Author: Eric Hendrixson

Type of Book: Fiction, novella, bizarro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So, what’s the holiday this time?”

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

Yeah, Charles is a Fifth Day Philistine.

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh no,” Charles said. “No. No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Tao Lin

Type of Book: Fiction, novella, autobiography

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd:

Does it really matter?

Availability: Published by Melville Press in 2009, I highly advise that you not buy a copy, but rather shoplift a copy. If you get caught and arrested, take your mugshot, superimpose it over a picture of your ass, and mail it to Lin. He will then fashion all of the be-assed mug shots into some sort of self-aggrandizing but ultimately morally and socially empty project and thus the circle will be unbroken.

Comments: I genuinely do not understand how anyone could like this book, let alone the nice, earnest, decent people who recommended it to me. The only thing that prevented me from shitting on this book or setting it on fire is the fact that I needed it in a relatively clean state so I could discuss it thoroughly, complete with quotes, even though quoting it will only cause this godless endeavor to be exposed to more people.  But as I have always said, when I hate a book, I need to support my case and discuss thoroughly why the book is bad.  I briefly considered ignoring this book and just letting the wretched memory of it die but I can’t. My compulsive nature forces me to discuss every odd book I read, and, more to the point, I just want my voice to be out there in the electronic wilderness, urging people not to read this book.  This book is the naked Emperor and I don’t want anyone who reads this site to be a part of the crowd that refuses to say, “Hey, the Emperor has no clothes!” Or rather, “Hey, this book is a pile of shit and your soul will be imperiled if you read it lest you lose your will to live and find worth in the emotionally void headcases Lin droned about, stick figures that misguided people think pass for hipsters. Run, run away and avoid this book like it has the plague and wants to ass fuck you without your permission!” Or words to that effect.

Also, for reasons that will become clear, this may be the first bad review I ever enjoyed writing.  Seriously, I cannot recall ever reading such an egregiously dishonest book. I say dishonest because I can only imagine Lin wrote this book as a litmus test. People who like it are clearly people he will be able to defraud further. I almost wonder if he managed somehow to track down the addresses of the people who liked his book because those are fresh couches to crash on when he inevitably gets evicted. The reason I say this book is dishonest is because it cloaks the naked and smarmy ambition of a talentless writer behind subcultures that ultimately have little to do with the emotional vacancy represented in Lin’s words. This book mines many counter-cultural ideas, mainly those of vegans, Crimethinc and hipsters, and tries to pass off the hucksterism of the author as an honest look at those cultures when it is really just shitting all over everything.

Look, people have shit on those who write for a new zeitgeist pretty much since publishing evolved from the Gutenberg Press to a more accessible means of conveying ideas.  Truman Capote demeaned Kerouac. Half the people I know would like to kill Holden Caulfield if he were a real human. Douglas Coupland mined his generation so thoroughly that some think he wrote himself into a place of relative irrelevance, and Bret Easton Ellis’s scathing examination of 1980s consumer culture, American Psycho, is one of the most misunderstood books ever. Books that speak of a people who may not be our own, or of a culture that is different, or of a people who may be our own but are so morally bereft we can’t admit it, run the risk of being seen as poorly written or inexplicable or exploitative. Moreover, this most commonly happens when the middle-aged make the mistake of thinking they have a finger on the pulse of the young when they don’t, walking into new works clutching their own ideas of art, connection and social relevance like so many pearls.

I can tell you with no small amount of emphatic anger that this is not that, a woman long in her tooth clutching pearls at the antics of These Kids Today. This book is so foul that I didn’t even have to second guess myself. This book is such an egregious piece of shit hiding behind what many consider to be hipster culture that it sickens me that people got taken in by it. To paraphrase the late, great Dorothy Parker, this not a book to be tossed aside – it is a book to be thrown with great force, preferably at a picture of Tao Lin that one has printed out from the Web and taped to a bean bag chair.

Before I tear this book apart with a ferocity born of knowing that this huckster will look at this review from a small potatoes reviewer and smirk as he adds it to all the negative reactions that he uses to build his brand, I feel the need to clear up a few things. One, as a failed vegan who would very much like not to be a failed vegan, do not in any way misinterpret my criticisms of Tao Lin’s use of veganism in this book as an indictment against veganism in general. That One Time You Ate A Hamburger And A Vegan Yelled At You notwithstanding, most vegans are extremely nice, extraordinarily principled and idealistic people who deserve respect for choosing a diet that, the mere mention of, causes even kind people to downshift straight into nastiness born from cognitive dissonance and crow about their Paleo diet or how good cow tastes.

Second, I sort of like hipsters (and I often feel disliking hipsters is a clear sign of incipient fogeyism) so I find it interesting so many hipsters embraced this book. I don’t see this book as a hipster manifesto because after reading this, I grouped Tao Lin into the same camp, ironically enough, as  men like Dov Charney who prey on hipsters. Young hipsters, to my eye, are the natural progression of edgy youth once the anger of punk wore itself out and the alienation of grunge wore thin. Sure, sure, the hipsters I have met definitely had an air of pretension about them, as do almost all young people because youth is a time when we are meant to pretend, to try on new ideas and see how they fit. All young people are arrogant if they are doing it right.  There is nothing sadder than a humble 20-year-old.  One of the reasons I like hipsters is because there is something to be said for people who make a virtue of that which does not require much money. Their currency in trade of knowing the arcane, like music and bands that are discarded when they become popular, is a means of wealth that people with cash in hand cannot achieve unless they are in that particular realm of knowledge. They have created a culture that is a lovely “fuck you” to the rest of us because no matter how often people sneer at them in their thrift threads worn ironically, they have a culture of particular value that permits them to sneer right back at us. They know things that we don’t and never will until knowing them no longer means a thing.  There is a cultural renovation and reclamation behind hipsterism, a desire to have that which is unique and unknown that fuels their perceptions of status, that can be as hard to see as the hopefulness behind goths.

So, I clearly don’t dislike hipsters and I don’t think Tao Lin speaks for them, unless co-opting and hiding behind the sarcasm and irony of hipsters is a form of representation.  Also, this book is really nothing but a depiction of Lin and he as a person cannot represent an entire subculture.  Sam, the protagonist of this book, represents no one, though he seems to be mimicking the hipsters as they mimic elements from certain cultures, taking us back into the recursive nightmare so often present in this book.  But really, I have to make it clear that there is no subculture that sucks as much as a whole as Sam sucks individually.  The youth of America, a generation that some insist are dumbed down, are not that dumbed down, and they certainly are not this dumbed down.

Third, I have a friend who is deeply into the Crimethinc counterculture praise this book highly to me because he felt as if this was the first time he had seen someone sort of like him in a book.  I have seen others in anarchist groups say similar things and their enthusiasm was one of the reasons I read this book, though I have to say I have no idea if Tao Lin understood people like my friend would be drawn to his words via his thefts.  I understand my friend’s belief in this book but I also think it is misguided. Don’t misunderstand me – despite the amount of time I spent in the retail trenches, I don’t give a good goddamn if people shoplift. It’s the cost of doing business and if it didn’t happen, prices would still go up so a cultural aversion to theft is not a part of my distaste. This book is clearly autobiographical and Lin discusses his disaffected attempts at shoplifting, two of which got him arrested. No Crimethinc-er worth his or her salt would be that inept and if they were that inept, they would not aggrandize it because the whole point of shoplifting to them is to subvert capitalism and to sustain a life without the drudgery of work. To be known as a shoplifter to that degree would impair anyone’s ability to continue to steal and would subvert the entire point behind stealing. I really don’t want to entertain a conversation about the relative morality of such a mindset – knock yourself out if you want to go there but I find such conversations wearying these days. But it has to be said that since Tao Lin has made a virtue of getting caught stealing, to the point that a flier was made up warning a store about him, and that he uses that flier as a form of self-promotion now, it’s pretty clear that ideology was never at play with Lin and this book cannot stand as an homage to that ideology. A man who uses a flier about what a shitty thief he is to show what an OMG counter-cultural dude he is is simply promoting himself, and however much I want Lin to go suck on a tailpipe for writing this book, one has to tip their hat to his sense of self-promotion. At that he is a genius. Too bad the promotion is, at heart, the substance of what he has to convey to his audience.

