I
Read Odd Books

I don’t discuss my personal life in my review journals outside of how my own life affects my reviews to some degree. But I felt the need to eulogize my cat Adolph, who died on 2/19/10. So if you come here for the books and only the books, that’s cool, just give this a miss. It is long, wordy and extremely picture heavy, but he was with me for almost 15 years and, frankly, writing these things out helps me put things in perspective.

Adolph was a cat larger than life. He was the first animal who lived with me, and I was 24 when he came into my life. I will be 40 this year – my entire adult life was spent with that incredible cat. I am not one to anthropomorphize my cats – they are cats, pets, and not my babies or friends or relatives. My relationship with them does not need honorary human status for it to be very special. Nothing wrong with either approach to animal companions – it’s just how I interact with my cats.

Not so with Adolph. He was not our pet. He was our peer. He was our gross roommate who refused to get a job. He was amazingly intelligent, knew us inside and out and understood that we were flawed and loved us regardless because he knew we loved him in spite of his flaws. He was insistent, needy, imperious, a bully, weird, gross and intrusive. He was empathetic, loving, caring, smart, adorable, silly, and loved all humans – all of them, big, small, scary, cute. There was no sensible person he could not charm, even when he acted up.

When he first experienced renal failure and had to spend a couple of days at the vet, they gave up keeping him in a cage during the day. He upset his water bowl several times and howled and howled, so they let him out during the day, letting him have the run of the place. He mocked the dogs in the dog run, greeted people at the front desk. Several people asked if he was up for adoption, he was so funny and interesting. So while I am biased, I know others saw his roguish charms and gave into them, too.

This is the first picture I ever took of Adolph. I don’t have many pics of his early days. No dig cams then and I was very broke. Film was a luxury that I now wish I had spent more money on since I have so few pics of our early days. It was 1995 and he was around 2 years old.

Here’s Adolph’s life, what I can think of telling right now. He was truly an amazing cat.

Book: The Book of a Thousand Sins

Author: Wrath James White

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, extreme horror

Why I Consider This Book Odd: This book is not odd in the way many of the quirky, weird, off-beat and off-kilter books I review here often are. This book is only odd in that it is of an extreme, and that extreme is horror. This ain’t a book for the squeamish and the extremity of the content is what I think makes it fodder for my odd mill.

Availability: Published by Two Backed Books in 2005, it appears not to be in print any more since the imprint itself is no longer in business. You can, however, still score a copy on Amazon if you don’t mind paying at least twice cover price:

Comments: Wrath James White interests me on a personal level. Admittedly, all I know of him is what he puts online about himself and what he reveals about himself in interviews. He is someone I can see sharing a beer with, and talking religion and philosophy into the wee morning hours. He’s an interesting man with an unusual life arc and based on what I had seen of him and what others writers say about him, I bought blind three of his books. Not unusual for me. Before Richard Laymon died, I knew nothing about him but bought five of his paperbacks I stumbled across in a used bookstore based solely on the covers. I am a bibliophile and the -phile part makes me take chances on the unknown.

So, I had three White books, and one was his collaboration with one of my favorite horror writers, Edward Lee. The book, Teratologist, was possibly the most disappointing book I read in 2008, and I paid an arm and a leg online to get a signed, hardcover copy. I had not read a single review of it when I bought it and likely would have bought it even had I read a few but even so, I did not enjoy it. The book couldn’t even keep the names of the characters straight, sometimes getting the names wrong, as well as misspelling them (“Michael” frequently became “Micheal,” sometimes in the same page). I am a picky reader – every book on the planet has a couple of errors, and I am that snotty reader who generally notices them – but the grammar, spelling and punctuation in Teratologist were egregious to the point of distraction. Problematically, the topic was also a miss for me, a contrived and unlikely attempt to force a confrontation with God via the creation of human monsters using a vile drug that mutates the human sex drive. The grandiose and philosophically questionable nature compelling the book’s plot put me off. I bought my White books in 2008 and after reading Teratologist, I put the others away. I recently discovered them in the back of my nightstand cupboard, pulled them out and decided to give it a go. The Book of a Thousand Sins was strike two.

I always feel odd giving bad reviews on fiction, even when I emphatically think a book is not good. It is one thing for me to pull apart non-fiction books on conspiracy theory and new-age nonsense that asserts the soul of Einstein is on the planet Marduk. It is another to find fault in fiction because all fiction comes from a place of inner experience and not to like fiction is, in a sense, finding fault with the author him or herself, even if that is probably not the best way to look at things.

But however odd I feel giving a thumbs down, I didn’t much care for this book.

