Author: Amelia Gray

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, flash fiction, bizarro, gently weird

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because the stories, if not technically classified as bizarro, are bizarro nonetheless. And when they aren’t bizarro, they are gently weird.  Sometimes outright weird.

Availability: Published by The University of Alabama Press in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I have a favorable disposition toward women named Amelia. I knew a girl in high school named Amelia Beebe and she was one of the most interesting people in high school, but whitebread suburban high school experiences being what they are, I don’t think she and others realized it. I also have a favorable disposition toward those who love cats and the first entry I saw on Gray’s blog was a discussion of losing a kitty to feline leukemia. We lost a kitty to the dread disease and my heart bled for her, reading that entry.

Lest you think I am going to give this book a favorable review because of my various favorable dispositions, please note that I did not know about the cats before I started writing this review, and already had my opinion about the book pretty well formed. Of course I knew her name is Amelia before I began discussing the book, but since I can find it in myself to detest writers with my own name, her name played into my decision calculus hardly at all.

It is her writing that ensured a rave review. Fanciful, strange, unsettling, oddly sweet, vaguely sickening, amusingly awkward, Gray has a writing style that ensured I went back and reread a couple of stories immediately after finishing the book, just because they were that good.

There isn’t a bad story in this collection, and my innate hypergraphia is taking a nap at the moment, so I will just focus on the best of the bunch.

Let’s begin with “Waste.” This was one of those stories that, as I read it, made me feel like I was going a little insane. It’s a strange piece that I found compelling despite the fact that I find eating pig horrifying. Perhaps I liked the story because Gray’s characters explore the whole, “when does it stop being pig and become pork.” A man who works collecting medical waste from doctors’ offices shares odd culinary experiences with his neighbor, a woman with lovely collarbones who works as a line cook in a vegetarian restaurant. Olive is an exotic foodie, creating culinary experiences out of the strangest meats, making a sickening but sweet sacrifice that Roger may not wholly appreciate but at least his experiences with medical waste gave him the stomach to cope. As a woman who loves to cook, is meat-shy, and given to feeling deep disgust for any body process that would require a medical waste pick-up, it was unusual how much I enjoyed this story. Sometimes I enjoy having my disgust pinged, I guess.

Food horror actually played a significant role in this collection. In “Dinner” a woman finds herself with the unenviable task of eating a plate of hair in order to ensure her relationship continues smoothly, even though no one particularly knows why the plate of hair is on the table or even why it is important. A short, short story, this read more like the retelling of an unsettling dream than a story, a dream I have not had myself yet understood.

This dream-like element to storytelling continues in “A Javelina Story” wherein a hostage negotiator finds himself paired with five javelinas at a hostage scene wherein boy scouts are tied to chairs. The pigs just want to eat, the hostage-taker misinterprets their actions and everyone learns an odd lesson.

Many of the stories are flash fiction, so short that you don’t really process the punch until you feel the bruise on your psyche. Take “Unsolved Mystery.” Very short piece about the investigation into a serial killer with a bonesaw. These are the last two lines:

What I don’t say is, God’s a clever bastard and I do respect him. He’s everywhere.

“Thoughts While Strolling” does what it says on the tin. This story spoke directly to my particular sense of humor.

Jim Hale better train his dog.

That dog runs the perimeter of Hale’s yard, treading the ground until he makes a ditch. Dog says, “Hey, come over here.” When you do, that damn dog gives you a recipe for lemon bars which omits egg yolks and disappoints you sincerely. 

Later in the story:

Frogs croaking.

Turn them over and tickle them, the young boys say to the girls. After much conversing and screeching, one brave girl picks up a slick frog, green as a fig. She flips it over so delicately in her small palm that the boys stop their shoving and feel strange for watching. The girl extends one slender finger and runs it slowly up and down the frog’s exposed belly. When the frog urinates on her, she looks at the boys with loathing. She will later go on to swallow two goldfish alive.

“Diary of the Blockage” made me nervous because I can all too easily see this story happening to me. After a particularly upsetting incident involving a large iron pill, Mr Oddbooks can tell you that I will likely die from a foreign matter lodged, “it seems, between my esophagus and windpipe.” The narrator of the story tries to get the substance to come up but cannot. And much like me, she finds it hard to seek help for her problem:

DAY 2

I did not call the doctor. I went so far as to find my insurance card, but I could not imagine the remember Miss Mosely, well she has had a thing lodged in her throat all within range of anyone with half a mind to be within earshot of the the office window. I feel very sincerely that bodily functions have their place, but why would the toiletries and makeup and personal privacy industries all be such multimillion dollar successes if the place for those bodily functions was in public? To say otherwise is to disrespect culture.

This story was really on the mark for me, a neurotic who is determined to stay well enough that I never need to avail myself of a bedpan, though I did once vomit on one of my cats because I was  slow moving due to leg surgery and had stomach flu. I sense this story may be a pregnancy nightmare, too, for the lump in the throat later takes on a life of its own, in a way. All I know is that it was very important to the paranoid part of me that now takes my evening pills in far smaller clumps.

The best story was “The Darkness.” A penguin and an armadillo meet at a bar. The penguin has Fought the Darkness and can speak of little else, and the armadillo has spread vegetable oil on her shell in an attempt to look pretty and shiny.

“You are a penguin and I am an armadillo,” the armadillo said. “My name is Betsy.”

“That’s a beautiful name,” murmured the penguin, who was more interested in the condensation on his glass. “I fought the darkness.”

“You did not.”

The penguin swiveled his head to look at Betsy. He had very beady eyes.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Ray,” said the penguin,

“That’s a nice name.”

The penguin explains what he means by The Darkness and Betsy really wants to stay on track with flirting, changing the subject, but Ray demands his due.

“I suppose you think I’m some sort of lesser penguin, just because I fought the fucking darkness and tasted my own blood, because I haven’t protected a stupid fucking egg.”

Betsy felt tears welling up. Don’t cry, she said to herself. It would be really stupid to cry at this moment.

“I honor your fight. I did not mean to disrespect you.”

Ray sank back. “It’s no disrespect,” he said. “I’m just a penguin in a bar, drinking my gin out of a fucking highball glass for some reason.”

“I was wondering why they did that,” the armadillo said.

“Doesn’t make any goddamn sense,” said the penguin.

And it really doesn’t make any sense but the story is delightful nonetheless, encapsulating all that is so banal about so much of human interaction in these unlikely beasts as they attempt and perhaps succeed just a little at making some sort of connection. I read this one aloud to Mr. Oddbooks one night, unconsciously slipping into the redneck accent of my youth that I repress as second nature.

This collection was just too wonderful for me. A letter from a woman to her apartment complex complaining about the year’s Christmas decoration contest. One story told the strange tale of a man married to a paring knife and another married to a bag of fish. A man takes up residence in his suitcase, much to the dismay of his girlfriend. Vultures come and loom over an entire town. Bizarre, magical, strange, nauseating stories, all crafted from a mind so focused on my own nightmares and uneasy dreams that I felt myself becoming paranoid at times. Luckily, Gray is such a talented storyteller that her gift was greater than my nervousness and I highly recommend this book to all who find themselves wondering what would happen if one was able to splice Garrison Keillor, Bradley Sands and Raymond Carver into one writing force.

Author: Bradley Sands

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, flash fiction, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, one of the stories is called “Crawling Over Fifty Good Pussies to Get One Fat Boy’s Asshole.”

Availability: Published by Lazy Fascist Press in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: We end Bizarro Week with Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy by Bradley Sands, and I need to remind you that today is also the last day you can run rampant in the comments in order to enter my free book drawing. I am giving away a free copy of each book I discuss this week, and here are the details on how you can enter to win. Comment freely. Comment with vigor. Comment with the knowledge that each comment adds to the sum total of democratic good in this world.

It’s fitting that I am ending this week with Sands’ collection of flash and short fiction. Some stories are absurd. Some are surreal. Some are really fucked up. Some are just a meaningless romp with words. Some are deeply layered and strangely touching. All of them have the demented hand of Sands going for them, but the breadth of story-type made this one of those collections where I am yet again struggling to find a common theme to unite the collection other than the relatively useless, “It’s good, read it.” So again, I am just going to discuss the stories I liked the best in the collection.

“Scenes from the Life of a Greeting Card Designer” initially suffered because I read it shortly after watching the execrable 500 Days of Summer (in lieu of shouting at you kids to get off my lawn, I will say I suspect this is how my mother felt when I sang the praises of John Hughes and all she could see were attractive young people whining). However, on a second read it fared better. The story, one of the longer in the book, follows the life of Tim Hallmark over four Halloweens. On October 31, 5008 BS, Tim is working on a greeting card in his cardboard house when angry trick or treaters attack him with missiles for offering cardboard candy. The kids decide nukes are in order:

Tim Hallmark watches the nuclear warhead and thinks about his life. He screams out the words from his favorite creations:

Happy birthday! You are one day closer to your putrification!

Happy Mother’s Day, but I never asked to be thrust out of rotting taco.

Sorry your grandma died! She molested me when I was eight!

He doesn’t understand why the American public has never understood his genius.

Never fear, he survives and Halloween 5009 BS finds him working as a sideshow freak, living in a dumpster. Mutated by radiation, he is angry and poisons the children who knock on his dumpster asking for candy.

A little boy tears open a greeting card envelope and card, sees a picture of a skeleton in a thong bikini. Under the picture, he reads:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You have been poisoned
and it sucks to be you.

Tim tells the kids if they overthrow the government for him he will give them the antidote to the poison, but, sadly, the cost of the poisoned candies left him too broke to afford the remedy. But at least he is President.

As President he does terrible things, like threatening women who spurn his advances with rape camp and rubbing his testicles on the gold in Fort Knox, and he has guards to protect him from the angry mobs. But on Halloween, the sexually harassed woman turns out to be a tank in disguise and he is betrayed, oh no! The next Halloween, 5011 BS, finds Tim hiding in the sewers. He is now a eunuch and works on greeting cards in the sewers as the relatives of the kids he poisoned are trying to find him.

