly do so.  The job even required him to practice erotic body language as he went about his work, movements choreographed to make dusting and mopping look sexy.  And if some random reveler stole a lick of his ass, he had to pretend to like it, then extricate himself as expediently as possible.

What would OSHA make of that? I can’t help but think that a lot of the bizarros held very difficult menial jobs, or perhaps still do.  If the above description involved dealing with feet and far less sex, the mental impact would not be too different from selling shoes.  Kissing asses, handling feet – it’s all so demoralizing.

In addition to being inappropriately groped at work while mopping in a sexy manner, the rest of Jack’s job sucks as well.

“These men and women haven’t licked an asshole in six weeks,” the Bishop continued.  ”All they are dreaming of now is a return to Anilingus.  They’re drooling for paradise, and we must deliver.  I’m talking true Eden, Jack – as in, not one goddamn dust bunny on the planet, and every cobblestone, every leaf, shined to look like a scale from the reptilian skin of God.  Can you handle that?”

Jack said, “I’m on top of things.”

“If you fuck up, I’ll have you peeling potatoes on Vore.”

A demotion to peeling potatoes on Vore.  Jesus, the implications… This passage made me laugh so hard that Mr. Oddbooks wanted to know what I was laughing about.  I was shocked when he knew what “vore” meant.  I don’t really know him at all, do I?   Read the rest of this entry »

Book:  Her Fingers

Author:  Tamara Romero

Type of Book:  Fiction, fantasy, novella

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd:  It’s published as bizarro and I will consider it odd on that basis.

Availability:  Published by Eraserhead in 2012, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Though this book is part of the New Bizarro Author Series, I consider it more fantasy than bizarro. Compared to the other books in this series, the story in this book is far more restrained, with content that would not be out of place on a fantasy/sci-fi shelf in a bricks and mortar bookstore.

I have to engage in full disclosure right out of the gate:  I am not a big fan of the fantasy genre.  I cannot explain why but there you are. This being fantasy means a lot of the details in this book were muddled to me, though I tried to read as carefully as possible, which was difficult because too much is crammed into this book.  I think Romero’s tale, given the lushness of her prose, needs to be a full-length book because the story-building in this novella is rushed.

The story is about witches who have become persecuted and deals with the specific experiences of a witch called Misadora.  Misadora has several other names in this book, and given that several other characters have several other names, I lost the thread of who was who several times, which makes it difficult to write a good plot synopsis.  At any rate, a man called Volatile finds Misadora floating in a river after she is attacked.  He takes her in and shelters her, though he has a lot of trepidation about Misadora that I cannot share because it would be a spoiler. He lives, I believe, amongst what are called the Treemothers, women whom, when called  by the witches, ran into the forests and merged with trees.  These Treemothers exude a sort of sap/jewel called Amalis and only women can touch it.  Misadora was caught wearing an Amalis ring and had all the fingers on that hand cut off.  Friends who also have several names help her out with a bionic hand.  Misadora has to stand up against the ever increasing persecution of the witches and the soldiers who try to kill the Treemothers, but at the end is faced with a horrifying truth that changes everything she thought she knew.

If this description seems very vague, that’s because I often could not get a grip on what this book was about.  That is why it would have been better had this novella been written into a longer novel.  To have multiple characters with multiple names, all the world-building with the towns, the history of the witches and the families, the Treemothers, Misadora and Volatile, and to cram it all into a book under 60 pages, is too much for the reader.   That’s no insult to Romero because even though I have to review the book in front of me, it’s no small compliment to say that a book needs to be longer so that the author has to room to fully show off her chops.  As it stands, this book is a small wave of names and places that will wash over the reader without being understood unless the reader is willing to take notes to keep track of who is who, which names are towns and what exactly being a sleepwalker may indicate.  Finally, when you factor in that this book is told from different character perspectives, characters whose names switch in the book, it’s all a bit too much.

But I have to think this book would have been a better read for me had it been edited properly.  Romero originally wrote this book in Spanish and translated it into English.  I am mono-lingual but I recall vividly the awkward sentences I came up with when I translated Cicero’s De Amicitia into English.  Even though every person in my college Latin class was a native English speaker, we delivered sentences that belied fluency in any language.  It wasn’t until class when we read our lines and smoothed them over with the help of the professor that Cicero’s text had any beauty.  I cannot say this tendency to focus on the translation rather than the prose during the yeoman work of translation is what happened with Romero, because some of this book contains beautiful sentences.  However, large chunks of the text lead me to believe that is exactly what happened.