(Actually, in all honesty, as a member of the self-deprecating and all too often full of self-loathing Generation X, I wondered if my own complete inability at self-promotion combined with the notion that I probably suck at everything I do played into my utter distaste for Lin. So I did hesitate before I crowned Tao Lin the Emperor of Crap. But not for long. I don’t mind self-promotion and would do it myself were I any good at it. I just want those promoting themselves, however glib and irritating their approach may be, to have something backing it up, some talent worth promoting. Self-promoting one’s self-promotional capabilities is just too recursive for the likes of me.)

So those three points cleared up, I’ll start discussing the book. In many ways, this book harks back to Camus’ The Stranger, a sort of modern update on a book that I admit I am constitutionally unable to appreciate deeply, though I certainly understand its purpose and philosophical relevance. It was as if The Stranger was not only reduced and made trivial (Lin’s character in the book goes to jail twice for shoplifting and The Stranger’s Meursault goes to jail for murder, Lin orders characters around in an empty ego-gesture to show his superiority, Meursault is honest in his deep loathing for everyone around him). There are some similarities too in how the two writers handle conversation signifiers, but ultimately, if I analyze Lin’s work in reference to Camus’ work, I don’t really get a look at a nihilistic character, or a society deserving of contempt, or even a basic existential confrontation of the self. All I get is a look at Lin’s consciousness via his character Sam, and it’s a boring, pointless, tiresome, empty, foul, nothing sort of experience. It is not a nothing sort of experience because the purpose of the novel is to represent an empty character shaped by an empty world. Rather, it is empty because Lin’s life is not worth an autobiographical sketch and because he is a terrible writer.

In fact, as I reviewed the book in my mind, I wondered if this novella was ultimately a fuck you delivered from Tao Lin to the people who consider him a good writer and have defended him as a relevant writer. From the attitudes his autobiographical proxy Sam has towards the craft of writing to the way Sam treats obvious fans, perhaps this is a cloaked but clever way for Tao Lin to take minor vengeance on those who are too dense to see him for what he is – a man selling himself in any way he can. Perhaps Tao Lin wants people to know he is not the naked Emperor preening to sycophants, but rather the clever tailor who produces nothing and everyone applauds.

So let’s dive into this autobiographical novella. There are those who may say that Tao Lin adopts an alienating, flat, pointless, repetitive, meaningless narrative delivered through an alienating, flat, senseless, boring narrator on purpose because he wants to write like a soulless, numb automaton and those who find this relentlessly tiresome just don’t get it. They may be right (but they’re not). But whether Lin created one of the most boring, tiresome, empty narratives ever on purpose or by sheer crappy and purposeless writing means little to me because the end result is the same – a book not worth reading. This book reads like what would happen if an emotionally muffled person got a lobotomy, took a fistful of Xanax every day and then wrote a book. Every word would be “meant” and “on purpose” but the only truth one would be able to know is what it reads like to be an emotionally blunted lobotomy patient strung out on Benzos, and no matter how much one wants to claim the modern world with modern technology has numbed us, I know precious few people whose lives have become such a recursive nightmare that reading their most banal chat sessions repeated in a book appeals to them as an ideal way of experiencing meaning in literature. It may be a reflection of a small segment of society but as a whole it has so little experiential and literary merit that it’s pointless in a way that I suspect Lin himself could not have anticipated.

But then again, if a chemically deadened and lobotomized brain can write well, maybe the words would be worth the trip. Lin, if he can write well, mostly hides it in this book. The book has no structure, no sense of achievement, no sense of connection and no sense of disconnection. It’s just Lin vomiting up his experiences and it’s so pointless that it’s devastating. Here’s an early conversation between Sam (Tao Lin’s stand-in) and Luis:

“Should we kill ourselves now or start crying or punch ourselves,” said Luis.

“What is wrong with us,” said Sam. “Should I email Sheila. Or wait until she emails me. I have no car, phone, bike. I’m going to add more people on MySpace.”

“We are so weird,” said Luis. “We met online a year ago. And we are up a year later being weird as shit.”

“One year,” said Sam. “This is weird.”

“I feel like my chest is going to explode,” said Luis.

Despite the fact that this is not my idea of a good time, generally speaking, this has the potential to be funny. Two dumbasses low on the food chain discussing how full of dumbassery they are. I could see one of them portrayed by James Franco in the Hollywood movie adaptation. Stupid men, slightly melodramatic. Later, I wondered if this book was actually an inversion of existentialism, an inability to confront the self when there is no self to be examined. There is no there there, so all the self-probing and declarations of being “weird as shit” had no choice but to go absolutely nowhere. If this is what Lin was going for, I posit that boring, numb and stupid are not really how most people go through life, and that a novella featuring a soulless, empty carcass that manages to move around, desire vegan snacks and not really give a shit when Sheila has to go into a psychiatric hospital is not just a book that “norms” would not find appealing but one that the vast of humanity would find wholly without merit.

But rest assured, no attempts to assign a philosophical or social context to this novel saved it from what it is, a boring look at banality. A pointless look at banality, as well. The conversation between Sam and Luis continues:

“I am adding random people in MySpace,” said Sam.

“I feel weird,” said Luis. “Like I was molested by my uncle or something. You are on the floor. With the blanket around you.”

“The blanket is over my head,” said Sam.

“Are we fucked,” said Luis and got off the Internet.

I think it was right about here that I wondered if the book was setting me up for a novel in which technology and modern living had rendered these two men incapable of making choices that affirmed their humanity, that perhaps they were trapped in a life where they could not leave, a sort of No Exit wherein there were no moral choices or difficult people forcing confrontation but just a bland inability to do much more than add people on MySpace and state the obvious while feeling a disconnection they can only assume comes from a dark place. These are men so bereft of inner life that they are almost hopeful an uncle raped them, because it would give reason for their dissatisfaction and torpor.

But this is not a treatise about how the world has limited them by oppressive technology or media manipulation. Sam does things that could potentially have been interesting or could have served as some sort of philosophical or social underpinning in this novel. But by the muffled nature of his existence, none of it means anything. This book is not about the disaffection facing some members of a generation who have not known life without invasive technology and as a result have difficulty making choices that would prove their humanity. This particular meaninglessness of life does not come from without – it comes from within. Sam is empty and so is Luis but others in this book don’t exhibit this level of emptiness. But instead of interacting with humans who are fully in this world and having it change them, Sam just looks at them through numb eyes and reacts with a soulless incapacity to feel.  And if there was some sort of meaning behind the numbness, I could stomach this book.  Meursault in The Stranger is very clear about why he is so flat – there is a disgust for humanity underneath his every action and inaction.   There is no such clarity in Sam. This is a book about a narcissist who has no self. It is about a self-absorbed asshole who is incapable of examining himself and the world around him, and a character like this hardly deserves a novella built around him.