Right now, he is sitting on a pipe, working on his latest creation. He is calligraphing the words, “I’ll never flush you my darling. We’re purr-fect for each other.” He has already drawn a cat blowing kisses at an unflushed bowel movement.

But then the kids find him and shoot him with super-soakers full of flame. But since their older siblings were mean to him, they put out the flames and again, as fitting as the man who sends people to rape camps, kills children and rubs his balls on gold, he betrays the kind children and comes to a conclusion that I will not spoil.

So. That is one of the more lunatic stories and within it, there may be some meaning. It has a plot and Tim is characterized by his actions and we walk away knowing he was a very bad man and the ending points at a moral purpose to the piece. Ultimately I decided just to take this as a funny, gross story about a mean, gross man and left it at that.

Other stories have similar ambiguities. For example, “The Time Traveling Giraffe Defies God” seems to be just a strange vignette, and the title pretty much sums up this flash-length story. The giraffe has a headache from time traveling and asks God to give him a shorter neck and a pogo stick but God denies him as He is still creating Zimbabwe. The giraffe bites off God’s ear but he is still time traveling and his head still hurts. This is, I think,  not wholly absurd, because we can sort of derive a sense of an uncaring God in the face of suffering, sort of, and it is not wholly surreal. Maybe this is irreal? I still need to read up on irrealism so who knows? You tell me if you know. Many stories sort of have this tendency to seem utterly without meaning but have a maddening tendril of meaning in them that prevents me from seeing these stories as just a silly, lunatic ride.

Also, strangely, many of them, even as flash pieces, are complete summed up in their titles:  “A Headless Man Falls in Love With a Bowl of Rice.” Insanely, the story begins with the line:

The headless man is eating dinner.

The headless man feels incomplete and realizes that what he is missing is an emotion, an emotion he can direct at others. He focuses his emotion on the plate of rice in front of him, because women don’t like him because he is headless and men like to beat him up. And again, there is that annoying tendril, that piece of hair that gets in your face when you have the windows down in your car and you just can’t get it back in place: those who are extremely different may have a hard time finding traditional love. Maybe.

But then there are stories like “The Study” that are unmistakably absurdist. A bookcase will show a secret passage if you remove the book Cellular Metabolism at Fifty Degrees Celsius. The passage leads into a woman’s uterus, and there a secret passage will lead to series of vague places wherein the passage seeker can leave for another place but he can never come back to the study because there are no books called Cellular Metabolism at Fifty Degrees Celsius to remove from a shelf.

“Want to Hear Something Really Creepy?” defies even the labels of absurdist or surrealist. It is a nine line poem that discusses sitting on couches as a man writes the poem in question, and how the couches seemed to change. No more, no less. It almost has a Zen quality to it. I wonder if one could clear their mind of cluttered thought if they pondered this poem. Not entirely what is the sound of one hand clapping territory but not far off either.

I sort of want to discuss the story that confirmed this as odd, the brain bending “Crawling Over Fifty Good Pussies to Get One Fat Boy’s Asshole.” But I can’t. Any attempts to summarize this story will force me to take to my bed for a week or so. Just know that it features a gangsta Alex Trebek robot who busts a cap in Chuck Woolery’s ass and Stagger Lee, the trickster pimp, who wreaks violent havoc. It’s beyond lunatic. It’s an amazing work but I’ll be damned if I can come close to describing what Sands put on paper.

I’ll end this review with my favorite story in this collection, “Invincible.” Beware, I am going to be spoiling the hell out of this story, so skip to the final paragraph if you need to. This story is about a character called “the boy.” He is a stuttering child and is selling lemonade at a stand in his yard, making some money. Then come two neighborhood toughs:

Billy and Jack come down the street in fine Italian suits. The boy does not like Billy and Jack. They are bullies.

[...]

Jack removes a Tommy Gun from his pants, which contain an interdimensional dimension transcending time and space. He pours the lemonade on the sidewalk… slowly. “Faggot,” he says, “You’re cutting into our business, faggot. Go inside and stay there, faggot, unless you wanna be filled full of holes and eaten like Swiss cheese.”

The threats make Billy cry. His mother hears him and comes out to see what is happening:

Rata tat tat. Jack shoots the mother in the chest with his Tommy Gun.

She is not bothered by the bullets. She is unfazed.

Mothers are indestructible.

This is one of those times when bizarro may seem loony but really isn’t. This story is utterly perfect in depicting a common scene of bullying and the way a loved and protected child sees a parent. The bullies are so terrifying they resemble mafia hoods to the boy, and their guns may be toys but the menace Billy and Jack offer makes time seem like it is standing still, like time and space have ceased to exist. All there is is the fear and terror in that moment. But then comes the mother, who never speaks, only making guttural sounds as she protects her son, sounds that in turn terrify Billy and Jack. They run away and she takes her sad son into the house where it is safe from bullies.

Even though it uses the often strange narrative style found in Sands’ tales that are absurdist, it would be hard to find a story that depicts better the vulnerability of an atypical child at the hands of bullies and the way that a fierce mother can vanquish all foes. When I read this story out loud to Mr. Oddbooks, he remarked that the story reminded him of this drawing. This story amazingly captures the fear of being a child and universal awe of having a mother-protector.

It seems fitting to end Bizarro Week with a book that seems to encompass so much of the bizarro genre. Grossness, lunacy, clever meanings, tender interpretations, absolutely no meaning aside from the experience of reading… Sands’ voice is unmistakable but his focus is wide and this collection of 52 stories shows a remarkable ability to write the absurd, the surreal and the all-too-real, while also throwing in some really interesting and foul mayhem. I highly recommend this book to all of you. Thanks for reading with me this week, and I will announce the winner of the contest later this evening. Send your friends, spread the word, because I love giving away books almost as much as I like writing about them. Let’s make sure my cookie jar is full of names when the drawing time comes! Much love to you all.

Author: Vincent W. Sakowski

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s early(ish) bizarro and is very strange and sweet. I know for many that the word “sweet” is the kiss of death where a book is concerned, but this is sweet bizarro, not sweet like our moms would read. Although not having met your mothers, perhaps this is a bad call on my part.

Availability: Published by Eraserhead Press in 2007, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Bizarro Week continues onward with Vincent W. Sakowski’s Misadventures in a Thumbnail Universe. Don’t forget that I am giving away a copy of each book I am discussing this week and one lucky commenter will win all five. Click here for contest details and comment now, comment often!

Misadventures in a Thumbnail Universe was a wonderful surprise. The stories in this collection are creepy, surreal, beautiful, pulled from history and legend, and in one case, unconsciously reminiscent of one of my favorite speculative authors. Where Wilson’s stories creeped me out and where Rauch’s stories left me with a sense of emotional sadness, Sakowski’s stories left me feeling wistful. Using a traditional (more or less) plot structure and characterization, Sakowski’s stories invoke a sense of the unpleasant using the most beautiful language and present the utterly disturbing that registers as beautiful even as it appalls.

There was not a single story in this collection that did not work so I will just discuss the ones I enjoyed the most. “The Miracle Babies” was about a woman who gave birth to rabbits and sent them out into the world to make their mark. Immediately I was reminded of the story of Mary Toft, the 18th century woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits, but unlike Toft, who shoved mutilated rabbits up her vagina and squeezed them out in a hoax meant to bring her money, the protagonist of “The Miracle Babies” gives birth to cute, fuzzy bunny rabbits. The scene of her giving birth immediately reminded me of this Mark Ryden painting, though there are definitely some differences because she cannot nurse these baby bunnies, as they are carnivorous and feed on her flesh. Tiring of having them chew on her, she feeds them hamburger and then callously sends them out into the world. But free of the little rabbits that she had known only for hours unexpectedly affects the woman deeply.

In her sorrow and in her seclusion, she made a special mask to shut herself even further. Initially, she only wore it a few minutes before bedtime, as it reminded her of her children. Then she wore it more and more often – lying in bed, or sitting in the living room. The mask was made of black satin, leaving only her face from under her nose down exposed. There were no holes for the eyes or ears. On her head stood two tall bunny ears – black and white. The bit of white was for the small hope she still felt on occasion. That perhaps some day, one or more of her children would return to her.

I’m being very careful not to spoil these stories so I will stop here but ultimately this was a story of legacy, of making your mark passively, though painfully. As I read this story I was reminded of the works of an Austin artist named Jay Long, whose cute but creepy bunnies and people in masks eerily reflected elements of this story.

“The Screaming of the Fish” was about a man who literally has a fishbowl for a head. This is more of a vignette than a story so I can’t discuss it too much without utterly ruining it, but I will share a snippet of the story to give an idea of the calm, sweet humor that at times permeates this collection:

The two goldfish in the bowl didn’t seem to be too crazy about him jogging every day – with all of the rocks from the bottom getting stirred up, swishing around and scraping their sides.  Way too many scars over the years, but what could they say?

My friend kept them well-fed, and they certainly got their exercise. And even though they were stuck in a small home, they got to see a lot of the sights. Especially since my friend liked to jog a new route everyday.

“Peel and Eat Buffet” is a truly nasty story that is told in beautiful language, word combinations so lovely that the true horror of the story is almost muted. And to share much of it would spoil it utterly but here’s a quick look:

To a song that only she can hear, she begins to undulate and slowly turn on the platform – her body in constant motion – but every move deliberate. Sensual. As she turns, her hips gyrating, she begins to pull at the film, working the knots open. Stretching out scenes. Letting them fall. Editing in her own way. There is only the crinkling of the film to be heard as it unwinds and she crushes it underfoot.

“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ragnarok” also has some fairly disgusting moments but overall is one of the funnier pieces in the book. A longer story, it tells the story of how GQ and Vogue, a good-looking and successful DINK couple find themselves sucked into Loki’s bizarre plans for Ragnarok. You see, GQ dreamed about the end of the world and Loki was collecting stray hair and nail clippings in order to build a long ship. Vogue was trimming her nails and lost one crescent of nail (and really, she should have been getting professional manicures were she really that vogue, but never mind) and GQ panics and makes her collect her nail clippings lest she trigger the end of the world. As she is throwing out the trash before leaving for work, Vogue is confronted by a smelly, unattractive creature.

