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: Richard Perez

Type of Book: Fiction, transgressive (sort of)

Why Do I Consider This Book: The content is outre at times.

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

Comments: I’m in a slump. I don’t mind admitting it. I find myself reading mainstream fiction and sewing cat toys (if you want some, send me an e-mail). I look at the stack of odd books I need to discuss and I decide it’s time to clean the toilet or watch another barely coherent horror movie, and since Mr. Oddbooks got one of those Apple TV things, I have plenty. Lots and lots of really cheesy, really stupid horror movies. And every one of them seems more appealing than discussing books.

Is it a phase? Is my slump due to the fact that the drought caused the back of my house to sink an inch into the dried clay? Is it because I wake up every morning with a primitive need to pray to Tlaloc, begging him to just let it rain already? I’m not to the point that I’ll consider human sacrifice but I can see how it might come to that if this fucking summer will not end. Perhaps I will feel more kindly disposed toward my stack of oddness once the weather finally breaks and I can go outside without needing to go to the hospital after five minutes or so. Perhaps…

So I’m totally forcing myself to discuss books when I really want to be figuring out how to make my catnip fabric fortune cookies more realistic. And you should bear in mind this shitty mood of mine as you read any book discussion that occurs before Central Texas gets five inches of rain and goes two weeks without hitting 100 degrees.

Okay, Permanent Obscurity is not a bad book but it is not a good book either. The protagonist, in addition to lacking self-awareness, is one of the most tiresome, irritating, foolhardy, aggressive heroines you will ever read. She is best friends with a sociopathic, self-absorbed sadist. Together, the two of them, in the bowels of New York, decide to escape from the terrible financial situation they find themselves in by making a porno. Oh yeah, they owe a ton of money to a drug dealer. That should have gone without saying. The porno goes terribly wrong, as you knew it would, ending in a high speed chase and jail time.

The author tries to justify creating characters that irritate and annoy by saying, through the mouth of Dolores:

You better recognize this fact: People are complicated.

People are indeed complicated. Dolores, the heroine, and her friend Serena, are not that complicated, however. There is really only one complicated character in this book, a man called Baby who is in thrall, in a very controlled manner, to Serena. Everyone one else shows clearly how being completely fucked-up often passes for being complicated.

As I read this book, I imagined Dolores, our pregnant and drug abusing heroine, to be what would happen if you crossed the actresses Rosie Perez and Michelle Rodriguez with a fierce, constantly yapping Jack Russell terrier. I imagined Serena, the best friend who is hardly a friend and governed by a psychopathic self-interest, to be what would happen if you crossed Lindsay Lohan and any random porn actress with a Siamese cat.

And as you read these descriptions, you may be thinking this is nothing anyone would want to read or you might be thinking this combination sounds like the best thing ever. I’m not sure that either is correct or that either is incorrect. I do know Perez may lipfart at my attempts to discuss his book, evidenced from this passage, as Dolores discusses reading the reviews for Serena’s band online:

Then, from top to bottom, her product page looked like a hate-blog, with all the “reviewers” posting anonymously.

And who were these busters? Only your typical swarm of Internet critics: raging wanks and wannabes exerting their democratic right to be complete morons.

But then again, it’s hard to tell because the reviews Dolores reads, once one gets to know Serena, sound completely on the mark. Perez may be far more self-aware than his creation, Dolores.

Oh Dolores. She is the sort of woman who misses work at her temp job because she is on a drug bender yet is furious at her employer when she gets fired. She finds out her much-older boyfriend, Raymond, cheated on her and is understandably angry. However, Raymond, quite in love with our yapping heroine, is willing to do almost anything to win her back, and in the absence of winning her over, offers her a large, LARGE sum of money because he is genuinely concerned about her well-being. Given that Dolores and Serena are on the run from drug dealers who will kill them if they don’t come up with the money, Dolores’ “I AM A FIERCELY INDEPENDENT WOMAN AND WILL TAKE NO HELP FROM MY BABY DADDY EVEN THOUGH I STILL LOVE HIM AND AM BEING STALKED BY PEOPLE WHO WILL BEAT MY ASS FOR THEIR MONEY!” stance makes perfect sense, does it not? He even sends her a damn check she refuses to cash.

Her rejection of Raymond is all the more saddening because even though he cheated, he had a lot of faith in Dolores’ skill as a photographer and urged her to set up a website and develop a store. He wanted her to succeed at her chosen art. Serena, on the other hand, is only interested in exploiting Dolores’ skills and connections in order to pay off her drug dealer. Yet Dolores cannot say no to Serena as she repeatedly refuses Raymond. She also clearly still loves Raymond, evidenced by her taking care of him when he goes into a bad drunk spell, but she cannot act in her own best interests to save her life. You just feel your fists clench as you read this book because Dolores will make you despair even as you realize you care very little about her stupid plight.

Get used to the feeling of detached frustration because you will feel it often as you read this book. Dolores will test you as she goes about her day – hooked on drugs, using large amounts of drugs throughout her pregnancy, deciding to keep the baby, deciding she loves Raymond, deciding she loves Serena, deciding she hates Raymond, deciding she hates Serena, fucking up her jobs, running from drug dealers, deciding to make a porn movie but accidentally making a snuff film. She so relentlessly fucks up her life that I began mentally to shout at her, the way I will sometimes do when I get caught up in one of the aforementioned horror films, “No, you idiot! Don’t go down that alley! Stop sniffing that substance! Stop playing with Serena – you know she’s evil!”

Yet even as I wanted to put my foot up Dolores’ ass and spray Serena with Raid, I kept reading. I kept reading for a number of reasons. I guess it is backhanded praise to say that Perez has a gift for characterization because he managed to create such frustrating and despicable characters, but maybe it isn’t because perhaps he wanted me to react with frustration and revulsion. But characterization aside, there is a compelling, train-wreck feeling you have reading this book, a sort of rubbernecking as you watch these people completely mismanage their lives and drag others into the maelstrom of their dysfunction. Seriously, this book at times was amusingly over the top, continually upping the “Holy Crap, what can happen next to these dumb fucks!” factor.

That exaggerated extremity was, at times, entertaining. This book really isn’t a cautionary tale because the average person isn’t this addicted, this enthralled or this stupid. The average woman isn’t going to find herself in Dolores’ shoes. But it can still be interesting reading about her. I mean, I’ve already spoiled that something really bad happens as they shoot the porn film that they think will make so much money it will erase their drug debt (mostly Serena’s debt, but Dolores, loyal Dolores, takes on the burden of the debt as if it is her own), and it is, objectively horrible. But it is also subjectively absolutely hilarious.  I won’t belabor that point much more because if you decide to read this book after reading my critique, the dreadful porn shoot is worth the price of admission.

But there are other scenes worth discussing, and Perez is a pretty good writer. When I wasn’t rolling my eyes, I realized Perez actually did a remarkable job of creating Dolores, a girl utterly torn apart as her ideas of the world and herself are violated. Perez at times hits upon a zeitgeist that could be a part of the cautionary part of this book. Here’s Dolores’ observations upon meeting up with a group of old friends:

All of us had attended college, were up to our asses in debt, and had shit jobs.

That was the extent of it.

And why was this? Why were we in this predicament?