Regardless of whether or not the beauty of the original story got lost in translation, it is the responsibility of the editor to make sure awkward sentences and strange turns of phrase are polished before they are printed.  Though I am not a fan of fantasy, even I can see that this is an interesting novella and that with some work it could have been so much better.  I’ve talked with a couple of people from Eraserhead and its imprints, and they explained that as a small press they just don’t have the budget for copy editors.  I understand that to a point.  I really do.  And I sort of hate harping on this point.  But even as I despise piling on a small press I still get annoyed because words matter.  If they didn’t matter there would be no sense in publishing anything at all and since Romero’s book is definitely worth publishing, it is worth editing.  I cannot put a number on the times that people have said to me that after one bizarro book they stopped reading because they just couldn’t take the misspelled words, bad grammar, and poor punctuation.  I take books seriously and I take the small presses as seriously as I do big publishers.  The day I stop bemoaning poor editing is the day I stop reading these books entirely.

I initially wrote out several examples of what is wrong with this book but ultimately decided not to publish them because the last thing I want to do is to seem cruel to a fledgling writer, especially one who does not deserve it.  Writing a novella and then translating it into another language means that Romero has already done some heavy lifting.  Moreover there are parts of this book that absolutely sing.  The editing issues in this are not her fault.  I will never tire of saying this – authors are the last people who should edit their works because repeated exposure to the text means they no longer can see the errors.  It is especially hard when you are translating your own work from another language because I suspect at the end of it all Romero knew this book like the back of her hand.  No one can see their own mistakes with that level of familiarity.

But even as I try to be restrained, I have to say the editing issues in this book are serious and affect the way readers enjoy the book.  It’s uncomfortable when a town’s name is spelled differently in back-to-back sentences.  There are some sentences with syntax so garbled I am  unsure what Romero is trying to convey.  Garbled syntax is a common problem with translations – that’s why translators need good editors.  This novella is so riddled with comma and punctuation errors that I stopped making note of them around half-way through the book.  Conversational punctuation is also pretty messy, with commas often placed outside of the quotation marks.  There are several word substitutions, like “were” for “where,”  ”than” for “that.” Weird sentences like “I had almost never been to that area before,” stop registering about page 37, or at least that was when I stopped making notes of the problems.

This sucks.  This sucks righteously because this book has such beautiful moments, places wherein you realize that this book, for all its rushed narrative, confusing names and poor editing, is actually a cut above much of the bizarro prose out there.  In a way, it reminded me of Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, another jumbled novel wherein the reader was occasionally blinded by moments of literary brilliance.  With all my complaints about the amount of story crammed into under 60 pages and the poor editing, Romero’s talent salvages gold from the wreckage and the beauty of her prose is why I found this book worth reading.

Read the rest of this entry »

Book:  Gutmouth

Author: Gabino Iglesias

Type of Book:  Fiction, novella, bizarro, body horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd:  Well, because a man’s life is ruined by the sentient mouth that appears in his stomach.

Availability:  Published by Eraserhead Press in 2012, you can get a copy here:

Comments:  I decided to kick off my New Bizarro Author Series week with Gabino Iglesias because he is a fellow Austinista.  Shallow, but hopefully my discussion will redeem me.  Gutmouth is the story of Gut Dedmon and the sentient and often hungry mouth in his torso, a mutation that began as a pimple on his stomach and turned into a mouth that Dedmon has to feed.  The mouth, named Philippe, interferes with Dedmon’s life in pretty interesting and foul ways, demanding food and engaging in oral sex with his girlfriend without Dedmon’s permission.  Dedmon’s reaction to this latter act of betrayal lands him in jail, and the story is told in flashbacks as Dedmon experiences prison life, often with his own shit in his hand.

In this novel, Iglesias creates a perverse dystopia that can best be described as 1984 with extreme body modifications and mutations.  Extreme pain is pleasure, pleasure is demented and everyone is amoral and marginally insane.  There is a Church of Albert Fish, Carlton Mellick V is writing brutal fiction, people can genetically cross themselves with salamanders and a body modification expert deconstructs his ex-girlfriend into a motorcycle. This is a fun, perverse and at times really gross dystopic book, and it even has something for the paranoid types who like to visit here from time to time.  The dystopia is a capitalist hell hole and Dedmon plays his part as a “hunter” for MegaCorp.

The job, as the name implies, involved hunting down people who refused to comply with MegaCorp rules and regulations and bringing them to the local Consumer Rehabilitation and Punishment Center.  I would usually get a call or text with a crime, a name and an address and then I would track down dissidents – folks that refused to buy their allotted quantities of products each month, stubborn citizens who wanted to grow their own food, horny individuals that raped someone else’s pleasurebots, things like that.  From the inside of the cell, that life looked like paradise.

Dedmon loathes the stoma-mouth that penetrates his abdomen and you can’t really blame him.   Philippe forces Dedmon to interact with him and if ignored Philippe chews up whatever is in his way, including Dedmon’s clothing. Philippe also puts a lot of financial and emotional pressure on Dedmon.