“Good morning, my dear. I was wondering if you could spare some-”

“Is your name Loki?”

“Do I look like a Norse God to you?”

“I don’t watch that much television. I have no idea how a Norse God is supposed to look, but I couldn’t help noticing that sack of hair and nails. Are you building a long ship with them?”

“This is the suburbs, my dear. No open water for tens of miles… Will you be my friend?

“Is that really necessary?”

“It would be nice.” The derelict flashes a brown, hour-glass toothed smile.

Vogue steps back, grimacing. “Let me think about it.”

“Uh huh… Bad day, my dear?”

“I’ve just discovered that my husband’s an asshole.”

“Only this morning? You have my sympathies.”

She gives him change, leaves for work, he fishes her nail clippings out of the trash and yes, Ragnarok is upon them, among other things. This story combined the ridiculous, the gross, and the funny into one harmonious, bizarre tale.

My favorite story in the collection was “See Emily Play?” Beautifully written, extremely creepy and unsettling, it reminded me of a Caitlín R. Kiernan story. There was a Victorian, almost steampunk element to it, and I generally am not a fan of steampunk, but the images of a lovely little girl dressed in an elaborate gown, with bronze Praying Mantis arms, sort of creeps into elements of the genre. Emily gets gossip and news of the outside world from a bird called Mr. Calm and is visited by a friend Marla, who agrees to make Emily a new body. The first one, run by coal and producing steam, is not to Emily’s liking. The second is the one I would have chosen:

Mostly made of clear glass, inside, there were a variety of flowers and plants, all of which Emily eventually recognized from Mr. Calm’s lessons from long before. In the chest, hawthorn flowers and their red berries encircled a water lily. On the right side of the lily were white violets, on the left were blue. Below them were yellow jasmine and blue hyacinth, wild plum blossoms and even a small hemp plant, which seemed odd and disturbing to her, as it was linked with Fate. On the the lowest level, orange and lemon blossoms grew around a tiny willow, which she perhaps found the most unsettling of all. Even with the body on its back, the plants were held in place, and appeared to be vibrant and alive.

This body that implies fecundity does not appeal to Emily. She says it is because she does not want to rely on watering the plants and getting them sunlight, both of which would power the body and presumably would leave her unable to move on cloudy days. Really, it is clear Emily prefers a body which can move only under the power she creates for it, so she chooses a more sexually appealing PVC body and begins to engage in activities that upset Mr. Calm and calls into question Emily’s loyalty. Her body becomes her undoing and giving up her Praying Mantis arms means she is, herself, in danger of becoming prey.

There is a lot of body horror in this story, though it is presented in very lovely language, which is why I think I was reminded of Kiernan, though perhaps these formally dressed, strange young women could have led me to such a comparison. This piece also reminded me of a painting I know I have seen of a pretty girl dressed in finery and in possession of insect arms of some sort. I cannot find this anywhere, and if you know the one I mean, please send me a link. Though it is not impossible that I am imagining it. This story was vivid enough that perhaps thinking of Mark Ryden in an earlier story caused me to place insect arms on one of his little girls.

This collection of stories is unique, even though it triggered in me thoughts of other works. Sakowski can write of a world of strangeness, a world that few others can effectively pull off. That he reminds me of Kiernan in subject matter and that his works bring to mind Ryden paintings as images is a sign that Sakowski’s mind delves into veins that other excellent artists have mined, and he mines it well on his own. Nothing about this collection is derivative, though his imagery certainly is visually evocative for me. I am not a person known for much in the way of visual acuity, so if he had this effect on me, I wonder how he affected those with a more artistic bent. I loved this short story collection and very much want to read Sakowski’s other works.

Don’t miss tomorrow, the last installment of this Bizarro Week. I will be discussing Bradley Sand’s Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy, and it’s gonna be a hoot.

Author: D. Harlan Wilson

Type of Book: Bizarro, fiction, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because there is some full-bore absurdity in this collection.

Availability: Published by Atlatl Press in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Day Three of Bizarro Week begins with They Had Goat Heads by D. Harlan Wilson, and before I begin to discuss the book, I want to remind you that one lucky reader will win a free copy of each book I review this week. Check out the contest rules and be sure to comment to enter!

Okay, on Monday, I discussed a book that is regular bizarro, with a traditional story framework but with outrageous and strange characters and details. Tuesday featured a gently weird book that focuses on the human experience more than the lunatic elements that can often be the trademark of bizarro. So it seems fitting that today we are looking at a book that is all over the map. It’s absurdist. It’s surreal. It alternates between hilarity and horror. It has a six-word story. It has flash fiction. It has short stories, consisting of simple vignettes and traditional plots. It has a creepy story that is made all the creepier because of the excellent illustrations accompanying it, making it a short, stylized graphic novel.

In fact, I’m unsure even how to begin the discussion. Thematically, I’m completely screwed. So I think I’m going to concentrate on examples of all the story types that I mention above.

First, the six-word story. It is also the first story in the book. “6 Word Scifi”:

Mechanical flâneurs goosestep across the prairie.

Thank god I went through a heavy Baudelaire phase or I would have had no idea what a “flâneur” is. As six word stories go, it’s not bad. I think Hemingway still takes first place in my mind (“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”) but this one is pretty evocative, too. This story immediately brought to mind those Nazi hammers from Pink Floyd: The Wall. I just imagined them leisurely marching across the American Heartland. Minimalism is always a winner for people with over-active imaginations and plenty of pop cultural references to fill in the mental blanks.

There are several very well-executed flash fiction pieces that were in turns interesting, maddening, clever and strange. Take “Monster Truck,” wherein a man wants to become a monster truck.

“Whoever fights monster trucks should see to it that in the process she does not become a monster truck,” said his wife when he tried to crawl into bed.

I don’t want to spoil this story of a couple hundred words, but he really should have heeded his wife’s warning.

“Strongmen & Motorcycles (& Monkeys, Too)” is a mini surrealist masterpiece:

The question is – why are muscles a prerequisite for strongmen? Strength is a relative term. Strength can indicate corporeal authority in equal measure with Einstein’s motorcycle…
Vroom.
Screech.
Kachunk. Kachunk-kachunk.

Well of course, a strongman can beat your ass but Einstein on a motorcycle can blow up your town and zoom away unscathed. Always respect Einstein before strongmen. Is this the message of this tale? Who knows? It is delightful nonsense and can be shaped to fit all kinds of conclusions:

I edit the sound of the daily news with a synthesizer and a pocketful of nitroglycerine. Nobody minds.

Should I mind? Should I be dissecting this story? Probably not but someone has to do it. Even if it makes no sense, which I cannot judge really, it has a very nice rhythm. I think I am going to ask Mr. Oddbooks to read this story to me out loud one day, to see how the meter of it rolls off the tongue.

The last bit of flash I want to discuss is “Cape Crusade.” I don’t want to quote from it because it looks like it is less than 100 words, but the image of a Superman-type chasing his cape like a dog chases his tail made me want to see if I could fashion a cape of sorts on my enormous kitten, Grendel, who chases his tail like it owes him money. He can never catch his tail. I wonder if he could catch a cape?

The short stories in this collection that worked the best for me were the ones that more or less implemented a plot. I am at times constitutionally unsuited for too much absurdism because I cannot help but try to find meaning in things. I can deal with this in very short pieces wherein motorcycles, Einstein and strongmen are discussed to no real conclusion, but in longer form, I end up with a puzzle with no edge pieces to guide me as I read it. It’s a personal failing but one I sense many may have. We are a species that likes order and there is nothing wrong with that. It’s just hard to turn that tendency off.

However, possessing this failing does not mean I cannot enjoy the lunacy of absurdism with a touch of surrealism. Or maybe it’s surrealism with a touch of absurdity. I tend to think it is the former but it gets hard to tell for me at times. So I made my brain shut up and just read and at times it was quite fun.

Take “Victrola,” a vignette (and it may actually be closer to flash but I’m calling it a short story for these purposes) about a man who is waiting for someone to give him a midnight snack. It reads like a dream, one of those dreams where things just happen without any concern for plot. The man’s parents come downstairs, then leave and go back to sleep, snoring. Then a man in a stovepipe hat and a three-piece suit comes into the room, and the Victrola lectures the snack-less man on mortality. His parents come back into the kitchen and dance and search the cabinets for something they cannot find. The father roughs up the mother a bit and they return upstairs. The Victrola speaks some more things one would not commonly hear from a Victrola. The story ends with the man listening to his parents’ noises as they sleep. That is a synopsis, or is as close to a synopsis as I can come.

I think that if I work hard enough, I can force myself into finding meaning in this story. There is a sense of coming to terms with disappointment and death. The parents demand coffee and receive none. The Victrola delivers strange news:

“Welcome to the kitchen. I am your host. I hope you enjoy a snack. You must enjoy things. Eventually you will die.”

The mother also has some hard wisdom she imparts after she fails to find decaf:

“That’s life, son,” says my mother, tilting her head. “One failure after another. But one must continue to fail. Otherwise one ceases to be human.”

But even this is a bit empty, explanation-wise. I think that with these stories that veer into absurdity, it’s best to concentrate on the language. Wilson is a writer who clearly delights in words, how they appear on paper and how they sound when spoken. His images are often quite beautiful. In this story about a strange Victrola, the words are melodic:

I listen to my mother and father’s muffled voices. They intersect and accomplish a crescendo, then roll out and taper off, fatigued, paling, until the only thing I can hear is the hush of the ocean surf, the Victrola’s fleur-de-lis whispering like a conch.

The last story I want to discuss is “The Sister.” This is the illustrated story, the one that was a mini graphic novel. This brief tale shows how a visual image changes the entirety of how a story is perceived. The words alone in the story are a bit unsettling. A man sews his sister back together only to watch passively and impotently as a madman in a monster truck kidnaps her. Tied to the grill of the truck, she is torn to pieces when the truck runs into a wall. The brother sews his sister back together again, and again she is kidnapped and placed in a bird cage as a vulture flies over her. One can see how this is a repetitive nightmare, showing a weak man who can restore his sister to health but cannot protect her from harm. That was simple enough.