Mostly because we all stubbornly clung to the ridiculous notion of someone working in the arts, of somehow making a name for ourselves in our own self-chosen artistic fields, of holding on to what we believed was our identity.

How impractical is that?

The idea was always to find the job of least hours and responsibility that would allow us maximum time to pursue our own creative interests and grow.

But somehow things never worked out as they should.

Somehow we all seemed to end up wasting more time, working more hours, feeling less significant (because we were working anonymously), and losing courage and spirit.

Poor Dolores is having to come to terms with the fact that she isn’t as special as she thought when she was younger and that without the spark of true genius of an artist, she will have to work at a day job to support her. She thinks she is facing the cold world that is not receptive to her work. Rather, she is undisciplined and lacks the drive to make her life what she wants it to be. Perhaps that is the real cautionary element of this book – that the youthful belief in one’s self to create pure art must be backed by hard work. Dolores is a photographer and evidently a good one, but she’s scattered, drugged and loves a grifter girl who cheapens her.

And Dolores has a good heart. Her instincts are to be kind, even as she stubbornly abuses herself, her body, and her emotions. Here she describes how she encourages Raymond to love his body, and again, at the end, she finds out that maybe she isn’t as special as she thought she was, and in this case, she is wrong. She was special but people are weak and it’s just another blow to her idea of herself, leaving her weakened prey for Serena:

A touch of vitiligo had left a portion of the skin albino white, so his cock had a mottled appearance.

Big deal.

“No one’s perfect, honey,” I told him. “And it’s okay to be different.”

I was going to restore his cracked self-image: make him strong.

I promised him that.

Here I was to stay. Here to get that dill-zick all big and stiff, not to worry. And whenever he stressed about our age difference, which was the big anxiety, I told him to shut up about that, too.

Maybe I did too good a job building up his ego, in the end? Gave him too much confidence?

Maybe I should’ve made fun of his spotty cock, or called him a tired old man?

Part of me was mystified. How could Raymond even get it up with another girl?

Why would he get it up?

Wasn’t I the special one?

Wasn’t that my magic?

And this is all the more heartbreaking to read because in Dolores’ world, once she is emotionally violated she cannot go back. Yet she makes all kinds of allowances for Serena’s constant lies and manipulations as she adamantly refuses to admit that perhaps Raymond had been weak and stupid and really does love her despite cheating. Dolores really cannot tell a killer from a savior.

But as we get all of this depth about Dolores, the book frequently descends into slapstick and I wonder if that is why I find it hard to praise or condemn this book completely. The slapstick helped distract from the real emotional wreckage of Dolores’ life as she likely is deforming her fetus with lots of drugs and selling her soul to Serena, but the slapstick also diluted the purpose of the book. It made it hard to see what Perez wanted this novel to be: cautionary tale or amusing train wreck. It’s hard to be both. But the book shows a fabulous disaster that read funnier than it should have.

Take this scene, where Serena is encouraging Dolores to do what she has to do to get a locally-known filmmaker to lend her his equipment so they can film their porn movie (and Dolores’ antics to get the equipment was another of those scenes where I was mentally shouting at her to just not do it, please, for the love of god stop being so dumb, but alas…):

“We’re partners, Dolores. We’ll be splitting the take 50/50. Just talk to him, that’s all I’m saying. Make him a bunch of empty promises. We’re filmmakers now. We need to talk like filmmakers. You know the drill. Offer him percentages.”

“What?”

“Offer him ‘points.’”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“‘The back end,’ I don’t now. Promise him something. Anything.”

“But no blowjobs.”

“Just tell him I owe him one. Owe him big time. Tell him I love him. Anything.”

“Whoa, you have gone Hollywood!”

Yep, they have no idea what they are doing but think they have gone Hollywood. And Dolores sacrifices what little artistic integrity she has left to fulfill Serena’s plan.

In addition to dialogue that paints them as the worst sort of amateurs, we have a body transport scene directly from a slapstick mob movie, degenerate men who show up at the worst moments, stalled vans, grand theft, a car chase, and quite a bit more high ridiculousness. At times it is a strangely funny book.

So I don’t know. You could do worse reading this book but you could also do better. It’s well-written enough in places but it employs a sort of dumb girl logic that wore thin after a while. Reading as Dolores defiantly and sassily ruined her life wore thin because any goddamned fool would have eventually wised up but not our pregnant, drug-addled, feisty heroine. Not Dolores. She’s a well-fleshed character, and in the land where women refuse to make good choices and love their best friends who use them, she makes perfect sense.

But for me she was ultimately so frustrating, what she was willing to do for a friend who let her down, who didn’t come close to deserving it. As a woman who knows self-destructive impulses intimately, she ultimately made so little sense to me.

Is it the Devil? Or some self-destructive impulse? [...]

All I wanted to do from the beginning was to express myself, be myself, and maybe have a little fun.

Is that a crime?

You tell me.

And this is how it ends, save a couple of paragraphs. Dolores looks at the nightmare she helped create, a maelstrom of drug abuse, ill-advised sex, theft from the honest and dishonest alike, and accidental homicide, and she thinks, “Hey, I just wanted a little bit of fun as I engaged in some of the worst behavior imaginable because I can’t accept the fact my boyfriend cheated and my girlfriend is a sociopath. So I engaged in behavior that led to death, violence and betrayal. Is that so wrong?”

Of course Perez doesn’t label this a morality tale. He calls it a cautionary tale. But what caution should the reader engage in when the protagonist whose life is the caution itself does not get it? Dolores, so frustrating and tiresome at times, will learn nothing, which means that this book was just a wallow in terribleness and bad decisions. But while that is not my cup of tea in all regards, it’s a funny and at times moving wallow even as it is a nihilistic look at a heroine who just won’t learn any lessons.

So I don’t know if you want to read this book. I recommend it and I don’t recommend it. If you can stomach an annoying and tiresome heroine as you read through the relevant parts and the slapstick, go for it. I don’t see myself reading this book again, but Perez got enough right that I want to see what he writes next, and I guess that’s a good thing, to have done well enough to make me want else he’s capable of.

Type of Book: Fiction, experimental

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It is written like a drug-induced nightmare with no plot, characterization or coherence of thought and because I had to stop reading halfway through yet still want to discuss it.

Availability: Published by Two Dollar Radio in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I have been on a bad streak lately, book-wise. I struggled through a bland horror novel by one of my favorite writers and lost about two weeks as I forced myself to keep reading though  I longed to quit and move on to something else. By the last 30 pages, I just skimmed and by the last ten pages I gave up. I followed it with a book that was supposedly about the social and sexual politics of using one’s body to make money, via stripping or peep shows or similar. When it became clear that the politics were really going to be whining about how hard it is to be a girl, like even middle class white chicks get called a slut if they sleep with a boy OMG, I put it down.

And that cheesy book of whining about sexual politics was followed by The Orange Eats Creeps. Well, it was followed by my final stab at the book. I began reading it back in March and had to put it down because I could not make sense of it. I began reading again in May and gave it my last try in June. I can’t get past page 95. I stopped reading with the knowledge I was never going to finish it.

