Author: Knut Hamsun

Type of Book: Literary fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, it’s a book without a plot with an utterly unhinged protagonist. Possibly one of the most upsetting books I have ever read.

Availability: This book was originally published in 1890. My edition is from Farrar, Strauss, Giraux in 2008. You can get a copy here:

(If you have a Kindle, dig around because I saw a Kindle version going for free, though that may be because I have a Prime Membership on Amazon)

Comments: I’ve been putting off discussing this book because I don’t know where to start. Hunger really is a book without a plot – in this novel, the same thing happens every day with mild variations on action. There is no character arc because the protagonist is as vainglorious, horribly depressed, and lunatic at the beginning as he is at the end.  This book frustrated me beyond belief and yet I read it through twice because I just had to do it. And as contradictory as it sounds, I hated this book the first read and loved it the second. This is all the more contradictory because even though I loved it the second time, I never want to read this book again.

This book is the literary equivalent of running your soul over a cheese grater. Over and over again. It’s hard to discuss such a book with any skill, though others have. Initially, I thought Paul Auster’s take on this book, printed in the copy I read, was wrong, but later I realized he was correct – he just interrogated the text from a different perspective. He looked at the book from an intellectual perspective and I looked at it from the perspective of someone who has gone insane and felt something akin to pain reading such lunacy.

So I am faced with a problem: how does one discuss a narrator whose highs and lows make Raskolnikov’s public behavior seem normal? How can I discuss a book wherein nothing really changes and there is virtually no character arc? I don’t know. I think all I can do is discuss the parts of this book that resonated the most with me, and even this is going to be sticky because even as I divide the book into specific elements I want to discuss, there will be significant overlap between these elements. For example, as I discuss how the protagonist cannot act in his own self-interests, lunacy caused by starvation also comes into play. In fact, it is tempting to just write the words, “Starvation in a land of plenty will make you insane” over and over until I hit a decent word count. Just bear that in mind – there is a lot of overlap when discussing the narrator’s mind and actions.

Before I begin, I need to mention that I read the edition translated by Robert Bly, widely considered to be the crappiest translation because he evidently “corrected” verb usage to eliminate mixed tenses. Mixed tenses, according to scholars of the text, were to show the disorganization of the protagonist’s mind. So my edition is actually a bit saner than the actual text. Though I sort of wish I had read a more faithful translation of the text, I suspect it is a good thing I read the less crazy version. As it was, the narrator’s mind was an utter vexation.

Hunger‘s narrator is trying to write in a very Dostoyevskian manner. He may be an excellent writer but his topics, “Crimes of the Future” or “Freedom of the Will” lean toward him being a self-impressed hack. His grand ideas are constrained by his grinding poverty and his mental disorganization.  The novel is divided into four parts and begins with him leaving a boarding house (though he could have stayed had he just approached the problem with logic and patience) and living rough. The second part of the novel concerns his attempts to live in a borrowed shack as he tries to write. In the third part, he meets a woman who slowly realizes he is not what she thought he was and the romance is dashed. The fourth section of the novel takes place mostly in a very low boarding house where the narrator, terrified of the cold and of living rough again, hangs onto a roof over his head in a manner so servile and cringing it almost killed me to read it. He finally goes to enlist as a crew member on a ship, which some take as him finally moving on from his despair, but I read as suicide, an interpretation I will, of course, explain. Until then, I will just divide this discussion up into relevant chunks and hope that at the end I have given the reader a good idea of the protagonist and the struggles he faces as he starves nearly to death in a world that often notices him too well or does not notice him at all.

The Protagonist’s Strange, Grandiose Ego
The protagonist, as I mentioned is a writer and is very impoverished to the point of starvation. Yet he has a need to present himself as a man of means, a magnanimous giver to the less fortunate. But unlike most who want to present a facade of wealth, the protagonist often takes things a step too far and actually impoverishes himself further in an attempt to save face in front of others, selling literally the clothes on his back to give a pittance to people who often have more than he does. He does not do this from a need to help others, or from a place of charity. He does it because he wants to be seen as something he is not and it is a blow to his ego that he cannot bear when people realize how impoverished he is. This is particularly sad because his ego destroys any chance he has at maintaining the security he needs to write.

He makes his poverty very clear at the beginning of the novel. He looks shabby.

…my clothes were beginning to look so bad I couldn’t really present myself any longer for a job that required someone respectable.

He has no possessions.

By now I was so utterly denuded of objects that I didn’t even have a comb left, or a book to read when I felt hopeless.

He has no food.

If one only had something to eat, just a little, on such a clear day!

But when he meets a beggar who asks him for money, he questions him and once determining that the man actually had a trade, he says:

“Well, that’s different,” I said. “Wait here a few minutes, and I’ll see if I can’t find something for you, a little something at least.”