It is the artwork that takes this to another level, a horrifying level. The sister is a doll with mismatched parts. Ragged scars cover her face. Her eyes do not match. The first stranger looks like Lon Chaney, Sr in the role of The Phantom of the Opera. The little sister, after the car accident, is laid out and looks for all in the world like the slashed-face Elizabeth Short, the sad Black Dahlia (NSFW and not for the squeamish), as she laid on a coroner’s table.

These illustrations worked beyond this story. Seeing in such horrific graphic depiction the words that would have seemed just slightly strange and uneasy by themselves, put some of the other stories into similarly horrific terms. Perhaps the genius of Wilson’s writing, in addition to the at times sheer beauty of it, is how easily, via surreal images, he might be cloaking something truly horrific. That man with the stovepipe hat that scraped the ceiling in “Victrola” became a leering Slender Man. The man who wanted to be a monster truck who looked into the abyss seems infinitely more monstrous. “The Sister” is a short story in terms of words but packs a wallop in terms of impact. This is one of those “worth the price of admission” stories.

With 40 stories, some leaning toward meaning, some a lesson in utter absurdity, this is a collection I very much recommend. Wilson blends humor and horror so well that even as I was affected reading some of the stories, like “The Sister,” my overall feeling at the end of this book was uneasiness. I had a sense there was much that I had missed but a reread did me no good in deciphering any meanings. In most cases I was forced to take the stories as they came, internalizing that tantalizing sense that meaning was so close but could never really be had. And it cannot be had for most of these tales because that is the cost of reading a book so absurdist. But in these absurd tales there is body horror, a sense of otherness, a feeling of awakening and a feeling of helplessness, and sometimes simply feeling something is enough meaning itself. And if that is not enough, I think the beauty of Wilson’s language is  certainly worth reading  This is also an excellent collection for those who seek out the actively weird and strange in bizarro. I definitely think this is a collection worth your time.

Author: Tony Rauch

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Rauch is a bizarro author, but even within that classification, he employs a writing style that is a bit left of center.  These stories are atypical enough that I consider them odd.

Availability: Published in 2008 by Eraserhead Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Day Two of Bizarro Week focuses on Tony Rauch’s Laredo. Before I begin, let me remind my readers that I am giving away a free copy of every book I will discuss this week. One lucky person will win a free copy of each of the five books and entering the drawing to win is as easy as leaving a comment. Read up on the contest rules here and comment wildly. Avidly, even.

I both enjoyed this collection and found it maddening. I like Rauch’s simple yet meandering approach to prose. His words at times are delightfully combined and the stories as a whole are far less insane than one often finds in bizarro fiction. But at times the stories, especially the first story in the collection, went on far too long for my tastes. And that is what is so maddening because even as I reread the stories I like the least, I could not find anything technically deficient with them.  In fact, I think the real maddening element was that I felt like these were stories I could have written myself and being unable to see them unfold as I wanted made me nervous.

So instead of force my tastes into a discussion wherein I end up panning a good story that simply was not my cup of tea or appearing as I would have wanted had I written it, I am going to discuss the stories that were, to my sensibilities, mostly excellent. This is a collection of stories that discusses longing, human frailty and occasionally gives the readers a happy ending when they least expect it. Little doses of magical realism, large doses of love-sick men, and stories that, had they been trimmed down a bit, would have been near perfect.

The story “I’m Afraid the President May Be Shrinking” is a sad little tale that does what it says on the tin. The President is shrinking. Before long, not even expert tailoring and excellent nutritional intervention can hide the fact that the President is getting smaller and smaller. In the interest of national security, the President ceases public appearances and the staff sees him, three-feet tall, depressed and restless, pacing the halls of the White House, muttering strange philosophies:

“Maybe… maybe we’re all freaks…” he would quietly tell himself. “In a million forms, in manners and ways we may never perceive. Each with a fabric and depth of quirks. In layers we may never unravel. We may never know ourselves so how can we know one another, how can we understand.”

Eventually the press breaks the story of his strange shrinking, and the public and government react, sure this was the work of American enemies. The First Lady came unhinged, citizens were concerned, but then things took on a different hue:

It was about this time that their spies had uncovered a similar phenomena. The scientists collated the data and reported back. It had occurred to a French aeropilot back in World War I. The pilot, a gorgeous devil, suddenly began shrinking one day – right out of the blue. They say it was a gradual thing – over weeks and months. They had to keep fashioning him smaller and smaller aeroplanes with progressively smaller gear.

[...]

They showed the president the chipped, grainy photos. The pilot had slick black hair that terminated in surf-like curls. His stare bore through you and 1000 years beyond – an intense, piercing ice blue, freezing everything he caught with it, as if seizing the world in his clinched fist, as if freezing time itself and taming fate in his icy gaze, dropping it to his knees with the intensity of his will.

These two passages shows that while Rauch can use the occasionally clunky word (I tend to think it should have “happened” to the French pilot rather than “occured” and surely he meant “clenched” instead of “clinched”), he mainly writes relatively simply, a trait I love, and in this simplicity he creates very vivid images. He engages in a crisp sort of prose that is recognizable to me in his use of em-dashes and complex yet streamlined sentences. It is how I write when I write prose. The President’s body continues to betray him and he loses confidence and becomes more interested in solitary activities. He writes a book about a President who turns purple. He takes up racing in a toy racing car.

He would race around the lawn, gritting his teeth, a twisted grimace on his face, almost as if he were attempting to drive his frustrations away, chasing them down or trying frantically to pull away from his grip. His racing garb consisted of a small red crash helmet, racing goggles, and gloves, a sporty red scarf which fluttered behind him, and a yellow t-shirt with insistent red letters spelling out: “I am a happy, well adjusted person.”

This passage really resonated with me for two reasons. One, I used to imagine my late cat Daisy would dress the same way, minus the t-shirt, were she to ride around on a cat-sized motorcycle, complete with a sidecar. Two, this image bore itself into my brain as I imagined the tiny President on the White House back lawn, speeding around in a car, trying to forget that with each passing day he would be smaller and smaller. But it is through writing about the purple President that the shrinking man finds meaning in his life, mirroring his misery in his parallel creation.

“Once I Saw a Pretty Girl (The Girl I Followed Today)” is the story of a man who is taken with a lovely young woman whom he watches walk into a used record shop. He feels compelled to follow her, as to do so seems to be a part of his fate. This story, in a bizarro fashion, explains the giddy, lovely feeling of falling in love at first site. He watches her as she wanders through the store, disrobing in an interesting way.

When I stepped inside, I noticed she was looking at the old Rod Stewart albums – the disco era Rod Stewart albums. I should’ve just turned around and walked out right there, but she did a curious thing – she pulled off her headband and stuffed it into one of Rod’s albums – into one of Rod’s older ones, into one of his better efforts, thankfully.

I started thumbing through the jazz albums – Chet Baker, Chet Baker, Chet Baker – and watching from the corner of my eye. At first I thought she was just going to adjust it and put it back on. I mean, what do I know about headbands? But she slid it into the album, then removed one of her long white stockings and put it into an old ABBA record. Then she slid off her other white stocking and tucked it into an old Blondie album. Good place for it, I thought. Sure. Of course. It belongs there. It’s meant to be.

She takes off her accessories and the skirt she is wearing, stuffing them into album sleeves. She leaves the store in a t-shirt and cut-off shorts and the narrator follows her but she gets on a bus and he loses sight of her. He is a sad romantic, going over in his head all the ways he may meet her again:

Maybe I’ll meet her at a party, somewhere out in that great promised nowhere. Maybe someday I’ll get to talk to her, maybe be introduced by a mutual friend, a sympathetic saint, someone to put in a good word, someone to give me the lowdown, the stink. Maybe someday she would tell me her name… That would be pretty great.

The sad thing in all of this is that the thought of her slowly got lost in the day, a little at the supermarket, a little at the laundry, places we could have shared, fun we could’ve had, until I had forgotten about her.

Had I been Queen Editor, this story would have ended here, but it doesn’t, and as I said above, that is my only quarrel with this book – the stories go on too long. Had the story about the President shrinking ended as he was racing on the back lawn, had this story ended when the narrator realized the girl was leaving his mind already, they would have been perfect. But this story does continue on and the narrator sees her walk into a bus station and follows her, and engages in some more romantic mental meandering:

Maybe she slipped into the restroom – maybe that’s why she wandered in. Or maybe she came in to get a soda from the vending machine and slipped out the back. The vending machines were old and forgotten here too. I bet this was the only place left in town that still served strawberry cola in bottles. I bet that’s why she was in here, to get a cold strawberry soda in a bottle and then wander back out the back door and down to the river for a quick swim. I bet that was what she was up to. It made perfect sense, you could tell she had good taste and all.

I was just trying to figure if I should join her down the block out back, or wait for her if she was in the restroom in here. Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s the right thing to do. When will it be my time to do the right thing? When will it be my turn to know? I think I’ll sit here and wait for it.

This story ends better than it should but then again, I wonder why the needy, near-stalkerish narrator did not creep me out.  What should have been disturbing was very sweet as Rauch’s characterization makes it clear the narrator is just a romantic, sappy kid with no malice in him.

The final story from this collection I will discuss is “The Strange Green Moss of My Discontent.” I end with this story because for me it was perfect. The length was on mark, the story tight, the ideas conveyed neatly in a few pages without sacrificing the wordy, emotional longing that characterized most of the stories in this book. A patch of moss begins to form on a wall in a bachelor’s apartment. He searches for a cause but cannot find one, in either wayward water from the floor above or in his cleaning routine. He is a fanatical cleaner:

Cleaning was my number one priority and hobby. It was one of the few times I was actually content in life – when I was scrubbing away, able to control at least that minor aspect of life – and was just enjoying the Zen simplicity of it all – the joy of scrubbing, the ironing, the mopping. If I could I would vacuum the air itself.