So back to the book. Sam has moved with Sheila to Pennsylvania, a transition that takes a paragraph because location is meaningless to Sam and because Tao Lin is a terrible writer:

A few days later he and Sheila were on a train to New York City. They drank from a large plastic bottle containing organic soymilk, energy drink, and green tea extract and wrote sex stories to sell to nerve.com for $500. Sheila’s sex story had chainsaws and Sam’s sex story had Ha Jin doing things in a bathroom at Emory University. Sheila said she felt excited to be in New York City soon. They talked about making their own energy drink company. They got off the train and stood waiting for another train. They climbed a wall and sat in sunlight facing the train tracks.

“I feel really happy right now,” said Sheila looking ahead.

Sam looked at the side of Sheila’s face.

“You didn’t feel happy before?” he said.

“I mean I just feel really good right now,” said Sheila. “Don’t you?”

“You don’t feel good at other times?” said Sam staring at his new shoes. “I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry. That was stupid of me.”

“It’s okay,” said Sheila.

It was around 11:00 am. It was March.

Sam felt himself about to say something.

“Do you not feel good anymore?” he said.

Sheila had a bored facial expression.

“Something is wrong with me,” said Sam.

Fuck Tao Lin for giving the reader little moments like this wherein we can think, “Holy shit, Sam realizes he’s a repellent, emotionally stunted Lizard Man and can change!” But this is not a confrontation of self. This is Sam digging for information because Sheila is expressing that things like writing sexy stories on a sunny day with her boyfriend can affect her mood. Sam cannot be affected this way because he is empty.  (Yeah, not gonna touch the whole nerve.com and Ha Jin thing.)

So, as Sam sits here and pokes his girlfriend for information about what it feels like to be human, we also get a taste of Lin’s terrible writing. Sometimes he uses question marks during questions, and sometimes he doesn’t and while I have no idea why he switched back and forth, I do know it was pointless and stupid. And though I can see how inserting that little sentence about the time and the month probably is meant to interrupt the flow of the feelings Sheila was expressing, it also seems like a pointless non-sequitur. I think the worst element of reading this book was realizing that despite being a third person narrative, and despite the fact that this is an autobiography, Lin never uses either method of storytelling to let us into Sam’s mind.  A flat character in a first person narrative would be unable to explain himself, but a third person narration could have analyzed Sam in some manner that makes him relevant. We never see why the hell Sam is a useless sack of crap and again, even if it is deliberate, it is a shitty way to tell a story. Of course, Lin could not use a third person narration to plunge Sam’s soul because he doesn’t have one. He’s just a ridiculous creature that eats stuff, exercises an empty ego and and periodically goes to jail and none of that is enough to justify telling a story.

So in a couple of pages Sam is back in Manhattan, crashing in his brother’s house. He goes to eat a salad with Sheila:

They stood talking near the front doors while looking at each other’s shoes and other things. They left the cafe and went somewhere else then sat in front of New York University’s business school. It was around 10 p.m. They ate most of a giant salad of hijiki, lettuce, spinach, sprouts and tofu. Sam turned the aluminum container upside-down over a large plant. “High-quality fertilizer,” he said.

“Good,” said Sheila from where she sat. “Good job.”

They talked about the salad’s size and organic ingredients.

“We can eat it together in the future sometimes,” said Sam.

“That would be good,” said Sheila. “I would like that.”

Interesting that the same food that nourishes Sam is used to nourish a plant. I suspect this book would have been more interesting if on page 23 we began to follow the life of the plant that received that high quality fertilizer. God knows what wonderful things that plant saw, the wonders it witnessed, the human drama that played out in front of it as it just sat there, composting organic greens and tofu. Had Sam been potted in a planter outside of NYU, I suspect the novella would not have been substantially different than the one I read wherein he was free to walk around amongst human beings.

Also, poor Sheila, eating with this plant of a man. Their future is not one of traveling and making love and having deep conversations. No, she will, if Sam can be arsed, eat salad with him on some unspecified day in the future, maybe, and they will look at their shoes and stuff. Because that is as deep as this will get with Sam. I believe I mentioned that Sheila ends up in a psych ward and Sam’s reaction is no different really if he had been told Sheila had gotten married, gotten a job, belched in public, cried during a sad movie or just walked home by herself one evening.  At 10:00 p.m.  In March.  I hope Sheila, whoever her real equivalent was in Tao Lin’s life, got the help she needed to understand why she hitched her star to a plant-wagon.

Some more things happen. To give the dull devil his due, the first scene when Sam is arrested and taken to jail is reasonably funny. It is one of those times when just regurgitating the interesting things that happen around Sam was enough because no matter how you slice it, a jail cell in NYC is gonna be interesting. Strangely, this pissed me off because it shows that if Lin had tried, just a little, this book would not have been the literary equivalent of eating Vaseline.  Sam ended up in jail because he sucks so much at shoplifting that he was caught immediately after trying to lift a shirt he wanted to wear to his book reading. A mixed message to be sure. Sam is broke but wants a shirt. Rather than conform to the ideas of capitalist morality that says one can only own what one can afford, he tries to steal. But because he has nothing inside of him that comes close to being drive or a sense of competent action, he doesn’t even bother to steal in a manner that ensures success. So what is the message here? That sucking at everything one does in life ensures that one will at least get the majesty of witnessing drunk people lose their shit in a jail cell? Who knows…

It was on page 35 when I knew Tao Lin was just a huckster slinging words around, using writing as a method of self-promotion. Tao Lin is not promoting his book when he annoys Gawker or ironically posts links to his bad press. He is promoting himself via his books. This is a key passage:

“I want to change my novel to present tense,” said Sam. “Is there some Microsoft Word thing to do that.”

“I don’t think so. I think you have to do it manually.”

“Manually,” said Sam.

“By hand,” said Luis. “Get an interview on Suicide Girls, that should be your next step. Do you think in five years the national media will create a stupid term like ‘blogniks’ to describe us.”

“Yes,” said Sam. “Remember when we had hope like four months ago.”

Shut up, Sam.  This book goes back four months – you had no hope then. None of us did. Also note the return to not using question marks. But mostly note that Sam is so divested from the act of writing that he simply wants a macro to change his book to present tense. It was here that I sensed Tao Lin was making it clear that writing is simply a by-way for him to sell the brand that is Tao Lin, the quirky boy who flaunts his theft failures, who holds readings and recites the same line over and over again, who has taken pestering people for attention to a level previously thought unattainable.

I am a writer. I am not a writer like Tao Lin, but I’ve slung a few words together in my day. Simply changing a name in a story or novel is fraught with peril if one uses “Find and Replace.” Any writer who is worth two shits will go through the manuscript carefully because changing the tense can result in other changes that will have to be made. But Sam is so distant from writing that Luis has to define what “manually” means. Yes Sam, you will have to make changes by hand. Oh how sad, oh how terrible! But of course, Luis knows what Sam needs to do. Who gives a shit about the quality of the book? Get an interview on an edgy website! I genuinely think that at times in this novella Tao Lin is cluing us in to his lack of substance and skill, sort of rubbing it in the faces people who praised him, displaying that he is unworthy of praise and that he’s the only one in on the joke.  I honestly wonder if he secretly loathes the people who like this book.  (And if I am correct, it is not because I am some great thinker – it’s because I am gifted in the art of self-loathing and secretly know how much I suck even when people praise me. But I don’t want to mock people who praise me. I simply want my ego to be worthy of praise. Subtle difference but the end result of having the skills to see a person who likely knows he is a fraud leaving breadcrumbs to lead us to that conclusion isn’t anything for me to be proud of.)