He simply cannot bring himself to tell the beggar that he too has nothing to give.

He goes to a pawnshop and takes off his waistcoat. All he has are the clothes on his back but he pawns his waistcoat for one and a half kroner.

I took the money and went back. Actually, pawning this waistcoat was a wonderful idea; I would still have money left over for a good, fat breakfast, and by evening my piece on “Crimes of the Future” would be in shape. Life began immediately to seem more friendly, and I hurried back to the man to get him off my hands.

Note how he has taken responsibility for the beggar. He needs to get him off his hands. He genuinely has a sense that he needs to help the man and that the man will be on his conscience until he helps him. It’s borderline Messianic.

But even the beggar picks up on the protagonist’s oddness.

The man took the money and began to look me up and down. What was he standing there looking at? I got the sensation that he was inspecting my trousers particularly and I became irritated at this impertinence. Did this old fool imagine I was really as poor as I looked? Hadn’t I just as good as begun my ten-kroner article? On the whole, I had no fears for the future; I had many irons in the fire. What business was it of this heathen savage if I helped him out on such a marvelous day.

He criticizes the man for staring at him and the man hands him the coin back. The protagonist begins to trip all over himself in order to save face.

I stamped my foot, swore, and told him to keep it. Did he think I intended to go to all this trouble for nothing? When you came down to it, I probably owed him the money, I just happened to remember an old debt, he was looking at a punctilious man, one honorable down to his fingernails. In short, the money was his… Nonsense, nothing to thank me for, it was a pleasure. Goodbye.

I walked off. At last I was rid of this painful pest, and could be undisturbed.

He hounded the man into taking the money he could not afford to give and that the man knew he could not afford to give, yet when he left the man had suddenly become a pest. He was a man of honor, insisting on paying a debt to a persistent, dunning debtor, not a deranged man who could not afford food who sold his clothes to be able to give money to a man who probably was not as poorly off as him.

There are several scenes like this in the book, wherein the protagonist, unable to endure that anyone looks at him as impoverished, gives away money he has earned or came upon by accident.  For example, the woman with whom he had the failed affair sees him in part four of the book and sends a messenger with ten kroner. He had just been thrown out of his boarding house for non-payment and for being unpleasant, and he could have used the money for food, rent at a new place, or he could even have paid up at the place where he had been evicted and stayed on. Instead he thrust the money into the boarding house owner’s hand so she would understand at last the sort of man she had been dealing with and wanders off in his mania.

His attempts to appear as he was not, his insistence that he be treated with reverence rather than respect, causes a large portion of the problems he has in this book. Swinging wildly between servile and arrogant, self-loathing and grandiosity, it seems clear the protagonist’s low status in life plagues him and he would rather self-destruct than stomach anyone potentially thinking him poor. This creates a spiral in which the protagonist, a bit unhinged in the beginning, becomes more and more lunatic as starvation makes him crazier.

In a similar vein is the protagonist’s tendency to tell himself what his ego needs to hear. He is behind in his rent and cannot bring himself to talk to his landlady (this later has horrible repercussions because his self-eviction leaves him with nowhere to go but an abandoned workshop he receives permission to sleep in). He spins a narrative for himself wherein the room is not good enough for him, especially since he is a man of great intellect. Here are his thoughts as he rationalizes giving up the last form of comfort he has in life because of his extraordinary pride.

This really wasn’t any room for me; the curtains on the windows were a very ordinary green, and there weren’t even enough pegs on the walls to hang your wardrobe on. The sad rocking chair on the corner was actually a joke of a chair: if one started laughing at it, one could die laughing. It was too low for a grown man, and besides, it was so tight, one needed a shoehorn to get back out of it. In short, this room was simply not furnished in a way appropriate to intellectual effort and I did not intend to keep it any longer. I would not keep it under any circumstances! I had been silent in this hole and stood it here and stayed on here too long already.

Bear in mind, he has no money to stay there and has read a letter from his landlady asking him to pay up. He can’t afford those terrible green curtains and that skinny chair, and one is tempted to think he is making excuses, psyching himself for the inevitable by making it seem as if it is a legitimate choice he is making. But he does this so often in the book – affecting a superior attitude even when he is not in a state of extremis – that the reader is hard pressed to tell when he is assuming a delusional role and actually expressing his ego.

The Protagonist’s Strange Theater
The protagonist becomes more and more unhinged as the novel goes on, but even at the beginning, he creates creepy situations or elaborate theater that no one around him understands. As he does these strange things, he feels as if he has gotten one over on the people he baffles. He is certain that the people around him understand he has gotten one over on them, that they understand that they are less than him, butts of his joke. That is never the case and he never seems to notice he is making a fool of himself. But sometimes he engages in these weird situations because they seem to make him happy.