As a neurotic who all too well knows the pleasures of excessive housekeeping, I knew that something in life had bullied the protagonist into a state of compulsive cleanliness. It’s soothing for us nervous folk to clean and clean and clean when life is less than we want it to be. That’s how you know when I am pretty well-off emotionally – when the floors are vacuumed but the baseboards are a little cruddy, when the bathroom counters are clean but the glass in the shower needs a good windexing. A sparkling house means I am not all together right at the moment. So it was no surprise when the protagonist begins to address someone who left him discontent, positing that the nasty, cauliflower-bumped moss is the manifestation of how empty and lonely he feels. But then he shifts gears and thinks:

Or maybe it was me, as if I had created this disgusting mass – too busy with cleaning, a cleaning that was meant to cleanse all the bad stuff in life, wash it all away, a purification that was meant to impress you, that other aspects of my life began to suffer – meeting new people, keeping things fresh, mixing things up, cultivating a variety of interests. But no, it was just the cleaning and my pompadour. Just those two things in my life. That was it for me. Just that.

Yep, the protagonist and I would have much to discuss during one of my cleaning binges. As he thinks these things, a transient in his neighborhood, a drifter who likes Shakespeare, looks at the protagonist through his window and shouts:

“Unceasing change turns the wheel of life… and so reality is shown in all its many forms.” Then he pulls away, back-stepping into the street, nodding his head slowly, his eyes fixed on me, never blinking, just boring intently into me, nodding a tight, intense stare. As he hits the street, he points a stiff arm accusingly at me and calls out, “Check it out if you have the courage…”

Oh, how the compulsive cleaners like to make life stand still. A clean room never changes. Clothes washed immediately after wear are returned to their original state. Those who clean, aside from the germophobes and those who spent a lot of time in the military, are raging against the passage of time and all the ravages it brings, all the losses, all the never-ending, tireless change.

He hears a neighbor throw a beer can at the transient and he looks outside his window, looking at his neighbors, watching them as they go about their days ( with this notable observation: “And next door to them Darren is climbing a ladder to put the finishing touches on a message he has just painted across the face of his two story: ‘Rock on with your bad self.’ Sage advice from one who knows.”) He watches these people and wishes he knew them and before he knows it, time, lots of time, is slipping away from him.

Though I only focused on three stories, there is much to like in this collection. When I say these stories beckoned to the part of me that always has a blue pencil in hand, that is no insult. I don’t want to correct crappy work. No, I longed to cut some stories off, to change a few words here and there, and I think that is because these stories spoke directly to the timorous, lonely parts of my heart wherein I feel I am shrinking or that I never know the right thing to do or I am spending far too much time Swiffering the ceiling and cleaning out behind the stove because the world outside seems unappealing to whatever is fueling my neuroticism. This collection at times seemed to me to be more bizarro-lite because it focused far more on basic human emotion than the strangeness that is often the crux of traditional bizarro. And yet even as this book verged into Miranda July territory (which is no bad thing, just to be clear), there was still the sense that these were not the sorts of stories one would ever read in a mainstream lit mag or in a collection put out by a large publishing house. They relied too heavily on magical realism, had too many words, and occupied a place that I associate with “the other” even as I find it hard to describe what such a place really is.

I really enjoyed this collection and recommend it to others. I would love it if those who have read it would tell me what they think of this book, as I wonder how minds dissimilar from mine interpreted these stories. I definitely look forward to reading Rauch’s other works.

Author: Eric Hendrixson

Type of Book: Fiction, novella, bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Humanoid fruit and a mob tomato obsessed with Michael Jackson, for starters.

Availability: Published by Eraserhead Press for the New Bizarro Author Series in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Ah yes, a new Bizarro Week begins. And as with all my themed weeks here on IROB, I am giving away free books. This time, I want to see if I can include the contest instructions on a different entry rather than clutter up the discussions with all my site business. So check out the contest rules here and comment away!

Eric Hendrixson got the shaft when I did my New Bizarro Author Series reviews earlier this year. I got a copy of his book later than the others and it was just luck of the draw that he didn’t get included. So I decided to start this Bizarro Week with his book, but before I get started, I feel the need to remind my readers that the books in the New Bizarro Author Series are an audition of sorts. Eraserhead Press gives these authors a chance to show their skills in both writing and encouraging an audience to buy their books. The NBAS writers will only get a contract to write more bizarro books if they sell enough of their “audition” books. So if this review makes this book seem like an appealing read to you, I encourage you to buy a copy of this book and give Hendrixson a chance to continue writing his lunatic tales.

The more I read bizarro, the more I realize that in many respects, these books are retelling stories we already know, using the normal as a framework upon which they build their intensely strange stories. I think that is why I don’t understand it when people look me in the eyes and say, “Bizarro is just too weird for me.” Seriously, many bizarro books are a mild inversion of the same plots we read, watch and inhale on a daily basis, except with more interesting characterization, a better use of pop culture details and a willingness to engage in subversive surrealism. These books are the logical evolution of storytelling wherein the core, the heart, if you will, of the story remains the same but the details evolve. Bucket of Face is a fine example of that evolution.

Bucket of Face‘s framework is the story of a bystander who gets wrapped up in a Mafia-like criminal world and finds himself in over his head. Add in an insecure but scheming girlfriend, an interesting cop team and an unusual hitman, and you’ve got yourself a show worth pitching to a network. Cast a faded Brat Packer in one of the roles and, hell, it’ll be on Fox next year. But of course, that’s just the core. What Hendrixson does with the details makes this a wonderfully absurd and very funny book.

The book begins as Charles, our protagonist, is editing his own Wikipedia entry, listening to acorns screaming as they fall from the trees. You see, due to a bizarre accident over a decade ago, some fruit is now larger and sentient. The acorns are screaming because they know the moment they hit the ground the squirrels will be waiting for them (and what is it with NBAS writers and squirrels and Pulp Fiction references). His kiwi fruit girlfriend, Sarah, is eating fruit salad (she explains that it’s not cannibalism unless she eats kiwi fruit and since Charles eats mammals, he should get over his squeamishness). He can only have sex with Sarah when one of them buys flowers, because that’s just how you do it with fruit. Charles works at a doughnut store and has ducked out of work frequently, claiming to have unusual religious beliefs:

“So, what’s the holiday this time?”

“Zzymer,” Charles said. “It’s a holy day commemorating the Accosterite victory over the Kylabites in the valley of Zimmer. On this day, my people eat tacos in commemoration. It’s also when the Philistines invented tennis.”

Yeah, Charles is a Fifth Day Philistine.

Charles, who is largely without ambition aside from a desire to win the lottery, is sort of whiny. He hates the cheap cigarettes he is forced to smoke. He hates his place of work and the customers he has to wait on. And he shares these petty hatreds, and others, as often as he can. But far from being annoying, Charles is a passive, Linklater-style sad sack whose travails are more amusing than irritating. Like when he finds a dead meter maid on Sarah’s car as he is trying to leave for work. He doesn’t want to upset Sarah or risk her getting into trouble if she decided to call the police upon finding it, so he shifts the dead body to another car, as you do, and goes to work. It’s just another tiresome detail in Charles’ life.

He relieves his co-worker at the doughnut shop, lights a Quality Light, and reads newspapers behind the counter. Then a banana and an apple, Mafia fruits, each carrying something, come into the shop and change his life (and that sounds like the set up for a bad joke: “A banana and an apple walk into a doughnut shop…”):

Even to Charles, it was obvious what was supposed to happen. The guy with the briefcase was supposed to leave with the bucket, and the guy with the bucket was supposed to leave with the briefcase. This kind of thing happened at Papa’s Doughnut Dinette eight times a week, but for some reason, these two fruits just couldn’t pull it off. They kept talking in low tones, muttering in a vaguely threatening manner. Charles got bored with them and went to check if there was anything to do in the kitchen. He was in the back, filling jelly doughnuts, when the guns went off.

Yes, the Mafia apple and banana, unable to come to a reasonable exchange, had shot and killed each other. And instead of calling the police, Charles takes the matter in hand and steals the pack of Dunhills one of the fruits had on him, because cheap cigarettes is one of Charles’ larger grievances in life. Only once the finer cigarettes are secured does he grab the bucket and the briefcase. The briefcase is full of money, and instead of feeling a heavy sense of dread knowing he has mob money in front of him, Charles is elated that he will finally have the money to take Sarah to a warmer climate. They are Zimbabwe bills but it looks like a fortune to Charles. He hides them before the cops come in to order their doughnuts and coffees, items that complete their clichéd image, items that they will throw out later for more epicurean fare. The slumped fruits look like drunks and the cops are none the wiser. That is, until they notice the apple juice on the floor:

The veteran officer shook his head. “That’s the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.” He turned to Charles accusingly. “Did you serve apple juice to that apple? That could be a hate crime.”

“Oh no,” Charles said. “No. No.”

“Well, it’s fucking revolting. I mean, how would you feel if you walked into a bar and they gave you a nice pint of human blood? Would you say, ‘Oh thank you bartender for this nice pint of human blood?’ No. You would have a complaint against him. There’d be arrests and lawsuits.”

After proving the shop does not sell apple juice and giving the cops their coffee for free, Charles ushers them out. The cops, after tossing their pastries and burnt but free coffee, drive five miles under the speed limit to screw with other motorists and then notice two other fruits up to no good at a Denny’s. The cops are major characters in the book but I’m not going to go into detail about them because of time and space constraints. Just know they are erudite men who ape the stereotypical roles of cops when in the presence of others. To add to the musical obsessions in this book, one of the cops engages in a cross-dressing Beatles fetish (or maybe it’s cosplay), so there’s that for the Beatles fans out there. Mortimer and Mayflower are, like most of the characters in Bucket of Face, remarkably and ridiculously realized despite the brevity of the book.

With the cops gone, Charles moves the fruits to the freezer, moves the bucket and the briefcase, and cleans up. He renders the fruit corpses and makes doughnut fillings out of them. He goes home to Sarah, nervous, fretting Sarah, who hates her face and is worried Charles will leave her for a human woman, unable to accept how much Charles loves her. He hides the bucket and the briefcase in the closet and goes to bed, only to be awakened when Sarah confronts him with the briefcase full of Zimbabwean money.

“Do you know the value of the Zimbabwe dollar?”

“It’s like a regular dollar, but from Zimbabwe. I’m not a racist.”