Sam’s reign of emotionless terror continues. At the organic, vegan restaurant where he works, Sam has a moment wherein he realizes that people affect him and feels happiness but…

He walked to a central area of the kitchen and stood with unfocused eyes. Ben was thirty-nine. Sam knew from Facebook. Sam had a poem in the “drafts” section of his Gmail account called “ben is funny at work.” Sam felt himself grinning. He stopped grinning and stared at different things while people around him worked. “I feel tired of life,” he said out loud. “I don’t feel like working anymore.”

Of course there is nothing Sam really wants to do because all he really does when he is not working or sort of writing is look at stuff and shoes and more stuff. But even as he has a moment wherein he acknowledged another person’s innate worth, it is cluttered with brand names that are as essential to understanding his connection with Ben as knowing that Ben is funny. But the moment he felt happiness he shut it down. I bet happiness to Sam felt like cramp-laden diarrhea feels to the rest of us. A moment of happiness, filtered through the brand names in his mind, and he is suddenly tired of life. Sam is genuinely one of the most tiresome, pointless protagonists I have ever read.

So Sam does some other stuff and has some vaguely funny conversations that become unfunny when you think about the subtext. He has texts with other people on New Year’s Eve:

After midnight he got a text message from Mallory: “2008 feels insane.”

Sam grinned and text messaged: “It does. Feels like 2040 or something.”

This was when I first felt genuine despair reading this book, not the least because Lin likely experienced this and felt this passed for real conversation. Again, you could, in some sense, think this is a cultural lampoon of empty hipster disaffection but it isn’t. It’s just a sad, empty man sharing his sad emptiness.

Then Sam does more empty shit with a revolving door of faces who mean nothing, then he gets caught shoplifting some earbuds and goes back to jail.

A police man asked if Sam wanted anything from the vending machine. Sam asked if he could have food from his bag. The food was organic raw vegan “Raweos.” The policeman asked what the food was.

“Like, cookie things,” said Sam. “Cookies.”

“No, I think we better not do that,” said the policeman.

Yeah, what better time could there be to show one’s indie cred and love of extremely expensive vegan cookies than in jail after refusing to pay for earbugs and getting caught stealing them.  Because veganism is not really an ethical means of choosing food but a way to demonstrate a facile allegiance to certain subcultures when shoplifting fails you yet again. Yeah. I see nothing jaded about that at all.

Then we get to the part of the story that left me feeling genuinely sad. Sam and a friend Robert are talking about Sheila being in the psych hospital:

“I wonder if she’ll get better,” said Sam.

“I felt sad. Connie was here. I felt funny about the situation. Later when Connie said things like ‘why are you sad’ I could say nothing and she would say things like ‘are you worried about your friend.’”

“Haha,” said Sam. “‘Concrete reason.’”

“Yes,” said Robert. “‘Easy to understand.’”

These dumb fucks are speaking in air quotes about what would be genuine emotional distress to a decent person. Air quotes. And though Robert and Luis are presumably different people, earlier we got Luis saying his current feelings were similar to what he felt like being molested by an uncle must feel like, that he felt something really terrible and had no frame of reference to define it. Here these two plant-men have a genuine reason for distress and they dismiss it and mock the woman who assumed Robert’s malaise was not the bullshit emptiness Lin and men like him wear like a badge of honor but actually generated from the sorrow of having a friend suffering from mental illness. This was one of the most violently and probably unintentionally sad things I’ve read in a while.

But then again, Sam encounters a seriously mentally ill man he met in jail and decides to follow him through the streets like he’s a mild distraction for the evening, like it’s somehow a normal and fun thing for the emotionally dead to stalk the mentally ill on a lark.  So I guess it could have been worse.

Then Sam shows what a nasty little man he really is and never forget that Sam is Tao Lin in this autobiographical sketch.  Sam goes to Florida for a book reading, and surrounded by people who knew his name, who thought Sam was the shit, he acts like an emotionally stunted bully. He notices a girl named Audrey who is clearly into him (and why all these girls are so into him I will never know but I don’t doubt that in real life Tao Lin has plenty of girls around him) and makes sure she notices him more while trying to look like he doesn’t care because Sam has no use for these emotions we humans embrace like so many dogs in heat.

Sam saw Audrey standing alone in line wearing all pink. Sam walked past Audrey to the bathroom. Sam walked out of the bathroom past Audrey without looking at her and talked to Jeffrey.

Smooth, that Sam.

Sam does his reading, but “he was going to read from the beginning of his next book and then read about two people alone in rooms in Ohio and Pennsylvania talking to each other in Gmail chat.” He asks Audrey, who was in the audience, to go with him to American Apparel and he and a few other people pile into a car. And hereabouts is where Tao Lin showed himself too clearly. Sam encourages everyone to act poorly because he knows he can and because he knows they will do what he wants. Of course, these people can tell him to get bent but when in the presence of someone you admire, a human brand even, people are willing to be manipulated and Sam knows this. Some examples:

Sam told Audrey to scream “red shirt” at people across the street walking in the same direction as them.

“Red shirt,” screamed Audrey.

A woman in her forties, two teenagers and a person in a bright red shirt who was maybe twenty turned their upper bodies and looked at Audrey while walking forward. “It’s a family, I think,” said Sam. “They’re ignoring it. That’s so bad for them, a family, it’ll probably be all they talk about later, like when they’re eating.”

So, Sam gets Audrey to perform street theater for him, and gets the cock stroke of thinking that this family will really give two shits about some grubby girl shouting at them in the street and they will be unable to think of anything else. No, it can’t be that dumbasses yelling stupid shit is worth ignoring. Nope, they are gonna have to remember this transgression against their person and dwell on it. Tao Lin has a very low opinion of us normal folk, or a very high opinion of himself and his jackassery.  You be the judge.

Sam then insists that a political sign about voting on a certain proposition needs to be pulled out of the ground and carried to where they want to sit on a Florida college campus. People think the man carrying it, Jeffrey, is campaigning and yell out to him. This makes him uneasy.

“Here, you can have it, do you want it,” said Jeffrey in a quiet voice.

“No, don’t,” said Sam. “We need to put it by where we sit.”

Oh yes, how whimsical and fanciful is our Sam. Jeffrey should have thrown the sign at him but again, he didn’t. Sam got to see how far he could push him, too. Giving him this inch enabled Sam to take a mile and so he took Jeffrey’s bottle of juice and threw it as far as he could.

“Go get it,” said Jeffrey.

“Are you angry I threw your Odwalla,” said Sam.

Of course plant-Sam needs this clarification about human emotion, but he probably just wants Jeffrey to be forced to be angry or suppress it. Jeffrey suppresses it. Then Sam convinces Audrey to roll on her stomach across the grass to get the bottle, then they throw it around until they break it. Then Sam eggs Audrey into jumping over a hedge, which she does not do to his satisfaction so he insists she do it again.

Later, he kisses Audrey, then having come dangerously close to no longer being a plant by engaging with a non-plant girl,  of course he retreats and more or less ignores her, leaving her baffled and unhappy until she retreats emotionally, too. Then a couple of more things happen and the novella mercifully ends with the following banality:

They sat quietly for about ten seconds. There were faraway sounds of people doing things in other parts of the town.

“What did you want to be when you grew up?” asked Audrey.

“Marine biologist,” said Sam.

Sadly, he didn’t go with his childhood dream and here I sit, discussing his book.  Yay.