Philippe was misogynistic and racist, which made me feel guilty about having him.  Plus, his extravagant tastes clashed with my financial reality. A hunter couldn’t afford a steady diet of bipolar midget brains, Angora cats and chocolate-stuffed olives.

Philippe is demanding, respects no boundaries, and speaks, inexplicably since Dedmon is American, in a British accent.  This is a pretty good distillation of their relationship, a scene from when Dedmon is in jail.

“Shut up, you fucking aberration.  You’re the reason we’re here in the first place,” I said.

Philippe smiled a crooked grin in response.

“I’m hungry, mate.  You think we can get some curry in here,” asked the toothy hole.

“I’m going to let you starve, you snaggletoothed prick,” I said.

“For a bloke who couldn’t satisfy his lady, you sure sound like a macho man ready to take on all comers.  You muppet,” responded the mouth in his British accent.

“You know what?  The best thing about dying is taking you with me,” I told him, pulling my shirt down.

I found the interactions between Dedmon and Philippe to be the best parts of this novella.  It’s impossible to miss the implication that Dedmon is a man truly at war with himself, with Dedmon as the ego, Philippe as the id and a superego nowhere to be found.  Plus I just like quarrels that verge into the ridiculous. Read the rest of this entry »

My latest themed week begins Monday. May 6-10, I will be posting discussions and reviews of the latest New Bizarro Author Series books. I don’t know the order in which I will discuss them, but these are the books I will feature next week:

Janitor of Planet Anilingus by Andrew Wayne Adams

Gutmouth by Gabino Iglesias

House Hunter by S.T. Cartledge

Avoiding Mortimer by J.W. Wargo

Her Fingers by Tamara Romero

As usual with all my themed weeks, I am hosting a giveaway. Because in the past people have told me they were reluctant to leave comments because they already own the books I am discuss, I am changing it up a bit. The lucky winner of this giveaway will have the option of receiving a copy of each book I discuss or an Amazon gift card in the equivalent amount the books would cost. So now you can all participate without running the risk of ending up with duplicate books.

The rules are as follows:
–The first comment you leave on each discussion will be an entry into the contest. If you comment once for each discussion, that is a total of five entries into the drawing for the giveaway.  You can only enter five times.
–Multiple comments you may leave for one discussion will only result in one entry. No more than one entry per day per comment.
–The contest ends at 6:00 PM CST on Friday, May 10.
–I will use a random number generator to select the winner and will contact the winner Friday evening and will announce the winner here.

Disclosures: Though my Amazon Affiliate account “earns” me some of the money I use to spend on these giveaways, this contest is not sponsored by any author, publisher, or related company and none of the writers I plan to discuss offered me any consideration to be involved in this contest. I received four of these five books from the authors to discuss. I pay for these books to give away because I like giving away books and it seems a good time to do it.

If you know anyone who would be interested in my week of New Bizarro Author Series discussions, spread the word and I’ll see all of you bright and early Monday morning!

ETA:  Do not be alarmed that G. Arthur Brown’s Kitten is not on this list.  I don’t post on weekends so there were only five slots.  I will be discussing Brown’s book in another upcoming Bizarro week with a giveaway.  So no one think he been excluded for any reason other than that I refuse to blog on the weekend.  

‘Zine: Biblio-Curiosa Issue 3

Author: Chris Mikul

Type of Book: ‘Zine about strange books and the authors who write them.

Availability: You have to get copies straight from Chris. If I recall correctly, he charges $8 USD for the ‘zine and shipping. You need to contact him at cathob@zipworld.com.au to place an order.

Comments: I did not intend for this to be a Chris Mikul mini-week here, but I needed something I could write about quickly and Mikul’s ‘zine fit the bill. I am writing like a maniac to get ready for my upcoming New Bizarro Author Series giveaway that starts next week and the Jim Goad ANSWER Me! week that follows soon after, so this issue of Biblio-Curiosa lent itself well to a quick discussion (well, quick for me).

Chris Mikul is a fellow traveller in the world of strange books, but he does it so much better than I do. When I grow up I hope to be able to dissect books as concisely as he does. He has a style that marries utter glee for and absorption in the weird books he finds with an investigative and succinct style that my innate verbosity makes impossible for me to imitate. The third issue of Biblio-Curiosa is a delight for anyone who lives for that moment when they find a strange or unusual book at a used book store or an estate sale. Mikul gathers as much information about the book, its author and any other details that will make the book or its author come to life. He finds amazing gems that my untrained eye would have skipped right over.