Yep, Charles has stolen a briefcase of money from dead Mafia fruit that could not buy the day-old doughnuts he forgot to bring home to his girlfriend, forcing her to eat very stale pastries for breakfast.

“So what’s in the bucket anyway?” She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin.

“I don’t know.” He poured himself a cup of coffee.

“So you don’t know what is was but you brought it home anyway? Have you ever wondered how epidemics happen?”

“Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I thought it might be worth something.”

“Why would you think a bucket someone forgets in a doughnut shop would be worth money? I’m just glad you don’t work in an abortion clinic.”

The above passage is a litmus test. If you found this as funny as I did, then you really need to buy this book.

Then Sarah and Charles investigate the bucket and find, as the title of the book implies, a bunch of faces. And given how strapped for money the two are, and how much Sarah dislikes her looks, you can see where the plot is going, as the two descend into the murky world of face trafficking. But even though it may be clear where it is going, I’m going to stop discussing the plot as it involves Sarah and Charles so as not to spoil too much, but frankly even if I did spoil it, the cast of characters and the ludicrousness of this alternative world would be more than enough to keep reading.

And now enters the hitman, the enforcer, the dreaded tomato with a chip and an epaulet on his shoulder. People often think tomatoes are vegetables, not fruit, and he has to work hard for respect. One might think he has to work even harder for respect since he is a tomato who dresses like Michael Jackson. His associate, a dim strawberry, is on a Sylvester Stallone trip. Sent to find what happened to the two fruits, the money and the faces, he shows his true colors as a thug and as an MJ fanatic as he roughs up Anakin at the doughnut shop:

Roma picked up his coffee. “You don’t want to be starting something. Do you want to be starting something?” He threw the coffee. Ani’s hands went up to his face…

What ensues is a torture scene worthy of Reservoir Dogs, except noses are at a premium rather than ears. Much plot happens, so much that as I scrolled through my e-reader I was surprised that the sheer volume of details Hendrixson included in this book did not hit me when I read it at first (this is the first book I have discussed after reading it on a Kindle – I find it fascinating that all the passages I had highlighted as I read it are not the ones I found worthy of quoting in this discussion). More bad things happen to fruit, Roma still has not found the briefcase or bucket, and he has to prepare for a hard day tracking down Charles and the purloined items:

A short nap would do him some good. He set the alarm clock and laid out his clothing for when he awoke: the red jacket with a white tee and black chinos. He opened the top drawer of the dresser and solemnly laid out the glove. He hesitated for a moment, but yes. It was time for the glove.

Oh yeah, shit just got real. Roma’s gonna wear the glove.

The plot continues onward, with Roma explaining why Michael Jackson is quite literally his god. Cops, Roma, Charles and Sarah all collide in a small literary explosion and everyone meets their fate, some sad, some expected, some rather touching. I feel strange right now because I want to talk about all sorts of things, like the theatrical cops, Roma and his final quest that takes him to Forest Lawn Cemetery, how things end for Charles and Sarah but I can’t. In fact, there is no way for me in all my verbosity to briefly discuss all the quirks of the various B-characters. Strawberry and his Stallone impersonation. The nasty old women in the apartment front office. Hendrixson really manages to include a host of characters and bizarre details in his alternate universe and yet gives all of them life and full realization. In a book this short, it is no small accomplishment to deftly arrange plot, pop culture details, and numerous characters into a read that never feels crunched or rushed.

So since I cannot discuss too much more of the plot, I will end my discussion with the some of the puns Hendrixson includes throughout the book. 

From a scene where Roma is talking to his henchman, Strawberry:

Thick as he was, he knew only somebody like Roma would give him a fair shake.

From a scene where Charles was trying to use humor to placate the insecure Sarah:

He regretted teasing her. A girl like her is soft, easily bruised.

From a scene where Charles finds the mess left behind at the doughnut shop after Roma has brutally extracted information from Anakin:

When he looked up, he could see a message written on the wall next to the door. The message was low, maybe three feet from the ground, but the letters were each six inches high. It looked like someone had painted them in a frosting knife. Charles stared at the letters. “I’ve been hit by what? What the hell is a smoothie criminal?” he muttered.

Chapter 19 is called “Tomato, Catch Up,” which is both punny and another reference to Tarantino, neatly covering two bases at once.

While all of the NBAS books I have read recently are quite good, this one strikes me as being the one that seemed a perfect fit for me. Grounded lunacy is actually very hard to pull off, and so is writing with an eye to humor. Hendrixson, in 92 pages, created an alternate universe with five fully-fleshed characters, several subplots, a wealth of pop culture references, using extremely clever prose. Hendrixson is a writer we need to read more from, so I encourage all of you to buy this book. It was a fun ride, from beginning to end.

So leave comments, dear readers, to enter the drawing for the five free books, and tune in tomorrow for a look at Tony Rauch’s Laredo.

Here’s the line-up:
6/27: Bucket of Face by Eric Hendrixson
6/28: Laredo by Tony Rauch
6/29: They Had Goat Heads by D. Harlan Wilson
6/30: Misadventures in a Thumbnail Universe by Vincent W. Sakowski
7/1: Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy by Bradley Sands

Here are the rules on how to enter to win the five books:

–Leaving me a comment on one of the book entries is one entry to win the books.

–Leave me a comment on each of the entries, and that will be five entries to win the books.

–Only one comment per day counts as an entry, so if you leave ten comments on one discussion, that’s one entry.  If you leave one comment on all five discussions, that’s five entries.  Please discuss the books as much as you want, but only one comment per book discussion will count towards winning the books.

–It doesn’t matter when you leave comments as long as you have left them all before the contest ends at 7:00 p.m. CST on 7/1/11.

–There is a max of five entries any one person can get via leaving comments.

–The comments must be left here.  I post snippets of my discussions on other book sites, but the only comments that will be counted towards winning the books need to be left here on IROB.

–I will announce the winner shortly after the contest ends on July 1.

Any questions, don’t hesitate to ask and get ready to discuss some interesting books with me!

Here’s the line-up:
6/27: Bucket of Face by Eric Hendrixson
6/28: Laredo by Tony Rauch
6/29: They Had Goat Heads by D. Harlan Wilson
6/30: Misadventures in a Thumbnail Universe by Vincent W. Sakowski
7/1: Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy by Bradley Sands

One lucky person will win all five books. Here’s how it works:
–One comment on one of the five book discussions is an entry to win the books.
–If you leave one comment on all five book discussions, that results in five chances to win.
–It doesn’t matter when you leave comments on the book discussions as long as you have all your comments in by 7:00 p.m. CST on July 1.
–I’ll announce the winner shortly after the contest ends on July 1.

Of course, you shouldn’t limit yourself just to the one comment because these books are all going to generate some interesting conversation, but no one will hold it against you if you do.

So come join me for the next Bizarro Week!

Also, I have some other themed weeks in the works: ‘Zine Week, Death Photography Week, and a Women of Bizarro Week. Maybe more as they occur to me. Be sure to let me know if you have an idea for a themed Odd Book week.

Author: Caris O’Malley

Type of Book: Bizarro, fiction, novella

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s bizarro, of course.

Availability: Published by Eraserhead Press in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: So Bizarro Week comes to an end with Caris O’Malley’s The Egg Said Nothing, but of course I need to get some business taken care of before we can move on to the book discussion. Because I really want to showcase the awesomeness of the New Bizarro Author Series, I am giving away a free copy of every book I discussed this week. All you have to do to enter to win a copy of O’Malley’s book is to leave a comment to this entry and I will put your name in the drawing for the book. Leave the comment today, 2/18/11, before 9:00 pm CST.

To the book. I’m gonna come out right now and say I am unsure if I really know how this book ends. I have an idea that I might know but I am sort of unclear if I genuinely understand how O’Malley concludes this book aside from the fact that that the protagonist seems to get caught in a never ending spiral of trying to do the right thing but being prevented from succeeding. He is literally being prevented from making difficult moral decisions by the man he once was. I tried to talk about the book with a friend and she immediately referenced the movie Inception, which I have not seen and likely never will, and I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it but you never know – that information may mean something to one of you.

Let me offer as much of a synopsis as I can without completely spoiling the book: Manny lays an egg. He wakes up one morning and he finds himself bare in the nether regions with an egg between his legs. Manny is sort of hostile and paranoid. He’s probably got that avoidant personality disorder that’s become all the rage now. He finances his life by stealing money from wishing fountains. He spends most of his time watching television. But when he sees the egg, it triggers in him something that is a mixture of the maternal and the paternal and he tries to take care of the egg. He goes to a diner and meets a waitress whose teeth, skin and scent enchant him. They hang out at a laundromat and eat vending machine food. They fall in love fast because they have to because this is a novella and they have sex and the egg… Well it doesn’t hatch so much as it breaks and what is inside is unexpected. What is inside I will not state explicitly because I think that would be the first link in spoiling the chain of the plot but the contents of the egg begin a series of circular events that test Manny’s mettle, his love for this new woman who offers him a new life, his morality and his sense of reality. Manny is given the chance to prevent a series of events that will trigger a world-wide catastrophe but he will have to make decisions no man should be asked to make. All in all, this is a really loopy, sad, absorbing look at a miserable hipster who lays an egg and changes his life only to have to destroy all that makes him happy in order to achieve a higher moral end.

Gah, I hate synopses that vague but the fact is, this is one of those books you need to buy and read and absorb. It crams an astonishing amount into a novella and despite the brevity, will cause you to think in depth about the plot. You will wonder about Manny’s morality. You will find yourself Googling quantum physics and wondering if there is a way the plot could have happened. It will make you question at what point we are asking too much of a person, in that post-college way when you wondered, if time travel were possible, if you would have strangled an infant Hitler or killed your grandfather in order to save the world if it meant that you were essentially ensuring you and your family would never exist.

And in the midst of creating these sorts of thoughts, O’Malley also creates a hero I could identify with all too well. I loved Manny. Loved him. If I had a penis and was single, I could have been Manny (before reading this, I dreamt I gave birth to an enormous goldfish and knew it was a baby even as it swam in a big tank though the doctors and family told me it was a fish so maybe I was in a the right frame of mind when I began this book). Manny’s love of John Hughes films also covered a bit of common ground with me. But mostly I loved Manny because he was such crank before he fell in love.