Take this scene, wherein he begins to follow two women shopping in town (one is the lady he later has a brief flirtation with – this scene is where she gets the impression he is a rakish drunk rather than an unhinged poverty case). He overtakes two women and brushes arms with one of them, an attractive woman who catches his attention. His reaction to noticing her and her noticing him is… interesting.

Suddenly my thoughts shot off on a lunatic direction, and I felt myself possessed by a strange desire to frighten this woman, to follow her in some way or other.

This reminded me a bit of Edmund Kemper, a serial killer who once said, and I am paraphrasing, that when he saw a pretty woman, part of him wanted to date her and part of him wanted to see her head on a pike.

He slows to permit the women to catch up to him and told the pretty woman she was losing her book. She had no book with her and she walked on. Her mild disinterest just goads him on further.

My malice increased and I followed the two. I was conscious all the time that I was following mad whims without being able to do anything about it. My deranged consciousness ran away with me and sent me lunatic inspirations, which I obeyed one after the other. No matter how much I told myself I was acting idiotically, it did not help; I made the most stupid faces behind the women’s backs, and I coughed furiously several times as I went by them.

He tells her again that she is losing her book.

“Book, what book,” she said in a frightened voice. “Whatever sort of book is he talking about?”

She stopped. I gloated cruelly over her confusion; the bewilderment in her eyes fascinated me. Her thought could not grasp my desperate and petty persecution; she has no book at all with her, not even a page of a book, and yet now she looks through her pockets, gazes repeatedly at her hands, turns her head and examines the sidewalk behind her, strains her small and tender brain to its limit to find out what sort of book I am talking about.

He gloated at what he thought was her confusion, assuming a position of superiority that is borne out as he mocked her silly little brain trying to figure out what he was talking about. He thought his mindgames caused her to try to find the book when she was really just trying to see what on her person would make anyone think she was losing a book, not realizing, of course, that he is insane. Her friend tells her he is drunk and to pay him no attention.

It is very telling what it is that makes him stop following the two women.

I was at their heels, as near as I dared all the time. They turned once, giving me a half-frightened, half-inquisitive look, and I saw no irritation in their manner, nor any wrinkled brows. This patience with my pestering made me ashamed and I dropped my eyes. I no longer wanted to torture them.

When it became clear they were not recognizing him in the manner he wanted – anger or outright fear – he gave up.

While he clearly felt some perverse, malicious drama following the women, he also engages in bizarre theater that is harder to pin down because he is performing for his own benefit. However, in some scenes, he begins a theater excursion, only to be forced back into some sort of reality wherein he has to save face. In part one, he finds himself inside a well-appointed building where he knew no one.

I rang a bell violently on the third floor. Why did I stop precisely on the third floor? Why did I choose this bell, which was farthest from the stair?

Though he clearly is in the middle of some theater that he does not understand, the whole thing takes a left turn when the woman behind the door answers and thinks him a beggar. His diseased ego kicks in and he asks her if there was a man there, an elderly man who needed assistance going out and was willing to pay for help. She looks at him strangely, and tells him there is no such man. But not content to leave it at that, the narrator is hell-bent to make this woman know, by God, he is a man of quality.

“Then I must ask you for your pardon again,” I said. “Possibly it is the second floor. In any case, I merely wanted to recommend for the post a man in whom I have taken an interest. My own family is Wedel-Jarlsberg.” Then I bowed once more and withdrew. The young woman turned beet red and in her embarrassment could not move from the spot but stood rooted staring after me as I went down the stairs.

My peace of mind was back, and my brain clear.

The protagonist, by this point, has been living on the street, has sold his waistcoat, has no access to a place to perform basic toiletries, yet he tells himself the woman blushes from embarrassment for not recognizing a man of quality. But most telling is how calm he feels afterward. This strange theater, his elaborate ruses, give him a buffer between himself and the people he senses look down on him. I very much get the feeling that the hungrier the man becomes, the more able he is to trick himself into believing that he can, through force of will, make people believe what he wants. Either that or he is so removed via suffering from common sense that he genuinely does not understand how bizarre he seems.

Still later, his theater serves no one but himself. In part two, he finds himself staring at what he calls a white cornucopia, which sounds  like the sort of white, paper cups that people serve snowcones in. He stares at one of these discarded cornucopias and decides that there is money at the bottom. He wants to go steal it but a policeman is near.

Then I heard the policeman cough – and why did it suddenly occur to me to do the same? I stood up and coughed, repeating the cough three times so he would be sure to hear it. Now, won’t he jump for that paper cone when he comes near? I sat rejoicing over this joke, I rubbed my hands in ecstasy and swore magnificently. His nose will stretch when he sees that! After this trick, he’ll want to sink into the hottest puddle in hell!