That was a difficult thing for me to do. I have, in the past, taken a very hard line with my reading habits. If I begin a book, I tell myself I must finish it. But lately I cannot make myself operate this way. I just don’t have time left in my life to struggle through books that don’t interest me or books that are not good. Which is why it sucked so much to give up on The Orange Eats Creeps because it did, ultimately, interest me, and it was not a bad book. It just was too uncontrolled, too scattered and too lacking in what one needs to make a novel; you can open this book to any page and begin reading and it will make no more or less sense than if you begin reading from the first page.  (And if it seems like dirty pool discussing a book I didn’t finish, I don’t make a habit of it, but I have done it before. But that book deserved it…)

Before I begin my discussion of the first 95 pages of this book, I need to get a rant out of the way. This book’s marketing was so utterly misleading that I suspect it pissed off many readers. Unless things are very different at Two Dollar Radio, most writers have no say in how their book is marketed. If I am wrong and Krilanovich approved of this approach I am all apologies, but I can’t imagine any writer would want their work so dreadfully misrepresented. This book is not about junkie vampires roaming the Pacific Northwest and encountering strange sights as they search for the protagonist’s sister. This book is not a new, fresh look at vampires, an adult’s replacement for the Twilight books. When I heard about this book and read some of the blurbs written about it, I thought, “Oh wow, this sounds like Near Dark but with grunge in the place of Southern culture on the skids.” That was not the case. Arguably, this is not a vampire novel at all. It is a stream-of-consciousness narrative that has no plot, no real characterization, and is the epitome of an experimental novel. It is difficult to follow, it has no linear story-telling, yet was marketed as follows:

A band of hobo vampire junkies roam the blighted landscape – trashing supermarket breakrooms, praying to the altar of Poison Idea and GG Allin at basement rock shows, crashing senior center pancake breakfasts – locked in the thrall of Robitussin trips and their own wild dreams.

In this book blog of mine, have I ever called anyone an asshole before? If I haven’t, let me start now. Whoever wrote the above, which is from the inside cover flap of the book and was reproduced on several book sale venues, is an asshole. Seriously. Because while some of the above is true, it paints a picture of this book that is not true, giving no hint to the fact that this is a difficult book, a book written in an experimental style.  That was a mistake because despite the fact that I found this narrative so jagged and jangling, so much so that it was like a kaleidoscope in the form of a book, this book has its moments of narrative brilliance. Passing it off as a junkie vampire hobo book during the time Kurt Cobain ruled the Pacific Northwest robs this book of its purpose and taints it because those who wanted a vampire novel can only walk away annoyed.

“Praying to the altar” of anything gives the impression that these are kids who attend punk shows as a part of their credo of identity. That is not the case. Music is not mentioned much, and is barely a side note, if you will. And those shows are seen through the jumbled eyes of the teenage narrator whose name we never learn, and as a result, if music were important, it would have been robbed of its importance by the narrative style. “Crashing senior center pancake breakfasts” happened once before I stopped reading. The heroine ate several servings of pancakes and was doted over by the elderly denizens – you can’t crash a place where you are obviously welcome. Add to it that the said “crashing” took maybe three lines in the book and one wonders why it was mentioned at all on the inside cover flap. And “their own wild dreams?” Bullshit. There were no shared dreams. We don’t know a thing about anyone in this book other than the messy and chaotic mind of the protagonist. There is no “their” there.

And there is no vampire there, either. Be warned. This is not even a spoiler – this is a fact that becomes abundantly clear within the first ten pages or so. The girl’s mind cannot be trusted so you take it with a grain of salt when she says she is a vampire. She gets caught sucking on a man’s neck in her early teens and you know she is talking about sex in her fantastic, disjointed way. Later, when she speaks of vampirism, you know she is talking about drugs, her fears, her knowledge of her own inner predator. This is not a vampire novel. This is a novel of lost youth, of homeless kids addicted to anything they can get their hands on, roaming around and behaving badly. No more, no less.

The plot, such that there is, follows a small gang of young men and the narrator, our fucked-up heroine, as they wander about aimlessly and purposelessly. The heroine wants to find her sister Kim. They were in a foster home together and Kim took off and joined her own gang of “vampires.” The search for her takes place mainly in the heroine’s mind, but Kim occupies a lot of her thoughts. There is a passage in the book that can lead the reader to believe that there is no Kim, or that the narrator is Kim. If either is the case, then this really is a book without a plot, and simply an examination of a seriously fragmented mind. That is not a condemnation because these sorts of mental examinations can be very interesting.

But the heroine’s thoughts, her filtering of events in this book, are ultimately what made this book intolerable to me. I don’t know if I would have felt this way had I bought this book knowing what it really is. But I can say that even if I had known what I was in for, I still would have found the narrative bereft of meaning. Perhaps that was the point, and if it is, then clearly this was not going to be my cup of tea. It’s just one event after another, sometimes events within events, the past bleeding into the present with no clear delineation between the two, with no linear continuity, spewed forth from the mind of the heroine. This narrative is what I imagine my brain would be like if I were punched over and over in the face, unable to respond before the next punch landed.

That is what happened to me as I read this – my brain never had a chance to recover from one reeling inner dialogue to the next. The onslaught of the narrator’s memories combined with her current activities with no plot, no timeline, no framework of reason outside of the longing for Kim, rendered the punch of each of the memories meaningless.

I can’t fault Krilanovich for trying. It was a bold idea, to create this mental assault on the reader. But it was just too much. Combined with the misleading and shitty marketing, this book should be a complete failure.

But it isn’t. Once Krilanovich refines her voice, finds a way to assault the reader the way she wants without knocking us out before she can make her point, she will be in a fine position as she already possesses a capacity for breathtaking prose. There were moments of utter truth in this book. There were sections that I reread several times marveling at her talent. Take this scene in a restaurant where the narrator notices a strange girl whose strangeness will never get her the attention she needs:

But then I noticed the girl had barf all down the front of the dress and when she opened her mouth it went something like this: “You guys. I just wanted to let you know that my family is coming in here and they are with the fucking mob, okay? They are organized crime, gangsters. They will hurt you. Be careful, they will fuck you up. Just don’t say a word – be careful.” And the strange thing was that then these white people came into the diner and it was her family, her parents and a sibling, Midwestern types in honest wool and small gold jewelry . They sat and ordered breakfast while the girl spent the majority of the meal in the bathroom, regurgitating. She returned to the table and fell asleep. They laughed with their mouths closed, polished off their various plates and exited as the girl threw up on the booth and waiting area before leaving some vomit on the front door. But the family didn’t run out the door, they strolled – without even pretending to mime the international gesture for “Sorry, let me wipe all this up.” Outside they wrapped their safety belts firmly around their midsections and drove away, the girl just folded into the back seat somewhere. God knows where.

Jesus, I felt badly for both the family and the girl. In such a beige family, anyone odd was going to suffer but then again, it seems they had seen her at her worst for so long it didn’t even register. This reminded me of the scene in Se7en where Morgan Freeman is reading John Doe’s notebook, wherein he describes trying to make small talk but vomits all over the prating man who is talking to him, so sickened is he by the banality of it all.