Take this passage that occurs early in the book, just after he discovers the egg:

When I woke up, I had this odd sensation. My lower half felt more sensitive. Felt exposed. If you’re the sort of person who sleeps nude, you might not understand. Or maybe you will. Maybe that’s why you do it. But, for my own reasons, I never do. It’s uncomfortable for me. I have a healthy sense of of shame about my person. Only rarely does someone come into my apartment. And if that person comes in while I’m sleeping, that person will not find me without my clothes on.

I hear Manny on this one. I don’t even like being barefoot. If a fire breaks out in the house and I am naked, I will have to remain naked because I will have to round up the cats and get them out of the house and there will be no time to get dressed so unless I am in the shower when the fire breaks out, I have seriously mitigated the chances of being found naked by firefighters or helpful neighbors trying to stop the conflagration. I’ve given this a lot of thought, as has Manny. We know you can never work too hard to ensure a state of complete body coverage.

But Manny shows even more so how we are on a common wavelength, following immediately from the above paragraph:

And that person will never find me in any state of undress because people do not come into my apartment without me knowing about it. And I would ever let anyone in while I was sleeping. I’m not the kind of guy who leaves a key under the mat so visitors can come as they please. I have a single key to my apartment on my chain. The only other copy is buried in a park six miles away. It is in an unmarked hole. And everything I just said about the whereabouts of my spare key is a lie because I don’t want you to know where my goddamned key is.

While I have not become as lock conscious as Manny, I will say that if I still lived in an apartment, I would mimic putting a deadbolt on the side where the hinges are. I can’t believe I never thought of that on my own and I totally do not think his eight locks are a sign of complete paranoia. I say this not only because of the naked matrix but also the dreaded “finding a couple of drunk drag worms in my living room in the middle of the night, scaring the cats” scenario that played out in my funky, downtown, shithole apartment in 2000. There is a fine line between paranoia and plain common sense and I may not be the person to declare Manny a genius among men, I know that, but I liked Manny more than any character I have read in a while, which probably says a lot about me, I think.

Just the way Manny thinks is wonderful to me:

There the egg sat. If it had eyes, I’d say it looked at me hopefully, but, since it didn’t, I’ll say instead it looked at me speckled. It was a light blue with reddish speckles. Like I think a robin’s egg might look, only bigger. But I’m not aware of ever seeing a robin or its egg, so I have no real way of knowing.

I like this manner of meandering, this sort of non-linear wandering through a logical yet disorganized mind.

Because Manny is eminently logical, though utterly random:

On a big enough scale, everything is less weird than something else. It’s more probable for me to have laid an egg than for me to have laid a perfect twelve-inch replica of the Statue of Liberty. Which, in itself, is a thousand times more likely than laying a perfect functioning replica of Ivan Raimi.

This is sort of weird in a way because this is the second time in less than a year that I have found myself on a near-perfect wavelength with a male character named Manny. I absolutely loved and seriously understood Manny DeLeon, the hero of Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, an utterly norm book. If it happens a third time, I suspect I will have to get some sort of literary intervention.

My love for this Manny makes perfect sense because despite being the sort of man who is paranoid, grumpy, sort of grubby and of decidedly poor eating habits, after inspecting his nethers to see if passing the egg had damaged him in any manner, Manny begins to nurture the egg. He pulls out blankets and tucks it in. He calls 9-1-1 for advice but comes up empty handed and just wings it, so to speak. He regards the egg:

It looked kind of like me, I think. As much as such a thing can look like a person. It looked like an introspective egg.

“What do I do with you?” I asked the egg.

The egg said nothing.

So he covers the egg with towels and sets up a space heater to ensure this egg that sort of looks like him survives. Someone calls him and tells him to destroy the egg but he doesn’t, even though the voice calling him sounds like his own. And in the name of all that is wordy with me, it kills me but I sort of have to stop because it is here that the metaphysical ramifications of the book show themselves and to discuss them in depth will destroy the reason to read this book. Just know that in a world where time is linear and dimensions are finite, none of this book is possible. The end of the book happened before the egg was ever laid but the egg had to be laid before the end could happen and it goes on in this manner, making you realize that you should have known by page 11 that none of this was going to end in a manner that seemed possible:

The egg was akin to a child, an unwilling, unknowing collection of matter, thrust into a nasty world. Imagine, for a moment, what it’s going to be like for whatever’s inside that egg. Even if it’s human, life is going to be hard

You see, by the strange quantum physics in this novella, he knew what was inside that egg even if in that portion of limitless dimensions available to him he didn’t know he knew. And once you read the book and ponder that fact, this whole book, ostensibly about a cranky dude who watches movies on TV and lays an egg and falls in love and has to make all kinds of draconian decisions when all he really wants to do is watch The Breakfast Club, eat potato chips, nurture his egg and hang out with his new girlfriend, is really a manifesto about the nature of reality and morality. Manny is Everyman, No Man, and lives in an existential clusterfuck that ensures his life is not going to turn out how he deserves even though he proves despite his curmudgeonly paranoia that he is a man who is capable of love, dedication and selflessness.

I think that despite the fact that I love the characterization in this book and just like Manny in general, that the real reason that you should read this book is that in all the potential choices of how to handle Manny, O’Malley never took the easy way out or resorted to cheap sentimentality. There is no deus ex machina. There’s just Manny, the egg, the girl, modern technology and terrible choices. The phone psychic who knows her shit cannot save him. The girl, whose name is Ashley, cannot save him. And the hell of it is, even he cannot save himself because as this book proves, Manny is literally his own enemy.

And sorry all I can provide you with is a lot of talk about the metaphysics of the book, vague discussions of how well O’Malley handles the plot, and portions of Manny’s thoughts that were especially akin to my own paranoiac synapses. But I want you to buy this book and read it cover to cover and come back here and tell me what you thought. This book shows O’Malley has a fine sense of the odd, a clever but snarky mindset and a masterful hand at plot and he needs to be able to write more books. As awesome as the New Bizarro Author Series is, authors have to prove they can be money makers in order to get a book contract. Let’s all buy this book and ensure we get to hear more from O’Malley.

And today is the last giveaway, and I want to thank everyone who commented faithfully. I wish I had a million dollars and could give a book to everyone who comments, but since I can’t, please be sure to come back because I plan to have more themed weeks in the future. March will be zombies and, yes, there will be free books. But please leave a comment if you would like to enter the drawing for a free copy of The Egg Said Nothing. You have through 9:00 pm CST today, 2/18/11, to leave a comment and that comment will enter you in the drawing.

I want to thank everyone who helped make Bizarro Week so fun for me. I appreciate the authors for spreading the word and I’ve enjoyed reading all the new people in my comments, notably Hira H, Omino, Evil Gringo, Monsieur, my excellent friend Ted from Romania, and all my friends from my personal blog. I love talking about books, I love giving away books and this week has been a blast because of all the excellent people who commented here. Thanks to every single one of you.

Author: James Steele

Type of Book: Bizarro, fiction, novella, bestiality, indescribable

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: This is one of those times wherein just saying “Bizarro, duh,” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Oh my god, this book is why bizarro exists as a genre because there is no other category that could come close to classifying Steele’s weird book.

Availability: Published by Eraserhead Press in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Before I dive head first into this book, let’s get Bizarro Week business out of the way. Because I think the New Bizarro Author Series is an amazing idea that needs a lot of attention, I will always give away a free copy when I review any book from this series (and I may give away more books in the future – we’ll see how the old bank account looks after I finally crack and file my taxes). So if you want to enter the drawing to win a free copy of this book, all you have to do is leave me a comment to this entry. So simple. You have until 9:00 pm CST today, 2/17/11, to leave that comment, so get cracking.

I have to be brutally honest here and just get the negative out of the way. This book contains two things I loathe deeply: references to gaming and forced sodomy. Seriously, the former is an irritant and the latter is an OMG because I just get freaked out by the image of so much non-consensual buttsex. I’m a girl. What can I say. It’s all just a part of who I am. So almost needless to say, this book irritated me and made me uncomfortable. Though the forced sodomy is handled in a manner that makes sense in the narrative and because I have reached the limit of what I can tolerate in terms of feminist advocacy with the whole “raped to sleep by dickwolves” situation, I don’t find anything offensive in this book. Don’t mistake being squicked out from time to time with being offended. I mean, it’s a book in which everyone is into bestiality (I had to create a tag for it, and frankly I was surprised I didn’t already have one) and the characters exact justice using very large animal dildos. Honestly, there is no way anyone who is the least bit prudish, easily upset or easily offended should read this book. But then again, most people who are prudish, easily upset or easily offended are likely not reading this site.

I am a woman for whom nothing is shocking once I get used to it so I was not really that put off by the content in this book but man, Steele made me uncomfortable as hell in just the first few pages. Not a “let’s go online and start a flame war” sort of uncomfortableness, but rather an “I need to encase this book in concrete and drop it in the ocean” sort of way. But I got over it and while I cannot wholly say if I like this book in its entirety, I don’t know if it needs that sort of advocacy. It is so demented and bizarre and gross it calls out to be read by every fan of the outre in the same way David Baker’s book does. In fact, I think the world needs to get these two in a room and sweat them out, bottle their salty leavings and pour it on normal people to see what happens. Bloody revolution followed by a really perverted orgy, I suspect. That or issue restraining orders against them so they can never meet. Either way.

But let me be clear – it is a personal reaction, looking at the cartoonish sodomy in this book, a satiric device to show how casually people have come to accept their continual degradation in a society and remembering that horrible scene from American Me. And even within this personal reaction, I can see clearly that Steele is going for the extreme, pushing the envelope in a manner that will either appear hilarious or disturbing to the reader. That is partly why the bizarro genre exists – to write of the extreme, even when it is mixed with technicolor dildos and social justice.

