Author: Mykle Hansen, illustrated by Nate Beaty

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, cannibalism

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Okay, it’s like a Jonathan Swift satire mixed with that long riddle people tell on road trips about the man who orders seagull and runs screaming out of the restaurant with a tasty helping of Occupy Wall Street on the side.

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

Comments: Oh, this was a fabulous book, and it gives me an excuse to create a “cannibalism” category. It’s one of those books that is the exception that proves the rule. Hansen tells without showing and 90% of the book comes from the protagonist’s one-sided conversation with a man called Louis, both of which are in chapter one of  What Not to Do When You Write a Novel, but Hansen gets away with it.  Why André’s conversation is one-sided is one of those things I cannot reveal lest I utterly spoil the book. In fact, this is going to be a bear to discuss because I cannot reveal many plot elements without just ruining the book.

Bearing that in mind, here’s as brief a synopsis as my enthusiasm will permit: Aboard the good ship l’Arche, along the coast of an island called Cristobo, André and his partner Marko have been engaging in questionable culinary behaviors. One is that they serve unusual meats to millionaires. They lure in jaded millionaires with offerings like giraffe, dining aboard the ship in monied secrecy. But André and Marko also have an ulterior motive catering to millionaires – millionaires evidently make good eating and André embraces the idea of eating the rich. But millionaires also have friends with ships and the L’Arche is under siege as André and Marko scramble to find a way to escape. Louis, a long-time frenemy of André’s, plays a crucial role in all these goings-on but that’s where I have to stop. To discuss his role will expose too much of the story.

With the synopsis out of the way, but before I begin to discuss the meat of this book, as it were, I need to say that this is one of the better-written bizarro novels. Beautiful word flow, gorgeous word choice, decently-enough edited, I wanted to cry midway through it.  I mean, there were some editing issues, but lately I’ve been smacked in the face and possibly on the ass with several terribly edited books recently and this book was the reward for not chucking out all the strange literature I try to consume and sticking exclusively with Dickens and Austen until the day I die.

And it’s so wonderful that Hansen got that right because this is a novel that demands intense attention to words. When writing of foodie cannibals, one needs a fussy precision and Hansen pulls it off brilliantly. In addition to reasonably clean the text is, Hansen conveys the near-neurotic attention to detail that foodies often exhibit. Not being a foodie myself, I have no idea if this is food-gibberish or not, but it sure has a decided foodie-riff to it.

…before you leave this place I will prepare for you my Millionaire in Limousine: steaming roasted loin of venture capitalist slow-braised in Madeira, served on a bed of squid-ink cabbage poached with chestnuts and Lardons Millionaires. You’ve never had anything like it. I also insist you try my Aspic Sweetbreads of Heiress Dissolu, molded in a swine’s head terrine and tiaraed with clove and apple. So light and delicate, you’d think it’s made of perfumed dreams.

You see André takes very seriously the consumption of long pig.

This is no mere restaurant – it’s a cathedral of food! Pilgrims to l’Arche have by our rare and exquisite flavors been transported, transmigrated, have communed with the great mystery, have wept with joy, have been saved.

Eating rich men is evidently quite a religious experience. And it is through monologue like this that Hansen deftly creates intense characterization. André does very little in this book, and he speaks mainly to Louis, who never responds, but at the end you end up with André as a character-in-full.

André has a specific sort of millionaire he likes to consume. Not just any will do.

It was late morning, a Cristobo waiter named Raoul and I were dumping a bucket of indigestibles over the leeward side, when the asinine scion of some spreadsheet fortune, fresh from Namibia, pulled alongside us on his bright red double-engined landing vessel – dispatched from the belly of a larger service vessel, that in turn follows his father’s truly gargantuan luxury liner around the globe – and deposited this poorly-bled, poorly-iced and shotgun-perforated beast onto our decks – one thousand pounds of unrefrigerated baby giraffe dropped from a crane like an immense spotted bony birdshit without so much as an “are you open?” – and instructed us to drop whatever else we were doing to get it ready for a late supper that evening for his friends. How many friends? What time? Not sure, he said, but save the skin, it’s valuable. And he adjusted his ludicrous sailor’s cap and motored away in a spray of salt water and hundred dollar bills.

That’s the kind of millionaire I like to eat.

And I’m okay with that. Baby giraffe indeed.

And that is the kind of millionaire we serve here at our humble bistro l’Arche: nouveau-riche gadabouts returning from chartered safaris with something they’ve killed. They’re drawn to us like calamari to the lamps of a fishing boat, and with them they bring lions, apes, pandas, eagles, elephants and more. They come to pay reverence to our motto: Consume Quod Interficis.