This scene shows how excellent a writer Krilanovich is, but also gives a tiny, little taste of the disjointed nature of the narrative:

One summer I caught an evil little pet. I caged it but it ditched me. No problem. After it left me I made it do my bidding from afar. Now I have remote control over its doings, ties I hitched over endless indelible months of putrid wanderings. Walking lost, my body boiling like water until all the thoughts in my head just evaporate. The swath of vapor in the sky infects your lungs and forced me into bubbles in your brain with every predictable breath. That summer I was a teenage carnivore. On hot nights I dug little things here and there that I found buried in holes. Creeping around under steel overpasses downtown I lived with my eyes to the ground, struck by how many gutter punks, panhandlers, dumpster divers, gakkers, vagrants, and romantic tramps would never even fuckin get it: the fact that we have to dig for stuff we don’t understand cuz we live in a past we don’t understand. I found a videotape in among some other stuff. It was of some kids partying in an apartment. They were all high on speed, tattooing each other while the girl held her cat to her chest, drunk, lying down on her living room floor. She looked absently at what was going on around her, a bit bewildered perhaps but casually luxuriating in her drunken nonchalance. She flipped through religious pamphlets in the dark. I identified with that girl on the tape, her predicament leapt right out at me from her crooked mouth. She looked at me but her bangs hid it all.

This is jumbled, incoherent, stark and true, true especially for the really lost among the Generation X. The narrator is tied to her lost sister, identifying with other lost girls as she searches, mostly in her mind. She’s digging in the dirt but she’s never going to find the right lost girl. There are too many of them to narrow it down to just one.

Then there is this scene, and words fail me to explain why I love it so much:

Jacob said that nobody but Jacob owns his body. He decides who it fucks and who it pummels. “We own nothing but what’s inside. It’s the middle of the night in here,” he said, pointing to his chest. This is what we own: our thoughts, orange and sickly. You feed it nothing but sorrow and it grows and stars come out and you are the King of your own Island of Night.

Please bear in mind that these are but small samples of the narrative that beat my brain. At no time reading this book will you have any idea really of what is happening, and for some of you that is just fine. I know some of my readers crave a challenging narrative like I crave caffeine and clean carpets. But even within that which is challenging, this book takes challenging to a new level, a level of confusion wherein all an earnest reader can get from the experimental nature of the storytelling is the sickness from addiction, the loneliness of loss and an unrelenting sense of wallowing in that which is unclean. And that would have been good enough for me, given the gorgeousness of the prose, had the sickness, the loneliness and the wallow had any sort of narrative direction. They were just punches to the face and just when my head would clear and I could focus the next punch came. As a person who has had more than my fair share of substances running through my veins, I wonder how this book would have read to me drunk. Stoned. In the jittery aftermath of speed. I wonder what it would be like to be a fucked up girl reading about a fucked up girl, a girl so beyond fucked up that she may have defied explanation, resulting in marketing that had nothing to do with the meat of this book because there was no other way to market her.

I wonder how it would feel to be so punch drunk reading this that the blows of this windmilling narrative don’t even register. But thankfully I am not a fucked up girl anymore. I admit that fact may have been part of the problem reading this.

Even so, I want to keep my eye out for Krilanovich. I think she is a writer who will either get better and better with each novel or she will crack under the weight of unfocused talent. I tend to think it is the former and want to read her next venture to see if I am right.

Author: Ron Currie, Jr.

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: This one is hard to classify as odd. It’s one of those books that is hard to classify as being in any genre. It resembles some of Vonnegut’s books in that regard, so perhaps that is enough to earn the odd label. Maybe it is odd because it made me wonder if there is a word for eating God. I guess theophagia works but I’d always associated that with the concept of communion. Is there a better word for literally eating the rotting corpse of God? If a book makes you ponder that question, it’s probably odd.

Availability: Published by Penguin Books in 2007, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I bought this book at Christmas time, and I very nearly put it back on the shelf because the cover appalled me. It features a dog sitting outside a cage. Inside the cage is another dog, curled up in a miserable little pile. I couldn’t tell if the caged dog was dead or asleep and not knowing made it worse. In fact, just thinking about the picture is making my stomach hurt a little. I cannot abide it when bad things happen to animals. This reaction taints a lot of my interaction with the world. I bought a Jack Ketchum book knowing full well the plot begins with the death of a dog and even so, I had to stop reading it. I just couldn’t take it. I hope Rugero Deodato, if there is an afterlife, spends a few years getting smacked around by a very large turtle and a couple of very angry pigs. So of course, given this tender-hearted tendency of mine coupled with my perverse desire to torture myself, I had to buy this book that featured a potentially dead dog on the cover being mourned by one of his own.

My instincts were right. This book was going to break my heart and I knew it before I opened it. The plot of this book is a cliche, a hackneyed conversation every wine-cooler and cheap beer-filled college freshman has had: what would happen if God died? But despite the fact that the premise is not original, this book is surprisingly fresh and frightening, at turns tender and sickening, hopeful and horrible. While there were elements that did not work as well as others, the fearlessness in which Currie approaches this story allows me to overlook its weaker parts.

A novel of themed short stories, this book tells of how God died and then was consumed by a pack of wild dogs in Africa. A few chapters are dead ends that just show how the death of God impacts the world at large, but the bulk of the book follows a family that forms and tries to flourish in a world going to hell (and possibly Hell) when God dies. The book doesn’t waste a second getting straight to the point. It begins:

Disguised as a young Dinka woman, God came at dusk to a refugee camp in the North Darfur region of Sudan. He wore a flimsy green cotton dress, battered leather sandals, hoop earrings, and a length of black-and-white beads around his neck. Over his shoulder he carried a cloth sack which held a second dress, a bag of sorghum, and a plastic cup. He’d manifested a wound in the meat of his right calf, a jagged, festering gash upon which fed wriggling clumps of maggots. The purpose of the wound was twofold. First, it enabled him to blend in with the residents of the camp, many of whom bore injuries from the slashing machetes of Janjaweed raiding parties. Second the intense burning ache helped to mitigate the guilt he felt at the lot of the refugees, over which he was, due to an implacable polytheistic bureaucracy, nearly powerless.

I quote this entire paragraph because it shows all that is right and wrong with this book. Intriguing ideas, intense details that border on the disgusting, excellent detail. But then there is that one sentence, the one about the “implacable polytheistic bureaucracy,” and I was in dangerous territory, though I didn’t know it yet. That sentence is meant to show how God is not omnipotent, which is why He does not intervene directly (I use the capitalizations common in pronouns when describing a Christian God because for this discussion it will keep my brain clear if I do). So God is a part of a bureaucracy, also a very cliched idea. But given the way this novel unfolds, that upon the death of the Christian God the world begins to unravel, it is hard to see that happening if God was just a cog in a machine. In his attempts to explain why his God is limited, Currie almost kills the premise of his book, for if God’s loss causes such horror, then His presence alive had to have meant more.

Worse, in a paragraph on the same page, God is implied to be quite powerful. He is suffering under the heat He created. But he is menaced by wild dogs. God could directly affect the weather but He could not drive away wild dogs… These are points that the reader has to ignore in order for this book to work. I was able to ignore them well enough but it was a bit irritating that the entire premise of why God would assume the body of a female Sudanese refugee and die is never truly explained to any real end. He is there to observe the tribal warfare, but why? We never find out.