It’s hard to follow but the protagonist thinks that the policeman will find silver in the cone and… And what? I don’t know, but the protagonist is certain it will be a bitter joke. The policeman finds the cone, picks it up, and throws it away, and this also somehow becomes fodder for the strange theater in the protagonist’s mind.

I sat there with tears in my eyes, hiccuping from shortness of breath, out of my mind with feverish laughter. I started to talk aloud, told myself the story of the paper cone, mimicked the gestures of the poor policeman, peeked into my empty hand, and repeated again an again: He coughed when he threw it away!

The narrator is clearly quite mad and there are so many irrational scenes in this book that it is hard to know the purpose of them other than to show the narrator, a weak man before he hits truly dire straits, is unhinged entirely and made completely irrational by the hunger he suffers. And he suffers greatly – more on this later.

But harder to understand are the times when he feels compelled to engage in this theater with no real explanation other than some sort of violent, uncontrollable need.

The Protagonist Cannot Act in His Own Best Interests
I’ve already mentioned how the protagonist, in possession of ten kroner given to him by his erstwhile girlfriend, decides to give the money away to the woman who has evicted him in an attempt to show her that he is a man of honor. I’ve also mentioned how he will pawn even his clothes in order to give money to beggars who are likely not as poorly off as he is. But his self-destructiveness, ironically presented in a manner wherein he is trying to preserve his ego, knows no bounds.

Take this scene when he finds himself locked out of the workshop he sleeps in. The police cannot help him open the door, but urge him to register at the police station as homeless. Doing so will give him a place to sleep and a means to obtain food, two things he needs in order to be able to write. Well, those things can happen if the protagonist is honest with himself and accepts that he is homeless and starving, but he doesn’t. He gives a false name to the officer on duty, telling him that he is a journalist who, after a night of revelry, lost his keys and wallet. The officer on duty gives the protagonist a knowing smile (and presumably mistakes the protagonist’s dreadful appearance as the result of hard-partying) and takes him to a cell.

But in the cell, the derangement caused by a lack of food and the madness latent in the protagonist both rear forth and prevent him from being able to rest in any manner. His mind races all evening, he experiences extreme highs (he creates a new word – Kuboaa – though he has no idea what it means) and extreme lows. He slept for a brief period of time once the sun began to rise, and the next morning realized that the gentlemen who had presented themselves as they were would receive food tickets. Since he was a temporarily impecunious reporter who claimed he had slept like a “cabinet minister” the police felt no need to offer him free food.

A ticket, a ticket for me, too. I hadn’t eaten for three endless days and nights. A loaf of bread! But no one offered me a ticket and I didn’t dare ask for one. That would have caused suspicion instantly. They would have wanted to poke around in my private affairs and find out who I really was – then they would arrest me for giving false information.

Even had he come clean, the police most likely would have chided him for his pride and permitted him a place to sleep and ensured he had food to eat. Maintaining this lie cuts the protagonist off from a major form of support that, had he utilized it, would have given him the foundation upon which to write. And while I mentioned that I don’t get the idea the protagonist is a particularly good writer, if I discuss it in depth, it would make this long essay even longer. But that this man refuses to do anything that will give him the comfort to write makes it seem as if writing is a very secondary thing to him, almost like a prop, a further form of theater to show himself as an intellectual. He does write but he cannot make enough money to support himself and his point-blank inability to foster his talent makes one wonder how much talent he even has.

There are other scenes, where he could have collected on debts owed to him but chose not to, where he tried to sell an item but gives it away to someone who has no money to purchase it. The protagonist is quite simply a man who has no idea how to behave in a manner ensuring self-preservation.

Starvation and Insanity
The protagonist is deranged and part of his mind shows a diseased will, but there can be no mistake that hunger strips his mind of the capacity to think soundly, especially as the book goes on. His hunger is of the sort I associate with death, the pre-terminal state wherein a starving person cannot keep down food because he has been starving for too long. There are times in the book when it is surprising he can even go on, so profound is his hunger. And as detestable as he often appears, one cannot help but feel pity for his plight. Hunger, as the title of the book implies, is the driving force in this book and shapes everything that happens to the protagonist. It may have been exacerbated by his strange need to maintain the appearance of being wealthy, but even had he spent every penny he earned or was given on food, he still would have been chronically hungry.

The book is full of scenes wherein he finally, finally gets access to food but cannot keep it down. He vomits up water, he chews on pieces of wood but real food nauseates him. In one scene, when he finally has money to get a plate of food at a cafe, the results are dire.

The food began to bother me, my stomach felt upset, and I would not be able to hold the food down very long. I walked along emptying my mouth, in every dark crook I passed, fought against the nausea which was making me hollow all over again, clenched my fists, steeled myself, stamped on the sidewalk, and swallowed again in a rage what was trying to come up – all in vain! I ran at last into a doorway, doubled over, blinded from the tears that sprang from my eyes, and vomited everything.