And again, I’m largely okay with this idea. If one makes a virtue of eating what one kills, perhaps it’s wrong to search for a larger morality in killing millionaires as long as one eats them.

Millionaires in the book, as well as in our current reality, have been taking it on the nose as the economy has been troubled and the poor have been grumbling, and millionaires do like to show their power via excess. André provides access to the ultimate excess.

Killing one another seems to be their latest distraction. An elegant form of internecine warfare has become popular among the rich. They’re armoring their yachts, fitting them with extravagant cannons. They’re arriving at l’Arche under heavier security, with larger and more numerous bodyguards, and their spring fashion is for hand-tooled leather holsters and designer bandoliers.
[...]
Some months back I had an interesting chat with a charming millionaire who posited, over a butter-braised polar bear paw and a second bottle of Riesling, that the world’s rich had been milking one another like an interconnected system of cows for over a decade, without once pausing to ingest any grass. This man called for a great reckoning, a final audit of who owns what and who owes who, and while he didn’t say as much, I imagine his accounting practices were coarser than yours or mine. He seemed to relish the coming struggle: a chance to test his new guns. Millionaires do, I’ve found, enjoy a good struggle, especially when they spot an advantage in the rules.

Curiously, that same millionaire was delivered to our service entrance just a few days later, packed in ice and stripped of belongings – the trophy of another, larger millionaire.

Still, André waxes philosophical about his unsavory blood lust, engaging in rationalizations that make sense but also help him avoid taking on moral baggage:

Food is life, yes, but also: food is death. It’s life eating life. Others must die so that we may live; there’s never enough food for everybody. The decision to live is the decision to kill. The rest is boring details that animals don’t bother with: vegetarianism, veganism, localism, ethical practices, kosherness, organicness – who shall we kill, in others words, and how shall we kill them? Those are the highest values that we may aspire to, we who have decided to live.

I did try to be a vegetarian once, but vegetarianism no longer impresses me. They never wonder where their fields come from, or who had to be removed to make room for the plow. They have no sense of history. Show me a farm, and I’ll show you a battlefield. Vegetarians fetishize inaction, as I once did. They can brag about the evils they don’t do, but what is the good they do instead.

Well, one would assume the good they do instead is not eat giraffe, panda and their neighbor’s kid, but André is not really willing to make such distinctions. But as I read, I realized, to my own terrible shame, that if André had, in fact, just stuck to eating terrible humans, I would have been on André’s side.

But amusing to me was how after André justifies his semi-savage “kill for food” philosophical, he follows it with a sort of apology that one can sort sum up as “return the pain”:

The millionaires, they do not suffer. Yes, they do on occasion have problems – loneliness, infidelity, deceased pets – but generally the millionaires delegate their actual suffering to others. A great deal of human suffering is, in fact, the misplaced suffering of millionaires.

Here at l’Arche we return their lost suffering to them. We help them understand how the other half hurts. That is but one of the many elite services we provide.

Yeah, being skinned, spatchcocked like a chicken and cooked slowly can bring suffering into sharp focus, if only for a few minutes.

But the parts I enjoyed the best were when André describes how his despicable palate serves a greater justice.

The very existence of the millionaires, in the shoddiest of mismanaged countries and at the tops of the most modern western hotels, is an ancient and confounding puzzle. How do they convince the rest of humanity to feed them? How do they dodge the obvious complaint: that they take too much and give too little? In a world of enlightened cooperation they would be banned, taxed, reprimanded, even jailed – or so one would think, but even the socialists have their millionaires. Power simply seems to concentrate, like clots in the blood or lumps in the gravy. In a world of self-interest and greed you’d expect millionaires to be the constant victims of robbery, assault, kidnapping – and true, these things do happen, but with nothing near the frequency needed to make a dent in the millionaire problem.

Take out the part about their power and this is not dissimilar to the reasons why people hunt deer in Central Texas.

André has what he calls an ethical philosophy regarding eating the glut of millionaires:

Let us husband them well, the millionaires. Give them their yachts, their many homes, many cars, many hand-stitched suits of clothing. Send them to the best schools and largest boardrooms. This is what makes them millionaires – what makes them fat and rich and wholesome. Give them the best life that an edible creature could possibly live. It’s what the new organic cattle ranchers have tried to do with their beef, of course, but to a far greater degree than has ever been attempted – indeed to the greatest degree possible. Spare no effort in fattening the rich, work for them and tithe to them and massage them and groom them and put their needs ahead of our own. As it has always been, so let it remain.

Until! Until that day comes when we require their sacrifice, for the greater good. Oh, the ceremony of it: picture this year’s wealthiest industrialists proceeding to the regal altar, bedecked in finest Gucci and Versace, encrusted with fourteen karat gold jewelry and sophisticated personal electronics. We shall thank them publicly, cheer them sincerely, stun them carefully, slaughter them with dignity and roast them with joy.