Moreover, the chapter goes on, explaining how God is searching for a boy, and because He is in such a pretty body, Colin Powell decides to track the boy down. Another boy, a wrong boy is delivered and God speaks to the boy in Arabic, confirming he is the wrong boy. If this has some connection to some religion, some God or god in the form of a human searching for a lost child, it isn’t immediately coming to mind. The quest for the boy clearly has some meaning but I have no idea what it is and without that knowledge, it is impossible to know why it is God has come to earth in mortal form, unknown to any as God, only to die in a bomb strike over Sudan.

And I have absolutely no idea how it is that merely consuming God can make one God-like. Perhaps I am too steeped in tradition, with ideas of how holy communion, wherein via religious magic wine and cracker become blood and flesh, exists to remind people of the sacrifice of Christ. Dogs eat God after a bomb sweep kills God in Sudan and become god-like:

One small death among thousands, his passing could have gone unnoticed if the feral dogs who fed on his corpse hadn’t suddenly begun speaking a mishmash of Greek and Hebrew, and walking along the surface of the White Nile as if it were made of glass.

So theologically, Currie has made his own rules that will prick and annoy those who have a solid Christian look at godhead.

I was able to overlook these problems, problems that more or less break apart the premise that forms this book. It was tempting to stop reading, but because I endured, I came to the conclusion that even though such details are important, they were not the reason to read this book. The reason to read this book is to come to understand that no matter how much faith we have in God, gods, ourselves and our fellow men, there are patterns of behavior that will plague us no matter what. There may be a God or some cosmic presence that shaped this world, but as this novel shows, the essential nature of mankind will endure even the death of our Maker.

So I am glad I just swallowed his strange take on God. I have to admit, however, that discussing this book fills me with dread. There are worse things than dread. Dread, in the hands of the right author, is a very compelling reason to read a book. Currie proved to be one of those right authors.

Currie, who seems like he may be a mainstream writer, has a perversity of mind that was very appealing to me. The world he creates when God dies is not what I would have thought of, miring the reader in a mundane world that somehow seems fantastic. He created a strange dystopia that revolves around unexpected yet unremarkable details. God is eaten by His anadrome, people are prevented from worshiping children in the absence of God, superstition doesn’t die with religion and horrific wars continue, based on philosophy rather than religion. The world he creates is meant to show us how little the death of God means to the ways mankind has always behaved.

Currie discusses the vacant evil of this world, the small deaths of the soul we all suffer as we live and learn what pieces of shit our fellow men can be. This comes from a chapter about a young woman preparing to leave her small town for college just before the world learns God is dead. The girl, Dani, is preparing to go to college and is driving around her small town, remembering times in the past. The part of this chapter that haunts me to this day was Dani remembering, as a little girl, observing a man killing a loon. Her wing was broken and the man in a boat made sport of rushing toward her, forcing her to go under the water. He would turn around and repeat this until the loon, exhausted, was unable to come back to the surface before she drowned.

It was the only time Dani could ever remember crying, as a kid. Why, Mama? she’d howled over and over, and her mother gazing dry-eyed out at the man in his boat, shook her head a little and said, I don’t know, hon. Some men are just that way. And Dani couldn’t understand why her mother didn’t shed even one tear for the bird, or for her daughter’s grief.

Some of us never grow out of this tenderheartedness, as I clearly demonstrate. It’s hard to live in this world and believe in a god worth believing in when there are men in boats who make sport of torturing injured loons. It is a form of sentimentality that causes people to be this way. It’s not a moral high ground, to be so invested in human kindness, so don’t think I am imbuing either my own squeamishness or Dani’s with a higher moral good. But I suspect this is a point that Currie is making, that the tenderhearted are going to have a hard time in this world whether there is a god or not. Dani, even on the cusp of adulthood, leaving for college, is just as sentimental as she was when she was a child. Her sentimentality is a sign of childishness, as is demonstrated in this scene as she imagines packing for college and getting out of her small-town life:

Her mother would ask, What are you doing? And Dani would tell her: I’m leaving, Mama. I’m a woman now, and today all the signs are pointing due south. Simple as that. And her mother might be sad, and a little scared, her baby going away. But Dani thought she’d be equally happy and proud. Get going, girl, she might say after a moment’s thought and a tearful hug. Get out there and do all those things I never did.

Despite her protestations about being ready to leave, ready to fly away from her small town, Dani is still a child in some very cringe-worthy ways. And though Currie misses sound theological examinations of godhead, his characterization is spot-on because the earlier chapters showed us that God is indeed dead and there will be no place for such childish ideation. He shows us this dead-end chapter with Dani to make it clear that the world he is creating is going to hold few slots for women like Dani, who cries for loons and engages in dime store novel melodramatic conversations in her head.

The next chapter has a collection of young men, left alone when the death of God causes the American infrastructure to crumble. A mom dies from diabetes when her insulin fails to come in the mail, families die in car accidents when traffic lights stop working and the town falls apart. The teenagers left behind, caught up in the bravado of youth combined with hopelessness about the state of the world, decide their fates:

“We’re not doing it unless everyone agrees,” Rick said. “All of us together, just like always.”

We sat quietly, alone with our thoughts, for a while after that. I thought about my mother. I thought about my plans to become an architectural engineer (not a dream, strictly speaking, but an aspiration, one that had been fairly important to me). I thought about all the horrifying Mad Max-type scenarios that awaited us when we eventually ran out of food.

Then Rick called each of our names, and one by one we said yes. It was easy, in the dark, somehow, shockingly easy, as if we were deciding nothing more weighty than which toppings to get on a pizza. We lit the lamp, sealed our agreement with a dull clink of near-empty beer cans, and went to bed.

So the world isn’t even ending with a whimper. For these boys it’s ending in an emotionless suicide pact.

But the world recovers and continues even if the one who made it did not. But in the absence of God, people begin to behave strangely, because if nature abhors a vacuum, so does the human psyche. People worship the dogs that ate God, people turn to science for truth, and some turn to children. It all begins with a little boy:

… into this burgeoning chaos came a sort of secular evangelist known as The Child. The Child was just that – a boy of three or so, serene and flawless, with cocoa skin and a vocabulary so rich it seemed he must have swallowed an Oxford English Dictionary. His message, delivered first in town halls and opera houses, and later, as his popularity grew, in arenas and baseball stadiums, was simple: God has abandoned us. The way to salvation is through the child.

By which he meant, of course, every child.

And America, already teetering on the verge of child worship, was only too eager to hear him.

This paragraph is from a chapter is about the psychiatrist who is part of a government initiative to prevent people from worshiping children and making terrible decisions. The psychiatrist, whom I fancy is the boy who survived the suicide pact though I have no textual reason to believe this, must help people stop engaging in child-centric stupid behaviors and his story is important because he eventually gives this up, has his own child and moves on in life, but overall the world the man, his wife and his child occupy is far more interesting to me than they are in and of themselves. The individuals of this family are well-conceived but it’s the post-God world and how Currie shapes this world that are interesting.

Take this scene:

As a psychiatrist, I began to see examples of this strange behavior well before it started to make headlines. Ricky Mascis, an out-of-work single father who I treated free of charge, was troubling over which bills to pay, as he didn’t have enough to cover all of them.