Money, so hard to come by, exchanged for food, and he cannot keep it down. He has clearly been starving for a long time – refeeding syndrome, an often fatal condition, can occur after only a few days of starving. The narrator is very physically sick and it seems that he has no way out. He does ask a man what one should feed a starving person who is beginning to eat and is told boiled milk works well. He gets boiled milk at a cafe and indeed can keep it down. But his poverty does not permit him to coddle his abused stomach this way for long.

It just gets worse for him. Take this pitiful scene:

I was bitterly hungry and didn’t know what to do with my exorbitant appetite. I writhed about on the bench and pulled my knees up against my chest as hard as I could. When it was dark, I shuffled over to the city jail – God knows how I got there – and sat down on the edge of the balustrade, I ripped one of my coat pockets out and started chewing on it…

He is struck with the idea of asking a butcher for a bone, the sort of bones a butcher would give away to someone who wants it for his dog.

I got a bone, a gorgeous little bone with some meat still on it, and put it under my coat. I thanked the man so warmly he looked at me astonished.

“Nothing to thank me for,” he said.

“Oh yes there is,” I said. “This was very good of you.”

He returns to the blacksmith shop, settles into the dark and begins to chew on the bone.

It has no taste at all; a nauseating odor of dried blood rose from the bone, and I started throwing up immediately, I couldn’t help it. I tried again – if only I could keep it down, it would do some good; the problem was to get it to stay down there. But I vomited again. I grew angry, bit fiercely into the meat, ripped off a small piece, and swallowed it by force. That did no good either – as soon as the small pieces became warm in the stomach, up they came again. I clenched my fists madly, started crying from sheer helplessness, and gnawed like a man possessed. I cried so much that the bone became wet and messy with tears. I vomited, swore, and chewed again, cried as if my heart would break, and threw up again. Then I swore aloud and consigned all the powers of the universe to hell.

This was hard for me to read. Very hard. This and all the passages like it. It is all the worse because it is starvation in the midst of plenty. It is a man dying on his feet from a lack of food outside of the constraints of war, genocide, famine or drought. From all accounts, this is something that Hamsun himself experienced and this passage of a man sobbing as his traumatized stomach vomits back up the food he needs to survive is harrowing in its implications because the narrator can not tolerate the ego hit it would take to admit he needs help and yet those around him seem largely indifferent to his suffering. He is starving alone yet with an audience and it is horrible to read and to contemplate. No wonder he acts out such bizarre theater toward those around him – they are watching him die and most don’t seem to care.

Interpretation of the Ending
Because this book evidently mirrors a terrible time in Hamsun’s life – a decade or more of his own suffering – it is tempting to believe the ending is a hopeful one because Hamsun survived and managed to get this book published. In part four, the protagonist, evicted from his home and having given away the money his ex-girlfriend sent him, goes on a sort of rampage, eating cakes and vomiting in the street. He finally goes to the harbor and finds a ship that is sailing to Leeds and then to Cadiz and persuades the captain to take him on as a merchant marine. The captain is reluctant but agrees when the protagonist promises to work hard, even to take two watches if it means he can have the job. The novel ends thusly:

When we were out on the fjord, I straightened up, wet from fever and exertion, looking in toward land and said goodbye for now to the city, to Christiana [Oslo], where the windows of the homes all shone with such brightness.

He’s leaving a place of brightness, where he failed utterly, where he almost starved. But then again, on the ship he will finally receive steady food, perhaps bread and water until he can stomach more. Isn’t he saved? Many seem to think this is the case.

I don’t think so. I think going onto the ship is a form of suicide, and not just because he is going to travel away from a city of brightness.

When the protagonist is in the jail cell, he has a waking dream that tells us quite clearly what he thinks of the harbor, of ships, of the sea.

God in heaven, how black it was! And I started again to think about the harbor, the ships, the dark monsters who lay waiting for me. They wanted to pull me to themselves and hold me fast and sail with me over land and sea, through dark kingdoms no man had ever seen. I felt myself on board ship, drawn on through waters, floating in clouds, going down, down… I gave a hoarse shriek of fear, and hugged the bed; I had been on such a perilous journey, fallen down through the sky like a shot. How good and saved I felt when I grabbed the hard sides of the cot! That is what it is like to die, I said to myself, now I will die.

There is a temptation to say that with death comes rebirth, but this does not have the ring of such an idea to me. Rather, it seems like the sea is where a man who cannot live in the brightness goes, and monsters are waiting for him. They take him down into the sea, kill him and his spirit, initially in clouds, floats down into hell.

For me, joining the merchant ship is the last straw – the protagonist is ready to die.