But before I conclude this fairly negative discussion, I need to talk about the product placement.  All those fucking brand names given as much emphasis as any person, as any emotion.  It’s sort of reminiscent of American Psycho but even more meaningless because Sam and his cohorts throw the words around with no attachment. At least Patrick Bateman placed the emotions he should have had for human beings onto objects. Lin just recites names like a parrot. On page 80, in dialogue that would have been better used as the liner in a bird cage, Sam and Robert toss out “Lorrie Moore,” “Paul Mitchell,” “Lollapalooza,” and “Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich” in a name dropping word salad of a conversation that had virtually no meaning. Later, we have a similar experience on pages 86-87. “Guggenheim Museum,” “Sausage Egg McMuffin,” “McDonalds,” “Synergy kombucha,” “Gmail” and “American Apparel.” And reading these quotes of places and products and brands as I reproduce them will have as much mental impact as their driveling recitation in the book. These are just two examples in this entire book of mindless name and brand mixing, as if any of it means anything. If Lin was trying to make the point that media has made us numb, who gives a shit? It’s not like that point has not been made for decades in far more effective ways than having this man-plant drone.

And while I did not harp on Lin’s style as much as I could have, the fact that this book stands as mental Novocaine should be clear in just the passages I quoted. If being a book alternative to numbing out was Lin’s goal, at least in that he succeeded. If this is a message worth spreading, it is hard to say. I suspect there are those who might think so, that a dull, numb, pointless story that has no commentary on the world but is just a recitation of scenes from the life of an empty narcissist is worth reading if only for the numbing effect it has.

So maybe there is a percentage of people in this world who are narcissists who have no self but I wager it is a very small percentage. And I guess there is a percentage of people in this world who might find interesting a narcissist with no self but I wager that too is a small percentage. Therefore, unless one is a narcissistic but numb person with no inner fire, or unless one is interested in 100 pages of such people, this book will be very unappealing. There is no progression, no crisis, no climax, no realization of alienation and subsequent despair. This is a book wherein a guy does some things and feels nothing as he does them. If you feel this sounds interesting, by all means, read this book. But for most people, this would become hollow and empty very quickly and for a reader looking for an existentialist wallow because of all the comparisons between this book and The Stranger, know that Sam never confronts his existence. He never experiences any sort of existential crisis. He does not exhibit nihilism or even a concentrated loathing for mankind that fuels his actions.  He just exists in the most banal way possible, showing a spark only to be an asshole for a few pages then losing purpose and meaning again.

So we are left with a book that seemingly deliberately echos elements of an existentialist classic but is devoid of any real philosophical focus. The writing style is tiresome, repetitive and outside of some mildly humorous scenes, devoid of merit and offers no trade off in terms of novelty, experimentation, social relevance or even basic interest for suffering through it. The protagonist, Sam, who is a stand-in for Tao Lin in this autobiographical novella, lives a squalid, pointless life, showing his humanity only when he is being a complete dick. The story goes nowhere, conveys nothing, and is so poorly written that if the goal was to cause the reader to recoil in horror at youth deadened by media and reduced to soulless utterings of brand names and stupid conversations, it failed because the only horror is the book itself, not its message. If my reading is correct, this book is a middle finger extended in our faces by a writer who shows cleverly how little he cares about The Word and how easy he finds it to manipulate the people around him. This is a terribly written book with a story that could only interest the emotionally dead.  This is a novella that conveys a smug, unpleasant sense that the reader is being mocked by lobotomized hipsters. Yeah, read this if that any of that sounds like a good time to you but for the most part, I say read The Stranger, American Psycho, Generation X, The Catcher in the Rye, and maybe even William Shatner’s autobiography.  Don’t read this book. Not even if you steal it. The soul you don’t kill may be your own.

Author: Brian Keene

Type of Book: Novella, short story collection, extreme horror, zombies (kind of)

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: There are some scenes in this book that classify as extreme horror, which I always consider odd when compared to mainstream tastes.

Availability: Published by Deadite Press in 2011, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Let me begin Day Four of Zombie Week by reminding everyone that I am giving away a free copy of every book I discuss this week to one lucky reader. That’s right – five books, one box, you could totally strike it book-rich. How do you enter to win? Easy as pie. Just leave me a comment on any of my Zombie Week book discussions. If you want to increase your chances to win, leave me a comment on each of the five book discussions. I count each comment each day as a separate entry, with a maximum of five chances to win. All you have to do is make all those five comments (or two of four or however many) by 9:00 pm CST, 4/1/11.

Now, let me begin this discussion by saying outright that this book very likely cannot be considered a zombie book by purists, and even I, a zombie novice, am reluctant to call the characters in Jack’s Magic Beans anything but berzerkers. If you have read One Rainy Night by Richard Laymon, you might consider its rain-demented characters to be very similar to the violence-bound, utterly mad characters in Keene’s novella. People acted upon by an unseen force become unspeakably violent, and while the character motivations and victim/hero situations are different, that was one of the best references I could think of in trying to explain the lunatic berzerkers in Keene’s novella.

Why did I read this and include it, then? Well, couple of reasons, really. I had Zombie Week planned out for about a month in advance, only to realize that one of the books I had selected was so short and shallow that, even in my most verbose state, I would have to pad a 200 word discussion. Okay, replaced it at the last second with another book. Then I went online to buy the copies I am giving away and realized the Keene book I wanted to discuss, The Rising, is out of print and I needed to read something else fast or I would be screwed. I had a copy of Jack’s Magic Beans on hand already, so I just decided to go with it. I do these “weeks” for my own benefit, so don’t imbue much nobility in what I am about to say, but I infinitely prefer it if my efforts here produce sales for the authors whose work I discuss. That won’t happen with The Rising because of Keene’s travails with Dorchester Press/Leisure Books, which have made for horrific reading in and of themselves.

If I discussed that very excellent zombie book of Keene’s, a book that is most decidedly a zombie book, he wouldn’t have received a cent if anyone bought it, and he wouldn’t have received a penny if I managed to find a new copy for my giveaway. Worse, there is every likelihood a e-book sale could in some manner enrich Dorchester Press because despite restoring his copyright, even for electronic books, Leisure Books still continue to sell his e-books illegally across various venues. Keene is not the only author who has been exploited by Dorchester. In fact, Brian Keene got his rights returned to him in exchange for unpaid royalties and yet Dorchester continues to sell works they no longer own the rights to. Because of this, I will not purchase another new book or e-book released by Dorchester Press or any of its imprints and I urge others to do the same. I generally do not participate in boycotts because it all too often only hurts those who can least afford it. But this time, it’s pretty clear that those at the bottom, the authors themselves, will not be receiving any money anyway. Dorchester’s been stiffing their writers since 2008 and any money given to the press cannot be relied upon to make it into the writers’ pockets. This is one of those boycotts where the people who get hurt are going to be hurt either way, and in such a case, why give the company a dime?

Much of the recent news of Dorchester’s wrong-doings came out after I decided just to discuss berzerkers under the wide banner of zombies, because as I perversely maintain, my site, my judgment call, but it also felt good to do this one little thing to help out an author whose work is excellent and who, by my own personal experience, is a good man. Yes, I met Brian Keene and if he remembers it, it is because he either feared for his well-being or just has an excellent memory.

I met him at Staples 2007. Staples is an independent media conference that in the past was comic-heavy but is sliding into other avenues. I am not known as a person who does well in crowds. Or in public. Or in small spaces or in places where you can’t rely on people all walking in the same direction. I won’t go so far as to say I have OCD or agoraphobia and whatever it is when you just cannot bear being around people, but I am pretty nuts. I’m actually a lot better now. I can make eye contact without screaming and I can navigate the supermarket without crying. But in 2007 I was a complete mess.