Free-range millionaires. I still have to think a lot of them would be very gamy.

This book was a big surprise for me. I was not prepared to enjoy a book about eating the likes of Donald Trump so much. The book offers some fine writing, a tense plot toward the end, and enjoyable lectures delivered by a lunatic. I wish I could reveal more of André’s struggles but to do so really would spoil the plot. So buy this book and find out the rest. Find out why Louis is so quiet. Find out if one should fear Marko. Find out how the millionaires respond. Highly recommended.

Author: Tony Rauch

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, bizarro, gently odd

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It has enough qualities of bizarro and the gently odd that it is not mainstream reading fare.

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

Comments: I’ve read Rauch before and found his collection of short stories in the book Laredo to be serviceable and entertaining enough to be worthy of a good review. However, Eyeballs Growing All Over Me… Again is a better collection. Less verbose, less neurotic, more confident – this collection is all together a tighter, cleaner, more relevant book. Rauch’s confidence as a storyteller has improved since I last read him. His stories show their purpose without a lot of hemming and hawing, sometimes even eschewing what I would consider a typical ending or a normal resolution. Not every story in this collection worked for me, but those that did not strike a chord likely failed to reach me for subjective reasons. With one exception, there isn’t an objectively bad story in the bunch.

That is not to say there were not problems. Like almost every bizarro book I read, this book had editing problems that were intrusive enough for me to notice. It’s a shame when an author writes a very good book and routine editing does not catch basic mistakes. This is an issue I continue to have with bizarro books as a whole and one I suspect will not go away anytime soon, yet I also suspect I will keep mentioning it until it stops annoying me. The most egregious issue with this book is that hyphens and em-dashes are used interchangeably. The interruption when I read hyphenated words and had to go back because I realized they were hyphenated and not words connected by an emdash was intrusive to the flow of the book. Perhaps this is a problem only in the e-book. Perhaps it was caught and I was reading an old copy. Who knows, but bear in mind this book did not escape the problem I often have with bizarro editing in other areas as well. On the other hand, this book does overcome one of the biggest complaints I personally receive about bizarro – the books are too short. While I don’t mind paying even for short books, I know many look at book purchases using a cost-benefit analysis and often find bizarro books too short for the price. That won’t be a problem with this Rauch collection.

This book is divided into three sections of stories and there are too many for me to discuss all of them, so I will stick to the ones I consider to be the best, though interestingly, I think the story from which this book takes its title is the weakest in the collection.

The collection begins with the story, “The Stench.” A man comes home to find an enormous, very smelly monster has taken up residence in his home while he was away. His wife is wearing an inhaler mask and has no good explanation for why the monster is there other than it may have wandered in because it’s been hot outside. Still, they play host to the creature, exercising a mild, suburban politeness.

The beast turns its big shaggy brown head to look at me.

Whatever it is, it’s an ugly mother, that’s for sure. I stand and nod to it in a friendly greeting, then tilt my head to look at it one way, and then another. I step forward, hang my hat on the top of the coatrack without looking, and walk across the living room and sit down on the couch, settling in next to the brown, raggy beast. I look him over. Gnats buzz about him. He holds a glass of water on his leg. At first glance, in proportion to him, it looks like a glass of water, but it’s actually an entire plastic pitcher of water.

Despite having a monster in their house, the couple go about their evening and retire to bed wearing inhaler masks, bickering gently over what they should do about the beast. They decide that if the thing is to stay in the house, they should trim it and wash it like one would a stray dog, but when they go to find it, it is gone. They feel vaguely disappointed and the man feels like he missed a chance to contribute to society in some way. He concludes:

“Honey, let’s have children,” I exhale and nod desperately. “Lots and lots of children.”

Where the Wild Things Are played itself out in his home and while not averse to it, the man and his wife decided to clean and sanitize the monster, to make it a family member, rather than revel in the mystery of it, wearing masks to blunt the reality of what we all overlook when we are children – that our fantasies never work in real life and can all too often stink outright. But rather than mourn that lost innocence, the man decides to create more innocence, so that the next time a monster comes in, the monster will be appreciated for what it is. I really liked this story.

In “Gigantic” a huge robot rips the roof off a couple’s house. The man and woman have a strange relationship with the robot, a relationship from the past, and they sense the robot’s loneliness as it picks its way delicately through the neighborhood.

“Send Krupac Through the Portal” is a story that crams into it all kinds of unlikely elements. A lovelorn “nice guy,” time travel, government conspiracy, the number 23, quantum physics in the form of string theory and so much more. A man who loves and is not loved in return decides to visit other dimensions because the object of his affection lets him down easy, telling him:

…that maybe in another time, another place, we were meant to be together, but that she just doesn’t feel it in the here and now. Not now. She just needs time, she says. Maybe in a little while. Maybe in the future. Maybe.