The first article in this edition discusses a book called The Ferocious Fern by C.B. Pulman. On a trip to a hotel on the Greek island of Rhodes, Mikul and his wife found a hotel library that featured some astonishing books, including a first edition of Animal Farm. Some of the extraordinary books had ex libris information from their previous owner, Archie Wilkinson, whose story is interesting in its own right so I won’t spoil it. One of Archie’s books that particularly interested Mikul was The Ferocious Fern, a collection of short stories with horror and fantasy twists. You need to read the article to get a feel for the book itself, but given what Mikul’s research reveals, this may very well be the only extant copy of this book.

This next article is a price of admission article and I will write just enough of it that hopefully you will feel the same way and will want to read it yourself. “Swastika Night by Murray Constantine” is Mikul at his book-loving, researching best. Swastika Night is an alternative history novel wherein the Nazis have taken over the world, women are less than second class citizens and keep themselves covered in a manner that modern Westerners associate with fundamentalist Islam. They are breeding stock and little else. Not too unexpectedly, this relegation of women to such a demeaned status has a perverse effect on the men. Mikul’s far fuller examination of the book has caused me to put this book on my wish list so I remember to buy it and hopefully discuss it on this site. There are two very interesting elements to this alternative history of Nazi occupation. First, it was written in 1937 and is both an alternative history for the modern reader and a fear of what the future was to hold for the writer and reader during the time it was written. Second, Murray Constantine was really a lesbian writer named Katherine Burdekin, who wrote more dystopian books. It seems very likely that Burdekin’s works, especially Swastika Night, written more than a decade before 1984, were an influence on George Orwell. This is a deeply fascinating look at a female writer whose legacy was almost lost to us.

The next article, “My Friend Froggy,” was written by Jeff Goodman and will be of deep interest to those who originally found out about F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre through the second issue of Biblio-Curiosa. Jeff Goodman once worked at an “adult fiction” mill, typing out very specific porn books, often in one sitting, for very little money. It was at this job that he met Froggy, as he called MacIntyre, and when he read Mikul’s examination of MacIntyre’s life, his strange stories about himself, and his suicide, he wrote to Mikul and revealed his experiences with Froggy. MacIntyre, even after reading a good friend’s examination of him, still remains a cypher to me, as I don’t understand why he created such a fabulist tale of himself when the real story was equally as interesting. I’ll stop discussing this now so as not to ruin it for those who want the details of Froggy’s life through the eyes of someone who knew him, but even as I know little about MacIntyre’s motivations, he was clearly an endearing, interesting, talented, deeply intelligent and deeply depressed man and I want to read his science fiction book The Woman Between the Worlds all the more.

Oh man, the next article is another “price of admission” article. “Tod Robbins, Master of the Macabre” is an amazing look at the life and works of Tod Robbins, who if he is known much by modern readers, is known for writing the book upon which Tod Browning based his movie Freaks. Strangely secretive about his many marriages, imprisoned in an internment camp in France during WWII, Robbins’ life was as interesting and strange as his fiction. Born wealthy, Robbins lived an enviable life during the day, but…

…when he took up his pen at night, his thoughts turned to crime, horror, madness and murder. To crimson thoughts, as he called them.

And indeed he turned to many crimson thoughts, writing novels and short story collections that seem quaintly horrific in a James Whale sort of way and strangely prescient to modern tastes in the deeply disturbing nature of some of his content. I hope it does not seem like a cop-out to say that there are two “price of admission” articles in this small ‘zine but there really are. This article is also worth reading just to be able to see some of the covers and illustrations that Robbins’ novels sported. An illustration for “Close Their Eyes Tenderly” initially seems very whimsical but the longer I looked at it, the more menacing it became.

The last article is “The Cardinal’s Mistress by Benito Mussolini.” I had no idea Mussolini had written books, but evidently in 1909 a socialist newspaper owner suggested that Mussolini write a book that would be defamatory to the Catholic Church. The novel ended up becoming a potboiler and though salacious was actually somewhat sympathetic to the Cardinal who took a poorly regarded mistress who ruined his name. This somewhat sympathetic portrayal is quite interesting when one learns how much the book would mirror his later life, as if he either predicted his own fate or reenacted it from his own book. Mussolini later thought the book he wrote was trash, but it sounds roiling enough that if I can get my hands on a copy, I may give it a read.

It’s probably clear by now that I am a big fan of Mikul’s but my fannish love of his works is born from a bit of envy. The books he digs up, the analysis he puts forth and the investigation skills he possesses are understandably enviable. For a 48 page ‘zine, this reads more like a book and the people and books it will show you are nothing you can find anywhere else because even the most extensive Wiki on interesting, bizarre and lost books will lack Mikul’s clear love of the topics. Highly recommended, e-mail him now and get your copy and if you don’t have issues 1 and 2, order those as well.