My poor spouse, a comic book nerd, wanted to go to Staples and I decided to go because I thought, “What can happen in a room full of comic nerds? I’ll be there with him, I can walk around in a relatively safe space and maybe I won’t vomit on myself. Again.” (Note: I am exaggerating for comedic effect. Slightly)

This was a good plan. In theory. But in public, I am also easily distracted and I got separated from my beloved because it was a lot more crowded and unruly than I had expected. One second I was looking at a comic about a Squirrel Girl, and the next I was alone in a sea of hipsters. Mr Oddbooks thought that I would have enough sense to keep close to him, you know, given that fact that I am the one with the issues and all. But no, I didn’t and there I stood, gawping at Squirrel Girls, wondering if I could literally die from panic.

I did my best not to just freak the hell out but if you have ever seen a feral cat locked in a bathroom, you know what I looked like. I sort of ricocheted around, looking for Mr Oddbooks and doing my best not to make eye contact with anyone lest I scream or cry or do anything else unseemly. I glanced around me at knitted cthulhu hats, comics about crap, comics about nothing, and had anyone asked me my name I would not have been able to answer. And then I saw in an ocean of stuff that meant nothing to me an oasis of calm. There was a table with books on them. Paperback books.

I wandered over and there sat Keene. I looked at the books, I looked at him, and then the fliers with his picture and pictures of the same books on the table and said the most intelligent question that all authors love. “Did you write these books?” I blurted like a complete asshole.

“Yeah,” he answered. And from there I remember nothing. You know how you talk to a dog and all they hear is tone? And you can basically call your dog an asshole to his or her face and they have no idea as long as you are talking sweet to it? Well, Keene could have been telling me I was an idiot and he planned to have me killed later, but he did it in a such a nice, avuncular tone that I calmed down and was able to talk for a few minutes until Mr. Oddbooks found me. I say “talk.” I’m pretty sure I babbled. I do remember one thing. I assume Keene knew he was dealing with an advanced case of anxiety because I seem to recall his eyes getting a little crinkly, the way people do when they are vaguely amused but not willing to completely crush a weird person’s dignity. Chances are, in that mass of weirdos, I was utterly unremarkable and he has no idea that as a kind book man in a room full of very young, very loud people, he was a calming presence that kept me from running amok until my husband tracked me down and more or less held on to my shirt tail until we left. But he did. And I appreciated it. And though I remember very little of the few minutes he talked to me, I remember enough to think very highly of him. I mean, for all I know, zaftig, panicked, incoherent women were the order of the day, but never fail to underestimate how the smallest kindness can impact someone.

Yeah, that’s right. That crazy woman you’re kind to could someday begin a small book blog and speak highly of you. Let that be a lesson to all of us.

Mr. Oddbooks had spent all our cash on HP Lovecraft art and collections from that guy with the drunken crow and sock monkey and that other guy who uses old drawings and creates wildly inappropriate captions so I was unable to return to Keene’s table and buy his books. But when I got home I bought three of his books off Amazon and I know this whole tale of my sorry mental state and tendency to romanticize casual encounters with normal, polite folk means some of you may think I am going to give this book a five-star review. Well, I am, but my uneasy mental state also forces me to be sickeningly honest. If it had been a bad book, I would have given it a crappy review. I would have agonized over it, but it would have happened. But this really is an excellent book.

Jack’s Magic Beans has the novella of the same name, as well as four additional short stories. I will discuss under a cut the short stories that accompany the berzerker tale so as not to annoy those readers who came only for the zombies and want me to shut the hell up about thieving publishers, my irritating but ultimately charming mental illnesses and anything that isn’t at least close to being zombie-related.

If you have read Brian Keene, you may not think him that odd – and mostly his work isn’t – but the extremity of the content ensured that even if I did not have a Zombie Week, his works would have ended up here. He straddles a line between regular horror and extreme horror, but my arbitrary metrics are that if it might gross out my mom, who is a sturdy old broad in her own right, the book is a good fit for IROB. Much of Jack’s Magic Beans would have given my mama pause.

Though the average reader will likely sense what is going on by the fifth page in the book, I’m going to be very cagey in my review because I really do not want to spoil this book. If you don’t win the copy I am giving away, you need to order this book, so I don’t want to ruin anything. However, like in Agranoff’s The Vegan Revolution… with Zombies, a common but sometimes controversial element of modern life is involved in a zombie-like armageddon. In Agranoff’s book, this element, Stress-Free meat, causes the zombie apocalypse. In Keene’s novella, the plot element saves a few souls from the madness that grips people and turns them into insane killing machines.

In Jack’s Magic Beans, people are going about their day as they notice the people around them are getting tense and angry, tenser and angrier than people become even in long grocery lines and in traffic. Then everyone snaps. Everyone outright snaps and begins to kill violently and indiscriminately. Four people find themselves unaffected by the madness that is gripping the slaying madmen around them, hiding in a walk-in freezer in the back of a supermarket and they eventually discover what it is that they have in common, a shared trait that is the reason they remained sane when everyone else lost it.

This is one of those stories that I wish was longer. Why everyone lost their minds is likely not important, but damn it, I want to know. And we get only a brief look at the world that remains when the survivors step out of the freezer. It’s hard to know the world ended but not see how the survivors maneuver in what remains of civilization. But sometimes you got to love a story for what it is and not what you want it to be. I always find it to be a slightly backhanded compliment to wish that a story was more than what it is, but in this case, I think it is just a natural reaction to reading a good story.

Zombie purists may snert at the idea of berzerkers as zombies but Mr Oddbooks, who is much more knowledgeable in these matters, explained that there is, in one particular zombie mythos, an actual class of zombies that are called “berzerkers.” I have not investigated this myself but he insists that zombie berzerkers are sadistic and relentless. He also mentioned they tend to be solitary but it really doesn’t matter much because as I go on, I am increasingly discovering that there really is no one mythos and the reactions to canons come fast and quick. The berzerkers in this book are definitely not undead, are mortal, and are capable of higher thought though that thought is focused exclusively on killing. They also don’t eat their kills. But they are nearly unstoppable and violent in disturbing ways. But even if you are not here just for the violence, this book will satisfy your need for intelligent horror. There is a subtext in the book, a sort of unstated social commentary about the state of sanity and how useful such a state may or may not be when the worst happens.

But it’s also loony, in a good way. Take the opening sentence:

The lettuce started talking to Ben Mahoney halfway through his shift at the Save-A-Lot.

Don’t let yourself go astray. The title isn’t Jack’s Magic Blotter Acid. What does the lettuce say to Ben?

…when he saw the old woman squeezing the peaches and the lettuce told him to kill her, Ben agreed. It seemed like a reasonable idea.

I once worked in a supermarket. I managed Candy City at the Westlake Hills Albertsons for three horrific months. And every time I saw customers reach into my bins with their fucking hands, I secretly killed them in my head. But I didn’t need the violated Jelly Bellies to tell me to do it (and yeah, if you value your health, don’t buy bulk foods that come in scoop-able bins – take my word, people).

“Go on, Ben,” the lettuce urged. “Make her bleed.”

“How do you know my name?”

“We are the lettuce. We know everything. It has always been thus and always will be. The lettuce is wise. Now kill that old bag.”

It was hard to argue with lettuce.