“So, it’s really just, you know, you gotta prioritize,” he told me. “Which isn’t too hard at first. Obviously, if it’s between buying a new TV or paying the power bill, you pay the bill. No brainer. But now I’ve got to decide things, like, should I buy groceries this week, or should I put that hundred dollars into fixing the car so I can get out and look for a job?”

“It’s a tough choice,” I agreed. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I asked Boo where he thought I should put the money.” Boo was Ricky’s four-year-old son, Ricky Jr. “He said I should buy ten sets of Hungry Hungry Hippos.”

“Cute,” I said. “That’s the luxury of being a child, of course. You don’t have to make hard decisions.”

“I don’t know, Doc,” Ricky said. “Boo’s a really smart kid. I mean, supersmart, and I’ve had it with worrying about all this crap. I’m thinkin’ the hippos might be the way to go.”

It feels strange, as an atheist, to realize that the need to believe in anything could survive the death of godhead. There are those who think the will to believe is genetic. Perhaps it is. This book certainly makes me wonder, but I also had to realize that, as arrogant as it makes me sound, there will always be people so fucking stupid that they will always need a leader, be that leader God, Allah or their child who thinks buying a board game is the best use for family funds. I wonder if those board games could be considered a tithe of a sort, giving fruit to one’s god. People like Ricky force those who want society to function on an adult level to try to repress the worship of children, a godless endeavor to be sure.

There is much more to this chapter – the narrator, the most loathed man in the city because people interpret his work as a direct insult to their children – has a complicated past, a hidden girlfriend, and an addiction to ads with kids in them that psychologically resembles addictions to child porn. But none of that was as interesting to me as the way in which people reacted to a world without God by creating a world with mini-gods, which ultimately were not the paternalistic figure that people needed to look after them. They replaced the Father with a child and ultimately such a mindset is unsatisfying.

“I think that’s the hardest thing about God being dead,” Selia says. “You know? Because before, when bad things happened, you could always shake your fist at the sky and say something nasty under your breath and you kind of knew that God would understand, he put you in a shit situation, so you had a right to be pissed. Now, things go sour and there’s no one to blame.”

The book goes on, with Selia marrying the psychiatrist and they have a son who fights in a war, because of course war does not end when religion ends. Wars based on minor philosophical differences that seem ridiculous on their face but, of course, are no more ridiculous than the wars we have now. The son joins the Postmodern Anthropological Marines and ends up in a horrible mess as the PAMs lose the war. Trapped in the Southwest with a lunatic friend whose love for animals is almost as demented as mine, he witnesses what, in my mind, is the true Apocalypse in this novel, and again, the world around this character is far more interesting to me than he is. I do not think this is due to a failure in characterization, but rather because dystopias appeal to me more than men do.

The chapter that affected me the most and inspired in me the desire to discuss it the least was “Interview with the Last Remaining Member of the Feral Dog Pack Which Fed on God’s Corpse.” Yeah, can’t discuss it. It’s sickening, saddening and powerful and is one of those rare things I read that hurt my heart too much to talk about. And I almost wish this book had ended with this chapter because it best summarizes what this novel is about, as the last feral dog explains the way things are now in the strange, new world:

I can offer no comfort and little insight. I am not your God. Or if I am, I’m no god you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I’m the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry. You’re as naked and alone in this world as you were before finding me. And so the question becomes: Can you abide by this knowledge? Or will it destroy you, empty you out, make you a husk among husks?

Currie’s writing has its problems. In addition to his strange take on theological assumptions, he also overuses commas to the point that it can at times destroy a sentence. This is a “takes one to know one” situation because I do this too. It’s a habit that dies hard. But overall, this was one of those unnerving, excellent books that made me love it despite its flaws because it asks the right questions, creates a dystopia that makes sense but is unexpected, and engages in writing that is almost cruel in its utter lack of sentimentality. I both loved and hated this book often for the same reasons, because it is a hard book to read and a hard book to like. But it is a book that I am glad I read because I like having my heart broken. Prose that rips open the wounds you may carry and poses as many theological and social questions as this book does is worth a read.

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.

Author: Scarlett Thomas

Type of Book: Fiction, cryptography, veganism, mystery

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Like the works of Chuck Palahniuk, this book can be seen as a gateway odd book. While a bit strange, it is not wholly odd but for the right reader, it will open all kinds of odd doors. For some, a mere mention of the Voynich Manuscript is virtual assurance of hours spent in a very odd world.

Availability: Published by Fourth Estate in 2004, it appears to be out of print and in the “bargain book” stage. However, you can still score a new copy online:

Comments: A few years ago, I ran a blog called Ghostroses, a terribly unfocused journal wherein I just wrote aimlessly about whatever topic came to mind. I reviewed some books over there, too. This month I noticed that I was getting some hits on IROB from a cryptography site. I was never able to pin down any entry here that would ping the interests of a cryptography enthusiast, but I ended up reading that site for a couple of hours because it focuses heavily on one of my favorite unsolved mysteries: the Voynich Manuscript. If you have time, check the site out. It’s quite interesting. As I read, I remembered the long discussion I wrote five or six years ago about PopCo, a book which discusses in depth cryptography in general and the Voynich Manuscript specifically, though briefly. No idea why I have visitors from a cryptography site now (hello and welcome!), but I am pleased I remembered this old discussion, because I really liked the book a lot.

Since I am preparing for Bizarro Week and spent far too much time fielding some unrelated nonsense on this site, I am behind on my discussions.  So I decided to edit (and in some places gut) my old discussion of PopCo.  It was interesting to realize that I was just as verbose back then, and that despite not having a brain cut out for the hard logic and mathematics of cryptography, I am not quite the dilettante I thought I was, as my interest in the topic persists to this day. Or maybe I am just a persistent dilettante.

At any rate, this book covers a lot of ground – media and marketing studies, mathematics, cryptography, veganism, toys, and social resistance.It is interesting for me reading this discussion because I wrote it not to discuss a book but rather my reaction to a book, which may seem like a specious distinction given my still intense, personal reactions to books. But in this review, I was just regurgitating how this book affected me and didn’t talk enough about how the book was excellent outside of my reaction to it. Like any personal blog entry, this is just a discussion of my life – it just so happens that this one is shaped around a book. Still, even in this somewhat disjointed discussion, I hope I convey what a fabulous book this is.

PopCo by Scarlett Thomas is one of those books that is a revelation. Every now and then, I come across a book wherein I know the author’s ideas and beliefs line up so well with mine that it is very nearly eerie. PopCo encapsulated so many of my own thoughts that I likely annoyed everyone around me as I recommended this book to one and all, even going so far as to purchase several copies at a book clearance store so I could give copies away.

PopCo is hard to categorize. While the heroine, a certain Alice Butler, solves two mysteries, she also contemplates veganism and the ethics of marketing to children. She discusses her knowledge of homeopathic medicine, crossword puzzles, high level math, cryptography and cryptanalysis, and the Voynich Manuscript. Her attempts at developing her own identity ring truer to me than any other coming-of-age descriptions in recent memory. And far from finding her childhood with her grandparents boring, I wondered what I would be like had I been raised by genius, eccentric grandparents, and found the prospect attractive. Alice has within her head the Vigenère square, Gödel’s code and prime factorization in the same manner as I have the world’s best chocolate chip cookie recipe memorized. Alice is self-contained, cool under pressure, utterly geeky and wholly earnest – in short, a heroine unlike anyone I have ever read before.