Book: Piecemeal June

Author: Jordan Krall

Type of book: Fiction, novella, bizarro

Why I Consider This Book Odd: I hate to keep invoking the name of Eraserhead Press, but there you go. I also read a synopsis that led me to believe this was an utterly lunatic book. It didn’t even come close to describing the lunacy.

Availability: Published in 2008 by Bizarro Books, an imprint of Eraserhead Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Oh dear Lord. How do I even begin? Because I am a closet pervert, I ordered this book thinking it was going to be a bizarro pornographic romp. It isn’t, not really, even though the June of the title character is a sex doll come to life, created in the image of a porn actress, and the main character, Kevin, has sex with her. Despite that, this is high bizarro that leaves me conflicted. Too many descriptions of sweat and feet and more feet. But there is a cat. An awesome cat. So you can see my dilemma.

There are moments when you simply cannot give an adequate synopsis of a bizarro book, and this is one of those moments. So just let me throw out some sentences that sort of attempt to explain this book. There are crab people from what I think is another dimension and the unethical pornographers who do their bidding. There is also a crab king called Simon. He loves the real actress June is based on. He has sex with ears sometimes, or mashed together body parts of the people the crab men kill, squashed together into weird, perverse configurations. There is a guy named Kevin who lives over a porn shop. There is a cat called Mithra who delivers pieces of June until Kevin has a full sex doll, but also gives tarot readings and drops meaningful cards at the right intervals. There is a seer named Latrina whose back is a swirling sewer and who travels via toilets. There is a brain-damaged boxer. There is an ending that will make you wonder if you have, in fact, gone temporarily insane.

So with that out of the way, let me focus on the two elements of the book that remained with me after reading it: FEET OMG FEET and the awesome cat.

Kevin, the protagonist, has a penchant for feet. Now bear in mind, at one point a toilet explodes in this book, spreading filth far and wide. One character is pretty much a walking sewer. Poo does not bother me. Hell, I would go so far as to say that I find poop pretty funny. I’m not into scat but damn if scatological humor doesn’t make me laugh my ass off. Fart jokes? I’m your girl. And all the sweat the disassembled June emitted was unpleasant but I could cope. But feet? Sweaty feet? Smelly, sweaty feet? As my friend Arafat would say, “Jesus Allah Fuck!” I very nearly went fetal during parts of this book.

Take, for instance, this passage:

He put his nose to the toes and inhaled the stench. It was as if his brain became a television and he watched as a teenage Kevin knelt at the feet of his high school Spanish teacher. She was a statuesque older woman who forced him to first massage her feet while he sniffed them. Then she peeled a banana and fed it to Kevin using only her feet. He could still taste the fruit mixed with the pungent flavor of Ms. Booth’s soles.

Mithra meowed and brought Kevin’s attention back to the bedroom. His nose was still touching the top of the foot. There was something in between the toes. He stuck a finger in there, cleaning out the gunk. Bringing the finger to his nose, he smelt banana. Kevin was pleasantly shocked. The sex doll’s foot has banana-flavored toe jam.

Emphasis not my own and I very nearly cried typing that out.

But that wasn’t even the worst of it. My fellow fearers of feet, behold:

…. Regina, the manager, called him into her office…. Every day, without fail, she came dressed in a skirt, pantyhose… Regina babbled on with rhetoric and rhetorical questions while Kevin stole glances of her pantyhose and scuffed black slip-on dress shoes. He wondered if they were sweaty… Were the pantyhose freshly washed or was she wearing them for a while. Would her feet have an additional vinegar stench?… Regina lifted her left foot up and the shoe fell off of it. Kevin first saw the bottom of her foot, the pantyhose were linty and worn thin. Then the smell hit him.

God. Jesus, Jordan, what the hell?

I may be taking this too hard. I sold shoes to get through college. I had some… unpleasant days at work.

Okay. Moving on.

So even if feet scar you a bit, Mithra can help. Mithra rules. Mithra the Cat makes up for all the feet in this book and then some. He is the coolest fictional cat ever! Sadly, I had to leave the feet above the jump and put Mithra under because telling you about him may have spoilers, as such, if a book like this can be said to have spoilers.

Book: Necrophilia Variations

Author: Supervert

Type of Book: Fiction, short stories, necrophilia

Why I Consider This Book Odd: Well, the author goes by the moniker Supervert. That is what I like to call a clue. Also, necrophilia. Yeah. Necrophilia.