And with the first couple of pages representing, it’s hard to argue this isn’t going to be one helluva story.

We go from some humor into full-force, vomit-worthy bloodshed. Gorehounds will want this book. Keene doesn’t pull any punches with his violence. There was a scene in this book that set off my “Oh, hell no!” response, the same response I had when I first realized there was a baby in The Hills Have Eyes.

A little boy lay sprawled on his stomach in front of her. Blood trickled from one of his ears. As she passed by, he reached for her, his tone pleading.

“Please help me.”

Sammi paused, but before she could act, an adult grabbed the child’s feet and dragged him away.

“Come on, kid. Let’s get you on the butcher’s block.”

If Keene is willing to go that extra mile and have kids slain in this book, rest assured that fans of extreme horror will not be disappointed with the rest of the content.

I also like that Keene does not mind getting all meta with it. Take this quote, for example, from when the four survivors, Jack, Angie, Sammi and Marcel, are tossing around theories about what could have caused the horror they find themselves in:

“Terrorists.” Marcel got to his feet. “Al Qaeda, or maybe some homegrown group like those Sons of the Constitution motherfuckers. Maybe they dropped some gas on us.”

“How?”

“They could have used a crop-duster or something, Like what happened in that little town in Pennsylvania a few years ago. That chemical got released from a hot air balloon and made the rain purple, and then everybody died? Supposedly they all went insane before they were killed. Remember that?”

“I do,” Sammi whispered. “I had nightmares about it for weeks. Those poor people…”

Yep, that’s totally a reference to Keene’s story, “Purple Reign.” Which also may be why I thought of Laymon’s book about black rain that made everyone go berzerk. Good writers can mine similar veins and still create works that aren’t derivative (also think Stephen King’s The Mist). And god help me, Keene fans who read here, but I know I have read at least one reference to the Sons of the Constitution in one of Keene’s short stories but I have no idea if they are a peripheral group, part of an idea that he will eventually revisit or if I just haven’t read enough of his works yet.

This next little bit of meta was sort of sad, actually, considering the whole Dorchester debacle, and the very real fact that writers have a whole world of worries aside from just having to come up with unique ideas, write and write well, edit and then find a paying market for their work. This scene occurs before the shit hits the fan:

Tom Brubaker had a headache and shouting made him feel better. After he was done hollering at Ben Mahoney, he shouted at the cashiers and the butchers and the baggers and a delivery guy and the little old Asian woman who ran the grocery store’s Chinese kiosk. Then he yelled at Jeremy Geist, the short, pudgy kid who was re-arranging the book and magazine display.

“Damn it, Geist. How many times do I have to tell you? Every book should be faced out. People are more likely to buy the fucking things if they can see the goddamned covers.”

Mr Brubaker arranged the books on the shelf so that the front covers were facing outward. “See? How hard is this?”

I have no idea if, perhaps, Mr Keene has seen a few really disorganized displays that featured a few of his books, but it does make you wonder. These meta quotes are also a good example of the sort of muted but clever undertone that frequently shows itself in the book. Nothing smarmy or overly cute but definitely a sense that you will be rewarded if you read closely and have a few of Keene’s books under your belt.

But then there are moments that are outright funny. Continuing on with the book display, and Mr. Brubaker’s demented anger is just getting worse.

Brubaker’s headache vanished. He glanced back to the shelves. Each of the paperbacks had the same title: KILL ‘EM ALL.

It was very sound advice. After all, these were bestsellers written by important authors who knew what they were talking about. Oprah said these books had meaning and value. Oprah said these books would enrich your life. You couldn’t argue with Oprah. That was crazy.

So he didn’t. Instead, Brubaker wrapped his hands around Jeremy Geist’s throat and squeezed.

I am almost certain I am not the only one who likes my unspeakable violence mixed with some humor, no?

So you’ve not got a wholly zombie book here, but that shouldn’t bother you. You have berzerkers causing the apocalypse. You have two scrappy survivors with two unsteady survivors facing the horror locked in a freezer and then struggling in the bloody aftermath. You have some really in-your-face violence with some muted but sly and some not-so-muted but amusing humor. You’ve got four bonus stories I will discuss briefly under the cut. Best of all, where my pedantic heart is concerned, this book is the best edited effort to come out of Deadite and I hope this is an example of a trend to come of finely edited books. You want this book. If you don’t win the copy I am giving away, you should pony up the bucks and buy it yourself.  And then you should check the Deadite site and note when The Rising is going to be re-released and buy a copy when you can.  It’ll then be clear why it was my first choice for Zombie Week.

Okay, tomorrow we end with another hybrid, with intelligent zombies, a fine line between what it means to be a human and means to be a zombie, a truly frightening apocalypse, and a dwindling food source. You don’t to miss that book, and be sure to leave comments so you have a chance of winning a copy.

There are four short stories that accompany Jack’s Magic Beans. And the hell of it is, it’s hard to talk about any of them without spoiling them. But I’ll share as much as I can without ruining them.

“Without You” was the weakest of the four. It’s the story of a man who is sick of his life but takes very seriously the promise he made to his wife many years ago, that he would die without her. The only reason I consider it the weakest is because it’s a little predictable but that’s a small criticism because the characterization ensures that the reader feels the protagonist’s misery in a palpable way.

“‘The King’, In: Yellow” is another story of people being made into creatures that are separated from their mind. A play featuring characters who may or may not be dead titans of rock drive the people in the audience out of their minds. But there is also a couple who wander through the streets and you just know this is not a quest that is going to end up showing them anything they want to know.

“I Am an Exit” and “This is Not an Exit” are the tales of a unique killer and that’s about all I can say. I will mention that these stories were so supremely creepy that I made Mr Oddbooks, whose tastes run to graphic novels, Patrick O’Brien novels and computer manuals, read them and he agreed they were truly… eerie? unexpected? Unsure exactly how to express it but these were two of the tightest, most interesting short stories I have read in a while. Keene says he will eventually write a novel about the killer in these two stories. I will be all over that when it happens. But until then, I will leave you with a quote from “This Is Not an Exit”:

I am swift. My avatar is a hummingbird. Metaphorically, speaking. I move through the night at eighty miles per second, traveling from blossom to blossom, taking their nectar and moving on.

Knowing that this is a killer speaking should make that description suddenly seem very creepy. This sentence also shows how Keene is a writer who cares deeply about language. There is a ridiculous misconception that horror writers are pulpy, in it for the plot, the fun, the gore. Keene is in it for those three things, but he is also in it to spin artful images and scenes that transcend the experience of simply reading them.

Author: Caris O’Malley

Type of Book: Bizarro, fiction, novella

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just the way Manny thinks is wonderful to me:

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

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

Because Manny is eminently logical, though utterly random:

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

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

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

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

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

The egg said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: James Steele

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

It was green.

Felix blinked.

It was translucent, too.

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

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

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

Sad but true and acidly satirical. Pretty funny too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hate all of you.

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

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

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

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

And in places this book is seriously funny:

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

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

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

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

But there is humor with the butt horror!

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Steve Lowe

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, novella

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: At the risk of sounding repetitive, it’s bizarro and bizarro is always odd.

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

Comments:We begin day two of Bizarro Week with a reminder that each day I am giving away a copy of the book I discuss. All you have to do to enter the drawing for the free book is to leave me a comment. It’s that easy. You have until 9:00 pm CST today, 2/15/11, to leave me a comment, and that comment will put your name in the drawing. Giving away free books is how I show my gratitude to my readers (and it also drums up attention for my site – let us not think I am not without ulterior motives) so comment!