The plot deals with two mysteries and has a wide cast of characters but still manages not to be labyrinthine, which is a good thing because for most readers – myself emphatically included – the math and codes will be hard enough reading. Yet Thomas manages to explain methods of cryptanalysis so well that I now can break any simple letter shift or replacement code within seconds. For people who are not as inculcated in ideas of anti-marketing and veganism, there may be passages that feel a bit preachy, but I’ve begun to think that simply using the word vegan is seen as preachy to some.

Alice Butler’s mother died young and her father left her behind with her maternal grandparents in order to pursue his avarice (she assumes her mother’s maiden name when left behind by her father). Alice is raised by her grandparents, a mathematician grandmother and a grandfather who is a cryptanalysis expert. While her peers were raised on television, Alice was learning about the Voynich Manuscript and prime factorization. Her grandparents treated her intellect as a given and never acted as if she were too young to explore her world intellectually.  As a result, they sowed seeds in her that permitted her as an adult to vindicate their own intellectual pursuits. The intellectual respect she was given as a child gave her the stability as an adult wherein unusual situations do not alarm her.

Alice’s grandfather managed to crack the code behind one of the greatest encryptions ever, the fictional Stevenson-Heath manuscript, a map that leads to billions of dollars worth of treasure. However, he does not want to announce that he has made the discovery because he knows the treasure was buried on an island that became a bird sanctuary. If he reveals what he knows, the island is sure to be ruined by treasure hunters. However, he longs to show that he did, indeed, crack the code. Mr. Butler was unfairly denied a place decoding German communications during WWII and cracking the Stevenson-Heath code could vindicate him. So instead of revealing that he cracked the code, he sets up a method by which his granddaughter Alice can one day show that he did, indeed, break the code, hoping that one day the world would know of his feat without destroying the bird sanctuary. He teaches Alice various methods by which she can decode and encode messages, using some esoteric math that as I mentioned above is oft-times difficult for a lay reader in math like me to understand. He also gives her a locket with a number on it, a number that Alice believes will help her crack the Stevenson-Heath code.

After her grandfather dies, Alice is recruited by PopCo, the third-largest toy maker in the world. Once on board, she creates code breaking and investigative toys for children and is eventually invited to stay in the country with the company CEO and some other employees in order to find and market a toy for older girls, a hard demographic to crack. While at this company retreat, Alice finds herself confronted with a lot of new ideas and the realization that some of the ideas, if she adopts them, will make it hard for her life to go on as usual. But she is also being sent encoded messages that she has a hard time understanding the motivation behind. She senses something going on under the surface of some of her coworkers and as she strives to discover what it is, she finds herself shedding old friends whose values are at odds with hers, finding a new world operating under the surface of the so-called real world.

Before I begin my gushfest explaining why PopCo made me happier on a personal level than any book has in a very long time, I want to get my sole, big criticism out of the way and herein lies a potentially big spoiler, so beware:

I was mildly annoyed by the ending. I truly hoped that the numbers on Alice’s locket would be enough for a devoted reader with a lot of time on her hands to crack the mystery. Then, through the book, I learned about prime factorization and realized that it could take forever and plus some to prime factorize 2.14488156EX48 (which is 2.14488156 x 10^48). This crushed me, because I truly thought that once factorized, the number would yield a Dewey Decimal number for the book that would contain the original source material that she would need to crack the Stevenson-Heath code. Of course, given the amount of time discussing the Gögol code, I should have known this would hold the key.

But I can be forgiven for not seeing this from a mile away because Alice herself does not see it. And to be honest, even after reading the ending about 20 times, how Alice managed to discover what it was her grandfather was trying to tell her and how she reached the solution is still unclear to me. I’m pretty proud at how much math I managed to absorb, and how many methods of cryptography and cryptanalysis I can still recall after reading the book, but the ending is only clear to me minutes after reading it and then it falls away like sand between my fingers. All I can say clearly is that while this ending is not an unfair, red herring sort of ending, it was a bit of a letdown that all of the math that this liberal science grad learned for the first time was not needed to solve the puzzle.

End of criticism. Let us now begin my unadulterated praise.

Scarlett Thomas created a character in Alice who defies a lot of the heroines on the literary landscape at the moment. She is contrary, which is not uncommon, but she is contrary not to show spunk or kookiness, but rather she acts as she does when she is younger because she is trying on many different personalities to determine which one fits best. But there is also the sense that Alice was fated to be a contrarian. There are many examples of this, but one of the best are her deliberate attempts not to fit in despite the fact that on a very basic level she could never fit in if she tried. When a mode of dress she likes becomes vogue, she drops the style just to remain outside the herd and nothing sets her teeth on edge as much as the hipsters she works with, whose affectations are for her baffling because they rely on a group identity that reacts instead of simply acting.

But Alice, for all her sense of being an outsider, is not alone. After spending a lot of time with people who are glib and unthinking, she finally finds her values replicated in other people, though not overtly, and finds a way to act upon her contrarian beliefs. I long for the day that happens, when a group of people finds me and says, “Hello, you can come home now.” No arguments over political minutia, no endless quarrels in cyberspace, no pointless infighting – just a sense of a common goal and a means by which to pursue it. Of course, I know this place exists only in fiction but at the same time, there have been moments in history when hidden people band together and change the world without a lot of pointless drama. Maybe it will happen again soon. It is a hopeful thought.

But Alice’s contrary nature is interesting because even as she sets herself apart, her mind remains open and she listens to new ideas, even as they may seem completely anathema to her natural way of doing things. When her new lover Ben explains why he is a vegan, her first impulse is to ask the questions most vegans likely hear when discussing their nutritional choices, the tiresome what do you eat if you don’t eat any sort of animal products? Instead, she thinks about what it means to be a vegan and realizes that Ben is brave to make such a hard choice in a world like this and tells him so.

This, when juxtaposed to her friend Dan, a man I disliked from the beginning (what sort of man invites a woman to his home, watches porn with her and then tells her he’s gay when she makes a pass at him?) shows the dichotomy between her old friends and the new people she meets during her group brainstorming session in the countryside. She and Dan discuss the fact that some of the toys PopCo manufactures are made in places where slave and child labor are likely used, or if the workers receive wages, they are exploitative. Dan truly thinks that it is better for people to earn a dollar a day than to earn nothing, and that concessions have to be made to the market economies in order for businesses to compete. Therefore, to him it makes perfect sense to use sweatshop labor in China to sew toys for children. He even says that if the workers found the situation objectionable, they could refuse to take the jobs. Alice thinks about the notion of real choice and realizes that the only choice is exploitation or starvation, which is no choice at all, but she knows by then that Dan will be unreceptive to the idea. Watching Dan flip through a magazine, she sees ads for products made in the third world, probably 90% of them made by slave labor and she wonders how it is that this way of living, with so many goods made so cheaply, could ever have seemed like a good idea on a sheer ethical level.