This is a hard book and I will never read it again. And there are a million ways to look at the text – despite the length of this discussion, I did not discuss much of this book – I barely broke the surface. But if you think you can stomach this sort of madness, this sort of hunger, this sort of repetitive lunacy as a man self-destructs, you will want to read this book. It’s not for everyone. I don’t even think it was for me. But I am glad I read it even as it haunts me.

Author: Mykle Hansen, illustrated by Nate Beaty

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, cannibalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Tony Rauch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh yuck.”

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Wrath James White

Type of Book: Fiction, novella, extreme horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: The extremity of the horror makes it odd by my calculations.

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

Comments: For reasons that I have discussed in the past, I have been watching Wrath James White’s writing for a while. I was introduced to him via a collaboration that was so bad it remains in my top ten category for worst books I have ever read (Teratologist was the book, the sort of book wherein the protagonist’s name is spelled three different ways in one paragraph). So I sought out White’s web presence and his well-written, interesting blog did not mesh with the hot mess I had read so I gave him another chance. I next read Book of a Thousand Sins and saw that in some respects, my belief he was a far better writer than Teratologist presented him was justified. There were problems with that story collection, but White got enough right that I was heartened.

Population Zero is pretty much a vindication that my instincts were correct. All the issues that I saw in Book of a Thousand Sins were reconciled. Whereas characters might rant for pages on end in BoaTS,  in Population Zero the protagonist’s issues were woven into the plot and showed a character arc. White’s at times baroque writing style was a bit more restrained in this book and his characterization was excellent. The villain in Teratologist embodied Dean Venture when he declared, “I dare you to make less sense!” (Dean also had a terrible problem with his testicles, and the applicability of me telling you this will become clear as you read my discussion.)

There were some small problems in Population Zero that I am going to get out of the way before discussing all that was fabulous. First, the ending left much to be desired and that may just be my feeling on the matter. But the ending felt rushed and given the amount of energy others expended to get the protagonist to the end point, the ending felt wrong. Additionally, as the protagonist goes about his job, he delivers information that become obsolete with the Welfare Reform Act of 1996; tiny little points of social policy that I suspect only I would nitpick because they aren’t too glaring and because they flow well with the story White is telling. There are some small typos, as well. Someone tries to score “heroine” and a character “grinded” his teeth. They’re minor and not that intrusive, but they’re there.

(And it should be mentioned that if you are a social justice warrior, you will not like this book. The protagonist is very unsympathetic to the obese, to the poor trapped on a social treadmill of bad choices, and pregnancy in all forms. The protagonist is also a mentally disturbed, increasingly unhinged killer. In the past, when such a character had very unpleasant ideas, it was called characterization. In some quarters these days, it is a sign of a greater misogyny and class prejudice. I hardly think it so, but I have now given some of my more socially progressive readers clear warning that this book may not be to their tastes.)

But those are small problems in comparison to the nasty, upsetting, yet strangely compelling trip Todd takes us on. All that White gets right in this book is made all the more amazing because this is a book that oh-so-easily could have become a screed with a caricature for a hero. The protagonist, Todd, is a vegan social worker with a job at the welfare office. Yep, a vegan whose interactions with the mass of people receiving public support emphasize his ideas of zero population growth for humans. Todd is a character whose life could be a stereotype, a shrill condemner cut from the caricature cloth reserved for so many vegan characters. White rises above that, making sure that his gore comes with some excellent characterization. Even as he may appall us, Todd is completely understandable.

Todd suffered horrific losses as a child that could, in a novel content to be simply pulpy, have been fuel enough for some “I hate babies but love animals” rampage, but Wrath’s characterization makes Todd’s reaction to the world fueled from his childhood losses, of puppies and ultimately his family, fodder for something more complex. Todd will end up a killer, but this isn’t a revenge-against-the-world-because-childhood-sucks trope. White sets up neatly how Todd comes to have reasonably rational ideas about zero population growth for humans, a dislike of people who take endlessly from the system without giving anything back, and even his intense anger for people who commit acts of sexual infidelity. And Todd does not even intend to become a killer. He just takes things one step too far one day and as he does this, Wrath writes some scenes of extraordinary violence and gore. But as he kills, Todd is still the environmentalist who rides a bike instead of drives a car, who refuses to eat animals, who gets a vasectomy because he wants no children of his own lest they strain the planet further. Todd is a demented idealist who makes perfect sense.

(Small, ranty aside: Bizarre protagonists who seemingly never make sense are the hallmark of the late Richard Laymon. But Laymon, one of the most talented pulp writers in the last 50 years, could make it work more often than not because he sacrificed believable characters for intense and involved plots. As you groaned as the heroine refused to call the police YET AGAIN, you kept reading because the plot was so compelling. Too many young horror writers who dabble in extremity have picked up the habit of unbelievable characters in the aid of the plot, but never write plots worth the exchange.)