The narrator finds access to a technology that will permit him to find all his other selves, the derivations of himself spread out across dimensions, the copies of himself as he made slightly different decisions and ended up with a different life. His friend Desmond offers him the following opportunity:

He’s thinking maybe the lab guys can zip me into another time stream one of these nights and maybe I can find a Margo that is interested in starting a relationship with me there. She might not even know me at all in one of those other timelines as our paths may not have crossed due to various arbitrary factors that would’ve kept us apart.

So the techs find a parallel world wherein the protagonist died young, several of them where he no longer exists and will not encounter himself, and he sets off to find his love, stalking her across dimensions, certain his life in that current dimension will in no way compare to the potential bliss if he can only find Margo in that other place where she promised him she could possibly love him.

The “New Kid” is a sweet tale of a new boy in school who has an amazing new way to approach tabletop football and an interesting elixir that helps him quickly close the gap between being an outsider and a kid with a new friend. The tabletop football description, full of well-written, kid-sized fantasy, is a delightful scene.

“People Have Been Drifting Away Lately” is an ethereal, lovely magical realism piece. It does what it says on the tin, employing beautiful language. It’s a story of detachment but it’s a calm, peaceful detachment.

Suddenly one of them sort of curls up. He is an older gentleman, all dressed up in an old suit. He seems to flatten out and his body sort of squares up. Right before me, he says, “Oh my,” as this happens. It starts slowly, as if all the air is being sucked out of him. And a bit of wind catches him and he sort of lifts off the ground and just hangs there in the air before us for a moment, then a gust of wind takes him higher like twenty feet in the air. And he slowly spins there in the sky, almost like a leaf or a kite. It’s like a dream, but like watching someone else’s dream from a distance.

Rauch, though much of this collection lacks traditional endings, concluded this story in the best way possible. This was my favorite of his stories.

I also, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, loved “The Bug.” A father and a son are doing battle against human-sized insects infesting their home. But even though the bugs are a menace, the father prevents his son from battering one with a baseball bat. Instead the father and the bug engage in some sort of scrum until the father wrests the morning paper from the insect and bests it in combat. They just want to go into the cool basement and the father cannot fault them for that but he is annoyed that they never learn their lesson as he pummels them in hand-to-hand combat.

My dad slowly walks down to it, bends to reach for some of its legs, swings it around and begins dragging its limp body down the walk to the trash out in the back alley. “I call this one Artie… Man, I tell ya,” he sighs, “They never learn.”

“You’ve seen this one before?” I gasp.

“Oh, sure. He knows the place pretty well,” Dad nods, “…He slept in your bed one night when you were staying over at your friend Terry’s place.”

“Oh yuck.”

“Yeah, they like to make themselves at home. You should’ve seen him there – snuggled up all warm and cozy like. Your mom actually took a picture of him. Said he looked cute.”

“The Procedure” is a sort of unlikely bizarro story in the beginning. It starts as a Gothic tale of a young child being rushed to the doctor in the night with a mysterious illness. A mother wakes her son to tell him his sister did not recover and their father would be bringing her home soon. The mother gasps, unable to explain the terrible accident and the boy does not understand. Then it takes a left turn, because when the father arrives with the sister, she is not a corpse waiting to be buried in the family plot. She just has a goat head. But more than just having a goat’s head, her essence of being human is gone. The little boy is made uneasy as he deals with this terrible change.

He feels betrayed by life, as if a promise had been made a long time ago that these things would never happen, and here something like this was now suddenly allowed, without preparation or warning, as if his sister were sacrificed so others might live out normal lives free from the reaches of such things.

In a way, that gothic tone continues even after we are aware of the goat head girl. Looming unease, the hint of future psychological unspooling, the loss of innocence, potential madness. This was a very effective story.

There are other stories, some very good, guaranteed to satisfy all kinds of bizarro tastes. A strange, stalkery man discovers his neighbor’s clone factory with some fairly disgusting descriptions along the way. A charming vignette of tiny, stampeding elephants. A man whose head grows to an enormous size, whose teenaged child is the only one with any sort of idea of how to react to the situation and is disregarded. A touching story about a strange plant given as a gift that rewards the recipient years later in an unexpected way. A good chunk of this book verges into the strip of literary land wherein bizarro and paranormal fiction overlap. If you think you can stomach the emdash/hyphen substitutions and other small editing issues, I recommend this book. The writing is at once creepy, romantic, strange, and sweet, and the stories are imaginative, amusing, and thoughtful. It’s a very good collection.

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.