Availability: Published by Supervert, Inc. in 2005, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Finally! A book that I consider eros and thanatos. All the books recommended to me as being eros and thanatos were all thanatos and no eros. Or the eros was so bizarre that I had no chance of relating to it. I am thrilled to finally read a book that contains both to equal degrees. I am surely no necrophile (which it annoys me even to have to say but if I don’t, I will get e-mails from people wondering if I am because I read this book and am talking about it) but I spend a fair amount of time photographing cemeteries, so in many senses, I understand the appeal. Death holds a quietness and a comfort – remembrance and the very real sense that the worst has happened and you have nothing left to worry about.

You pick up a book that is called Necrophilia Variations, and it is safe to assume all the stories are going to be about having sex with the dead. But Necrophilia Variations, while it does include tales of sex with dead people, is more a collection of stories of people dealing with the confluence between sex and death. The notion of le petit mort is an idea that is not new, yet the idea that the sex impulse is closely linked to death is hard for many to swallow. Though visionaries and poets, like Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mirbeau, have tread this ground before, it is refreshing to see these sorts of ideas written by a modern for moderns. Heartbreaking, sickening, humorous – this short story collection pushes boundaries, and does not just push them for the sake of pushing, as I felt was the case when I read Bataille’s Story of the Eye (a book I am willing now to say I simply did not get and likely never will).

The stories have merit, the ideas are intriguing. This really is intellectual eros and thanatos, not grotesque splatter for those who like lots of excessive violence with their sex (not that there is anything wrong with that, but too often it comes off clownish, an attempt by certain authors to one-up each other in the gross out factor – this book is not that sort of thing).

The book begins with a quote from Baudelaire: “It is one of the considerable privileges of art that the horrible can be transformed, through artful expression, into beauty.” I am unsure if it is because I have been immersed in the outre for so long that I don’t consider this book to be much in the way of horrible, or if Supervert managed to make the horrible so beautiful that I did not see it for what it was, but there is a lot of beauty, emotion and depth to these short stories. Overall, this is an excellent collection.

Here are some of the stories I liked best: Sex with the dead? The hell you say!

Book: Sea of the Patchwork Cats

Author: Carlton Mellick III

Type of Book: Fiction, Bizarro, Novella

Why I Consider This Book Odd: Carlton Mellick III. Eraserhead Press. Bizarro. It should all be clear to you now.

Availability: Published in 2006 by Avant Punk, an imprint of Eraserhead Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I wasn’t real happy with the last CM3 book I read. Which surprised me because I generally find all of his works something to talk about, not something to rant about. I had read Sea of the Patchwork Cats a while back, but due to a cat-related emergency (my cat that looks like Hitler lost a leg to injection-site sarcoma and I sold around 2,000 books to finance the surgery), I sold my copy. I recently bought it again, and this book reminded me of how I became so enchanted with the bizarros.

CM3 at his best has an earthy, yet ethereal quality to his prose. This is such a contradiction that in a sense, all I can say is that once you read him, you will understand. The often outre subject matter is filtered through a poetic mind that finds beauty in ugliness, romance in horror, happiness in despair and doesn’t need to use ten words when one will do. His prose style often reminds me of Hemingway with its word conservation. Which for me is a good thing because simple phrases permit me to fill in the blanks, to create visions in my head. I am one of those people who could not care less what the characters in books look like because ultimately, I decide what they look like even when the author tries to tell me. If you are one to prefer lots of descriptives, you may disagree. As always mileage varies, etc.

I am also a fan of this sort of clipped sentence structure, because it harks back to one of the grandfathers of weird, Bukowski, a writer who defiantly refused to set scene. Many bizarros also refuse to set too much scene. The subject matter – an alcoholic, lonely man whose better nature has been masked by the drink – is also an homage, even if unintended. And think of it this way: It requires a boatload of talent to tell the story of a completely different world when practicing word conservation.

Sea of the Patchwork Cats is the story of a man who awakens from a drunken stupor to find that the entire world committed suicide while he was out cold. He takes up residence in a house that eventually is swept out to sea. After spending time adrift in a sinking house, he eventually comes to rest next to a stone house carved to resemble two women sitting back to back. He finds what he thinks are human women encased in ice inside the sinking ship of a house and manages to rescue three, only to find they were really victims of a bizarre porno scheme to breed human women with animals. Once inside the house, the house takes on qualities one would associate with a Danielewski novel. It shifts, it changes internally, but one constant are the calico cats who live inside the house. Eventually the man and one of the animal human hybrids have to come to an unsettling agreement with a spirit in the house to be able to live there.

And as always with a bizarro novel, a plot synopsis does so little good in describing what the book really is, what it is about and what it means. It is both an end of the world novel and a novel of new beginnings. It is a story of entrapment and of freedom. It is a story of horror and of beauty.

And don’t think I’m a sucker for it simply because there are cats in it!