We meet the adult Todd at his job at the welfare office, and had Wrath not begun this book with the earnest, kind, idealistic child Todd had been, it would be very easy to dismiss him as a classist, lookist prick. He loathes those whom it is his job to serve: overweight women with several children, pregnant addicts, men who simply won’t get a job as they sire child after child. But as White writes about all that Todd observes, it becomes clear that the system that asks him to serve people who are at times dreadful has dragged him down into a very unpleasant place. He fantasizes about killing an extremely obese woman with four children and is shaken from his daydream as she asks to be put back on WIC because she is pregnant again. Appalled, Todd cannot stop himself from saying that he would pay for her to have an abortion. When she becomes angry, Todd takes it one step further telling her that if she decides to have an abortion, he will also pay to get her tubes tied, will ensure she has a very easy time getting her benefits in the future and will never have to come into the office again.

The woman’s mouth opened and then she paused. She paused!
She was considering it. She looked down at the mewling infant in her lap with his face stained with baby food and juice, the two-year-old in the stroller beside her reeked from a diaper that needed to be changed an hour ago, the four and five-year-olds still fought over a toy one of them had stolen from the grocery store, and a look of exhaustion and resignation began to take over her face. Tears welled up in her eyes. She began to look helpless and confused.

And if you are a social justice warrior who is still confused about this book, the above passage is a clue. This is a woman for whom life has become very difficult. Her situation clearly does not make her happy and perhaps she has been given the wrong help in life. As her human dignity to reproduce has been honored, no one had given her this way out before. Todd, in his prejudice is doing a good thing, but he can’t see it. Her tears mean nothing to him.

Todd was surprised that he wasn’t touched by it all. For some reason, the plight of a single human never seemed to have the power to move him, not when there were 50,000 species of plant and animal life going extinct every year as we cleared rainforests and turned them into cattle farms so fat whores like this could get cheeseburgers. He wanted to look away but he knew that he had to look sympathetic if he wanted to save his job.

She accepts his offer and he sets everything up for her. Afterwards, he feels peace.

He looked at the long line standing outside the door of his cubicle and for the first time he didn’t feel the usual anxiety. He didn’t feel the desire to run and hide under the desk or flee the building or take an AR15 rifle and mow down everyone in sight and then burn the place to the ground.

For the first time in his nine years working for the Welfare Department, Todd Hammerstein actually felt like he had done some good.

I began with this section to show how it is that I feel that White managed to get so much right. Todd has very unpleasant ideas, and I could humanize him more to you if I reproduced sections of his youth that explain all too clearly why he hates pregnancy and came to have extremist ideas about world population, but that I think needs to go unsaid in this discussion lest it ruin too much. But even though we understand how Todd comes to have these ideas and pity the boy he once was, he’s an unpleasant guy. We later learn his extremism about ZPG helped drive away his girlfriend into the arms of another woman. But Todd is also confronted daily with crowds of people who, in their own way, are as unappealing as he is. Helpless, sad, defeated people whom he often cannot help beyond funding them as they grow unhealthy and despondent. Todd is a complex man facing complex problems. And far from being a very good day, the day he procures an abortion and sterilization for that woman is the beginning of him exercising a diseased hubris that permits him to do the unthinkable.

As Todd offers meth addicts abortions and sterilization in exchange for benefits, he also frequents idealistic ZPG message boards and muses on the state of the planet in a way that foreshadows pretty clearly what is about to happen, but possibly only in retrospect:

Earlier that year he’d watched a documentary on Charles Manson in which Manson had stated that he needed to kill about two million people in order to save the planet. Two million people would hardly be a drop in the bucket in terms of overpopulation and the two unwanted children whose births he had prevented would not make a difference at all. He needed to do more.

It wasn’t until after I was finished reading this book and writing this discussion that I realized that Charles Manson was connected to the murder of just one pregnant woman. Yes, I don’t feel I am spoiling much here when I say that Todd will try to kill more than one pregnant woman. And that he discusses Manson only in terms of his ZPG utterings is telling. Todd is walking closer and closer to being a zealot, turning idealism into something deadly.

Todd is a fan of a ZPG writer named Heimlich Anatolli (a not so cloaked reference to the ZPG author Paul Ehrlich) and Heimlich frequents the message boards that Todd posts to. One day Todd asks if it is advisable to urge pregnant women to abort and Heimlich gives him the message he needs: any child born may be the one that breaks the camel’s back.