Also, summing up this book is going to be harder than any other bizarro book I have ever discussed but I started a regimen of Prednisone yesterday and feel up to the task: Felix, like everyone else on the planet in this dystopic tale, is overeducated and underemployed. And like most of the people in the world, he has trained to be a Stress Management Specialist. You see, everyone in Steele’s strange world is into animals – those who are into people are the perverts. Felix is an Equine Stress Management Specialist and in an attempt to prove himself as a superior ESMS he tries to jack off a horse except he gets more than he bargained for. He gets the Sacred Thor, an enormous horse johnson that turns different colors and changes size when it “levels” up. It levels up by fighting these sort of nuclear toaster things that have embedded themselves into people, mostly the unemployed who stand in lines for months to get a job. Oh, and getting a job is a fabulous thing in this world because even though the workers are subjected to multiple acts of forced sodomy each shift, customers committing suicide, and surveillance that requires dozens of supervisors per one employee, everyone wants to contribute to the greater good. Oh, and everyone gets sustenance via these places that emit nutritional grease people breathe throughout the day. Felix discovers the source of the toasters, as does a coterie of people also being led by rubber dongs and a strange battle ensued. I cannot reveal the ending but it is suitably dystopic and god, it sets up a sequel and I am secretly thrilled because I wonder how Steele would top himself and want to see that happen.

Despite my only somewhat tongue-in-cheek reaction to the content of this book, the fact remains that this book is steeped in very clever satire about the state of education and worker satisfaction as well the whole idea behind superheroes. Add to it text that is at times funny as hell, and that’s some good incentive to read through what I, as a person with two X-chromosomes, call the icky bits.

This? This was an icky bit. It freaked me out but I can also see how people of a certain mindset would find this deeply interesting. Me? It sent me to Google to search the term “horse sheath” because despite my advanced age and somewhat dissolute past, I am, in many ways, still innocent about the genital workings of horses. Anyway, here’s Felix showing his skills as an ESMS as a chorus of angels sing:

The horse spread its legs a little as the angels added guitars and electric bagpipes to their orchestra. Felix rubbed faster. The bagpipes and violins kept up with his pace. Light from the heaven strobed in time.

Something was different about this horse. For one, nothing has come out of its sheath. Usually, after just a few rubs, a penis would slip out and flop around, ready for Felix to perform various stress management maneuvers that could only be learned in college.

He rubbed harder. Still nothing. Felix had never had trouble finding a horse’s penis before. He felt something inside the sheath, but where was it? Perhaps it was stuck, or clogged from years of non-use? This horse needed help bad.

Okay, so this was uncomfortable. A little. Just wait. Felix observes a galaxy in the horse’s sheath and it goes on from there:

He slipped his arm elbow-deep into the sheath and felt around. There was the universe. He held it in the palm of his hand. He felt the meaning of life, but it was too depressing so he shook it from his mind and forgot about it.

[...]

His forearm emerged from the sheath. The angels rang bells and shouted in triumph and jubilation. Felix pulled out to his wrist. The angels performed Rock Concert Movement #75: Group Sex in the Mosh Pit. Felix pulled and pulled, and finally he fell backwards and landed on his rear, horse penis resting in his lap. It was a full two feet long and five inches across the flare.

It was green.

Felix blinked.

It was translucent, too.

Reached to the elbow… Pulled and pulled… :twitch:

But anyway, this is how Felix gets the Sacred Thor, a powerful weapon that a stallion in the clouds tells him he will know how to use as he spends time with it. The horse eventually explains, later in the book:

“Epic quests don’t involve the internet or TV! They involve sex toys and manly, hard-bodied, larger-than-life heroes defying physics, logic and insurmountable odds, spitting out quotable, highly marketable catchphrases all the while.”

Sad but true and acidly satirical. Pretty funny too.

So Felix takes the Sacred Thor, a life-sized horse dildo, and not knowing exactly what his purpose is, he tries to have sex with the Sacred Thor, which isn’t having it. After lubing it up, hilarity ensues and here is where I knew Steele was a clever writer because he followed up the tense manipulation of a horse sheath with this:

He tried applying lube directly to the Thor, but the Thor shook off all the lube and whacked Felix upside the head.

When he regained consciousness six hours later, he searched the net for advice. Nobody had ever heard of a life-sized horse toy, let alone one that needed to be tamed. Frustrated, Felix tried sucking on the dildo, but every time his lips went near it, the Thor smacked him across the face.

Yeah, I laughed and compared my fate to Felix’s as both of us had been forced to resort to the Internet within the first 11 pages of this book.

Then Felix, who cannot find full employment in the world of horse release, has to work at a store that kind of sounds like Target or Walmart. It is here that there is so much forced sodomy that I just wanted to cry. It’s a terrible place to work. He has many supervisors who give him conflicting tasks and rape him to show dominance. Customers commit suicide at such a rapid pace they begin to smell and no one cleans them out. Felix has the Thor with him at work and good thing too because he first encounters the flying toasters and he and the Thor defeat them.

But that scene, despite the fact that I refuse to quote from it is important because it both shows the dehumanization of workers in this society and how they have come to take rape as their due in order to have a job that doesn’t even pay, but it also explains Steele’s dedication, which I will quote:

This is for everyone who shopped the Christmas season of 2009.

I hate all of you.

Yeah, Steele worked retail, god help him. Maybe even still works it. I know nothing about the man but that dedication and the horrors Felix faces on the job mean I just know, man I know. And believe me, everyone who knew me Christmas season of 1995 when I managed a Nine West store in Lewisville, Texas, knows how close I came to terrible violence. Instead, I had a nervous breakdown. Good times.

Really, at this point I am just quoting passages that I found interesting or funny because unless I just basically reprint the book here I cannot do it justice. Just know there is an epic battle with animal dildos that all change color and get bigger as they “level up.” Ugh. Gaming references. But many of you lack my neurotic aversion to gaming so, you know, it may be okay for you. But this next passage shows even better the work dystopia in Steele’s world. Albert, a pedophile security guard, just wants to make a difference but he can’t. He can’t be a cop and as a security guard, he can really only sit and look at magazines as working makes his bosses suspicious.

Years ago, management sensed its guard might be taking extra breaks when no one was watching, so, to ensure its employees weren’t wasting company time, fourteen cameras were installed and aimed at the guard’s booth. But to do this without spending money on equipment, management moved all fourteen cameras from the factory and placed them around the booth.

In a way, Steele is sort of a combination between J.G. Ballard, Barbara Ehrenreich and that movie Zoo. A perverted dystopia where no one is happy but thinks they are, and forces spend all their time making sure no one spends an extra minute buying a soda at work.

And in places this book is seriously funny:

“What is this place?! Who are you?! Who do you work for?!”

The man gasped. “My name is Pat. This is my novelty toaster company, keeping the American kitchen quaint for nearly a quarter century.”

“Don’t mock me with mission statements! What’s going on here.”

And then there is forcible sodomy again. Again. AGAIN. Sigh…

But there is humor with the butt horror!

A woman, a little older than Felix, carrying something large. He squinted. It was a dildo shaped like a dolphin’s member, except bright pink and about five times longer than it should have been.

Felix studied hard in college. This will not be the first or last time he is able to discern from across a room the animal penis a dildo is based on.

There is a humorous scene with a girl named Martha, or “Tha” for short, and her room walls are screens that show her perpetual IMs and blog posts, as she swirls in a chair and answers messages and e-mails and responds to comments as they show up on her four walls. And don’t worry about how this fits into the book. It does and you should buy the book to find out. But anyway:

Tha heard a noise that did not come from the speakers. It was a loud thud, and it sounded uncompressed. She mentally wrote an emo online journal entry about the disturbing sound. Instantly she received 267 responses expressing sympathy and wishing her good luck making it through the troubling time.

[...]

Tha had the urge to write another emo journal entry, but nothing was happening. There was no music. No color. The world was gone. Should she sleep? Did she have to go to the bathroom? There was no way of knowing.

Yep. That was me in 2003. And Facebook wasn’t even a thing yet back then. The world is indeed a strange and horrible place at times and Steele cleverly comments on it whilst thrusting dildos around from scene to scene.

It was about page 61 when the insanity that I have been told is part of my charm was pinged. Let me give you a snippet of the conversation that begins on 60 and continues on to 62:

“You lie.”
“Why would I do that?”
“You tell me.”
“Well, I might lie to conceal my true intentions.”
“Naturally.”
“And I might lie to make myself more important than I really am.”
“I’d believe that.”
“I might also lie to hide the fact that I’m telling the truth.”
“Come again?”
“Since I’m not lying, I might tell a lie to satisfy you so we can move on.”
“Or to conceal your plan.”
“Who said I have a plan?”
“Everyone has a plan.”
“Not everyone.”
“Sure they do.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Of course they do.”
“Do I look like I have a plan.”
“Yes.”

This is the conversation of a man holding a horse dildo and a man holding a lion dildo. This is either fucking hilarious or deeply insane and, really, no reason it can’t be both.

So we have a society of people who are highly trained to sexually service animals and the market is glutted, where there are no decent jobs and those that are decent require sodomy and seldom pay wages, there are a bunch of people running amok with animal dildos in a place where people eat by breathing grease and there are exploding toasters put into people by a madman whom the spirits behind the dildos want defeated. Got it? This is a seriously deranged, insane, clever, nasty, twitchy, funny book. Like all its bizarro brethren it has too many typos for my tastes but Steele is a man who, like Baker, needs to write a second book. Steele, his use of two of my bugbears aside, is clever, funny and demented. So I say buy this book. I warned you but I also think you should buy it. I read it and I’m just fine. Sort of. Mr. Oddbooks says he wants the statement “Felix had never had trouble finding a horse’s penis before” printed on a t-shirt and I may arrange that for him, so really, this was a win-win situation.

And don’t forget, you should try to win the free copy of this book I am giving away. Leave me a comment here today, 2/17/11 before 9:00 pm, CST and I’ll enter your name into a drawing. It has been asked how I determine the winner. It is literally a drawing. I read the names from all the comments to Mr. Oddbooks, who writes them on slips of paper and folds the pieces of paper up into little squares. He puts the squares into a Tupperware dish, puts the cover on and shakes it all up for a minute. He brings the little dish to me and I close my eyes and pull out a square. I’m sure there is some sort of computer program that could randomize it better but I like this hands-on approach.