Does this sound preachy? Well, if you are a free-market über alles type, you may want to give this book a miss, but then again, maybe you shouldn’t.

In another conversation with Dan, Alice bites back at the notion that there is something wrong with her for not understanding or caring about social references from childhood born by pop culture and media. Dan mocks what he thinks Alice’s childhood was like because she had no television. Explaining what she did as a teenager, Alice says:

“I read a lot. I helped my grandfather with his various projects. I learnt how to compile crosswords…”

He shakes his head. “So basically you were the most boring teenager in the world.”

He’s joking but suddenly I feel angry.

“So, at age fourteen, your spare time would have been filled with what? Saving the world? Talking to aliens? Being a spy?”

He doesn’t seem to know if I am joking or not. “I don’t know. When I was fourteen, I think I just watched loads of cool stuff on TV.”

“Oh right. TV.” Now I really am cross. I can’t help it.

“What? What’s wrong with TV?”

“TV fools you that you’ve had a life you haven’t had. Don’t you know that? At least I had a life, even if it was, as you say, boring.”

“God, settle down, Alice.”

“No. I hate it. All that retro stuff that’s around at the moment. Remember when we all watched that thing on TV in the seventies and it was so ironic? I don’t even know what any of it’s called because we didn’t have a TV. It all just seems to be this stupid nostalgia for something that never existed in the first place. Just shapes on a screen…”

The conversation ends with Dan trying to assert that books are just words on pages and it was then that I knew two things:
1) Dan and Alice would not be friends at the end of the book; and
2) Alice would find it hard to continue at PopCo, a place where television tie-in and commercials for toys tied Alice, however indirectly, to a medium she loathed.

Alice’s revelations about the people around her and different ways to look at the world continue apace. In a conversation with another character called Chloe, Chloe tries to explain how people manage to do things that seem odd and continue doing them even when they analyze their behaviors:

“Have you ever heard of cognitive dissonance?”

I shake my head although the phrase is familiar.

“It’s the idea that your brain has trouble processing certain things,” she says. “For example, say you belonged to a cult that believed that aliens were going to arrive on Earth tomorrow, and you’d believed that for thirty years. Tomorrow when the aliens don’t turn up, what do you tell yourself? Do you say, Ok, I must have been wrong all these years? Maybe you should, but you can’t: You’ve had such a big investment in the idea that they’ll turn up. In fact your whole identity is based on it. What you experience at that moment is cognitive dissonance, as your brain rejects the idea that your life
has been meaningless. To overcome it, you tell yourself a story that you want to hear. You tell yourself, for example, that the aliens didn’t come because it was raining. Or that your calculation was wrong and they’re actually coming in ten years’ time. Well, some radical psychologists have applied this to meat-eating consumer culture. They’ve found that people tell themselves stories to make themselves feel okay about doing the things we have to do to be ‘normal.’ People
tell themselves animals have happy lives before they are slaughtered, for example, or that the third world slaves are happy. And it’s very hard to take those ideas apart, because people have so much invested in them.”

(Edited to add, the above paragraph is certainly interesting in light of Harold Camping and the Family Radio Christian cult’s belief that the world would end on 5/21/11. Camping just re-defined what the Rapture means because, obviously, not to do so would be to give lie to his entire life.)

This conversation was quite illuminating to read. It helped me put into perspective a lot of things that come up when living in a place like Texas. This is a place wherein it is hard not to be a Republican, Christian meat-eater. When I first wanted to become a vegan and discussed it, I thought that the negative reactions I garnered were similar to the subtle sneers ex-smokers give to those who still gather under the business building eaves at lunchtime, frantically inhaling before work begins again. I don’t think I understood the role of cognitive dissonance really until Thomas spelled it out.

With meat all bets are off in terms of most rational discussion. Even discussions with the nicest vegans put people’s backs against the wall because it is an either/or proposition. You either eat and wear animals or you don’t. And if you make such a choice for ethical reasons, those around you who hear your reasons behind the change and may find some truth to it find themselves frantically trying to defend a way of life that simply talking to you forced them to defend. You cannot choose between Southern Baptist, atheist, Mormon, Islam, etc. like one does in religion. Some people try to be a bit more ethical by choosing so-called free-range chicken and hormone-free milk, but when they learn about the real lives of free-range chickens and that any milk purchase supports the veal industry, again they find themselves in a position that their intellect may not be able to defend so they turn to emotional responses.

So cognitive dissonance sets in, even if the person you are talking with is not trying to convert you or demean you. Your intellect hears the evidence, but your emotions feel frayed because most people don’t like causing harm to animals but most people like eating them. Suddenly, an action you have engaged in for your entire life is being called into question and the first response is to defend it (and that Alice does not fall into this trap when contemplating Ben’s veganism shows what an amazing heroine she is).

In the past, I considered vegans a bit extremist and still consider some of them annoying. That’s life. Some vegans, Christians, or former smokers are annoying. Some are not. Some vegans are asshats who write books about veganism where they manage to show a complete lack of sympathy where the addiction process of certain foods are concerned and then go on to trash Sandra Bullock to show, you know, what indie thinkers they are. Some are quiet, thoughtful people who change their lives and then find themselves being screamed at when they are asked why they don’t want cheese on their pizza.

This all sounds very heavy, doesn’t it? Thomas could never have predicted where a reader would have gone in an analysis of a conversation in her book, but the book, even when discussing cultural morality, never reads like a shrill screed. The conversations in which these ideas are shared are natural, and the longer the reader stays in Alice’s cool, analytical, but ultimately moral head, the calmer we feel. It all makes sense, suddenly, the madness of life and that there is possibly a way out is the ultimate reward for reading the book. Add that all of this is a part of a larger mystery, a mystery aside from Alice’s quest to solve the riddle of the Stevenson-Heath manuscript, a tight mystery that hinges on this information, and one finds the sense of being preached to almost nil. And Alice manages to solve both mysteries. She learns who is sending her coded messages at the gathering in the countryside, messages meant to test her, and she redeems her grandfather’s life work without threatening an endangered natural habitat. Alice is sort of an intellectual super-heroine with frizzy hair, a love for William Gibson and more in her head than I will ever be able to cram into mine.

Without delving into non-fiction, I read few books that echo my own belief systems. This book came into my life during a time when I was a bit low. I had lost the last three cats I rescued to disease. We managed a feral colony of forsaken cats and a dreadful disease (FeLV) wiped out the colony and spread to tame cats. I write this reaction to PopCo the day after rescuing another cat and finding out he was too sick to be saved. My copy of the book is battered because it spends a lot of time in my purse, going with me various places, fished out when I want to re-read  a certain section. This will not last much longer, this attachment to the book, but it still helps me and it helped me after having to put to sleep a betrayed, abandoned, terribly ill cat last night.

This morning, with the dead cat still fresh on my mind, I opened the book and it fell open close to the back. My eyes settled on this passage:

“Look, it’s a seal!” Esther said suddenly. We all look. Sure enough, there is a seal playing in the water. We all keep completely still as the seal’s smooth, brown head emerges from the water and looks around.

“Hello,” I whisper.

“That is the most beautiful thing,” Ben says.

Then the seal is gone, gone deep into the cove and possibly out to sea.