And from there Todd is off to the ZPG races. Todd’s zeal to stop pregnancy causes some scenes at work and later one of his coworkers reveals she is part of a larger ZPG cabal and serves as a sort of deus ex machina when Todd’s back is against the wall. I found those parts of the book, as well as the ending, far less interesting than Todd and his complex justifications and extreme rage. White has Todd dissemble in a manner that I typically associate with the skill of Ruth Rendell, who arguably handles the diseased mind better than any writer today. And his relationship with his ex-girlfriend is also not as interesting, though it helps show what an absolute zealot Todd is, even as he knows he is missing out on having the life he wants.

The mayhem really starts when Todd thinks he will start offering DIY sterilizations. He offers a vasectomy to a young man who killed his chances to have a basketball career because he had children right out of high school. Unmarried with four children, Todd wonders how many more children the man would create before he died and offers him the vasectomy. The kid refuses so Todd lures him to his apartment with an offer of special job training. And it is about here, gorehounds, where the content will become relevant to your interests.

It’s funny, in a very dark way, how Todd justifies what he plans to do. He muses:

It’s not like I’m going to kill the guy. I’m just going to fix him. They don’t call vets psychotic when they neuter dogs against their will. This is the same thing, isn’t it?

Well, generally, one does not have to get a stun gun, hand cuffs, duct tape and instructions from Google on how to neuter a dog because vets have years of training and dogs are not very tall young men who had a shot at the NBA and could kill you for even looking too long at their testicles.

Oh my God. Maybe I am crazy?

He tried to console himself with the notion that crazy people didn’t know they were crazy, so if he thought that he was going crazy then he must still be sane. It was slim comfort though. He couldn’t bullshit himself.

But as he thinks he is nuts and tries to think of a way out of it, the young man comes to the door and Todd zaps him with the stun gun. He rolls him up in duct tape and… You know, I am not going to reproduce any of the extreme violence Todd wreaks. It needs to be read as it comes in the book. But Todd does manage to sterilize the poor man. The man passes out from the pain and is enraged when he wakes.

Todd looked up at the ceiling and tried to gather his thoughts, to find the words to make the big man understand.

“Do you know that it took hundreds of thousands of years for the world’s population to reach one billion and in the 200 years that followed, it has more than quintupled? The world’s population has tripled since 1980 to 6 billion people, and is expected to grow to 9 billion by 2050. For every one of those 6 billion people on Earth nearly six tons of carbon dioxide is spewed into the air annually. Do you realize that one human being generates over 1,569 pounds of waste a year? That’s nearly 125,000 in a lifetime, sixty-two tons! And that’s just one person! Half of the land on the earth has already been built on, paved over, and otherwise altered so that it is almost uninhabitable by any species other than humans and the insects and vermin that thrive off of us. And as the population continues to grow we’ll need to convert even more land into habitable space for humans, meaning uninhabitable space for almost everything else. How can we allow that? Fifty percent of the world’s original forests have been destroyed as a result of massive land clearing for housing, roads, agriculture, and industries. Do you get what I’m saying? Do you even give a fuck? Your sperm cells are destroying the planet! So I had to stop you. I had to stop you from reproducing.”

Yeah, the neutered man doesn’t really care, as he’s been operated on sans anesthetic and is prone on the floor, wrapped in duct tape. And it’s right about here that Todd realizes he has not thought his plan through. Those forcibly sterilized by a welfare office lunatic go to the police when released.

So Todd does what he has to do to remain at large. Oh, and he does it completely naked and not as a means of evidence control. He’s just naked because he’s pretty insane. Did I mention he had an erection, too? Sorry to bring it up.

Todd has not completely spun out of control. He has enough acuity and loathing that when his hero, Dr Heimlich Anatolli is arrested as a terrorist, Todd begins to see himself as a one-man force to prevent the planet from having children. And while he regrets killing the man he neutered, such feelings of regret do not stand a chance against the demented zeal spurring him on.

And he begins to abort and sterilize but doesn’t shed tears when his methods kill the potential breeder. There is a scene where Todd targets a home for unwed mothers that was so profoundly over-the-top in terms of sheer gore that you have to read it to believe it. I should also mention I read half this book waiting to see my gynecologist. It bothers me how little I was fazed when I read the scene in the unwed mother’s home.

The rest of the book reveals the cabal and an unpleasant truth about Todd’s ex-girlfriend, but the real focus for me was Todd as he became completely unstrung. He was a mix between a spree killer and a calculated terrorist. His rampage to achieve a small measure of ZPG is truly a gift to gorehounds everywhere. This book is a near-perfect marriage of gore with careful plot and excellent characterization. Were it not for the ending this would be a five-star read.

If you have the stomach for it, I say read it. An eco-warrior run amok. A damaged human being striking out. Tons of gore, but plenty of attention to details that don’t involve blood and feti. Subtle examinations of the welfare system via broadly painted examples. White manages to tell a very large story in a very slim book. This novella ensured that I will keep reading White, whose skill seems to improve with each effort.

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.