Muscle Memory is a clever, sad little book that employs one of the most cliched plot lines ever: a person wakes up in a body not their own. We’ve seen this at play in so many craptacular movies, mostly aimed at teens, like Freaky Friday and Vice Versa. But Steve Lowe’s use of this trope is decidedly different and if there is any cliche in it, it is the sort of triteness that contrasts well with the strange plot, small town humor and melancholy sadness that made reading this book a pleasure.

The plot is, like a lot of bizarro, deceptively simple: A man wakens in his wife’s body and realizes his entire town has switched bodies with the person or animal they were closest to when the switch happened. Husbands and wives wake up in each other’s bodies, a suspected sheep-shagger is in the body of a ewe, the dog is meowing and the cat is barking. Hijinks should ensue and they sort of do, in the sort of small town quirkiness one sees in Chuck Klosterman’s novels. But the ramifications of body-switching in Lowe’s novel transcends the zany and heartwarming things that happened to LiLo and Jamie Lee Curtis as they discover how hard the other has it in this world and their love and respect for each other deepen, etc. No, though Lowe uses humor liberally through the book, like the appearance of Terry Bradshaw in a dream and the recurring jokes about bestiality, this book takes a far more penetrating look at the human condition.

You see, Billy is married to Tina and they have an infant son, Rico. Billy wakes up in Tina’s body but she does not wake up in his. Billy’s body never wakes up at all because the night before the switch happened, Tina, in the throes of post-partum depression, poisoned Billy with antifreeze. So while Billy has to learn to navigate in his wife’s body, as he and his neighbors try to figure out what happened, as the government comes to investigate, Billy has to come to terms with not only the fact that his wife murdered him, but also the very real possibility that if things return to normal, he will return to a dead body. No matter what happens, his life will never go back to normal. No matter what, Billy’s physical body is buried in Tucker’s barn, as he and his friends try cover up Tina’s crime from the authorities. There will be no happy moment wherein he and his wife embrace, each aware of what it really means to walk in the other’s shoes. His marriage is over any way you cut it and he may soon be dead himself if normalcy is restored.

Lowe mimics a small-town style of speech that is not wholly familiar to me but reads well, and that sort of vernacular does two things. First, it gives wide latitude for broad humor and second, it applies itself well showing that deep existential experiences are not the sole purview of more high-minded literary characters. It is a language that permits humor and realization that in amongst the folksy language and the “aren’t small towns cute?” sort of mindset reading such dialogue creates, there is great human depth as well. Because even as these people burst into singing Olivia Newton John songs in bars, they are dealing with some deep problems. Like Billy’s startling realization that he had no idea what his wife felt, that she had been in state of psychological despair and he had not noticed.

Lowe shows Billy’s casual cluelessness very cleverly. Billy surely had witnessed his wife Tina nurse their son before but when he awakens in her night gown, inside her body, tasked with nursing Rico, he has no idea how to arrange the nightgown so that he can feed the baby. Luckily, his neighbors, Julia and Tucker, are there, and Julia, though she is in Tucker’s body, explains that there is a flap in the nightgown that makes nursing much easier. This is handled with a small amount of slapstick, as Julia has to show Billy how to use the gown, using Tucker’s oversized hands. But the scene, along with Billy’s admission that he would feign sleep so Tina would always be the one to get up with their son, shows a man who is completely apart from his evidently emotionally fragile wife.

But Lowe’s use of broad humor and silly details keeps this from being a completely dark experience. The whole novella is peppered with the ridiculous. For example, the cat has just barked at Tucker (in Julia’s body):

“Whoa.”

“Yeah, no shit, whoa.”

“So this is like one of them Twilight Zone things, right? Or maybe it’s more like Dark Matters or something.”

“Tales From the Dark Side.”

“Yeah, that was the black and white one with the dude in the suit who kinda talked like Captain Kirk before Captain Kirk was on.”

“No, that was Twilight Zone. That was Rod Serling. Tales From the Dark Side came after.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Yeah, this is a perfect encapsulation of how terrible situations breed the most banal conversations.

When their neighbor appears in the form of a sheep, it’s another moment of hilarity but also indicative of how rumors spread quickly in small towns. Tucker is speaking to Billy:

“… Wait, did you see Edgar?”

“Jesus, yeah, I saw him.”

“Dude, I told you about that like six months ago. Didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you he was doing that with his livestock?”

“Yeah, so you were right. I owe you a case. But to get back to the important point here…”

And oh yeah, Edgar’s full name is Edgar Winter. Ha!

Billy and Tucker go to the local watering hole to see if they can get any information about what has happened. Theories float around about aliens and the government testing secret gas. Townspeople having secret affairs reveal their trysts when they show up in the bodies of their lovers with ensuing slapstick. The men sit around drinking and razzing Edgar about being a sheep-shagger. Then, when the men in the bodies of their wives and womenfolk and barn animals are well soused, the jukebox comes on with “Unchained Melody” (or at least I think that is what the song was):

The lyrics hit my brain like a sledgehammer. Something catches my throat and pricks at the edges of my eyes. I hear Tucker next to me sniffle, and I can see his lips moving. Despite myself, I start mumbling along, too. Didn’t even realize I knew this song until the words start falling outta my head.

Tucker looks at me and sings, “Are youuuuu…still miiiiiiiiiiiine?”

Floyd spins on his barstool to face us. “IIIIIIIIIIII need your loooooove.”

Joe Vickers flips his wife’s cheap blond hair back and yells the same up at the ceiling.

But even as this novel fairly drips with the ridiculous, and the most ridiculous scene being the dream sequence with Terry Bradshaw, this is silliness with a heart, a sad core of loss. Billy, Tucker and Julia move Tina to the barn to bury her and Billy, in his wife’s body, tries to find an appropriate outfit to wear to his wife’s funeral. In Tina’s body, he looks in her closet and picks out a dress he bought for her, a dress that had offended her, that proved how out of it Billy really was, and he had no idea why. It becomes clear to him when he puts on the dress.

So I put the dress on. Takes me five minutes to realize the stupid thing only has one shoulder strap. The other shoulder is bare. And it’s long in the back, but has a really short front that comes up to a slit.

And I can see my underwear.

It’s not until Billy is literally in Tina’s body that he understands how much he really failed her. Buying her inappropriate clothing, taking her for granted, not knowing the most basic things about her day, being so spaced out that she was able to put antifreeze in his beer and he didn’t even notice.

Billy realizes all of this in a sudden rush, after Terry Bradshaw comes to him in a dream and tells him that the government will switch everyone back soon, and the implications of this are not discussed explicitly, but the implied idea is that Billy will return to his dead body buried in the barn. But since Tina’s essence, her soul or consciousness or whatever it is that defines identity was in Billy when he died, there is no guarantee her essence will be able to return to her body. This is not Freaky Friday. This is the destruction of a family.

I ain’t in the dream no more. I’m back. I’m in that other dream again, the one where I’m Tina and Tina’s me. And I’m dead and buried and covered by a rusting hunk of junk in my neighbor’s barn and I’m a depressed mother who’s now a widow and a widower at the same time. I feel like I’ve lost a wife and a husband, ’cause when you get right down to it, that’s what happened.

I have two quarrels with this book. One, like many bizarro endeavors, it could have been edited a little better, but the problems are small, so really, maybe that isn’t a quarrel. My other issue with this book is the relative brevity. This discussion should make it clear that Lowe managed to create a complex novella but the actual text of the book covers less than 60 pages. The New Bizarro Author Series gives unproven writers a foot in the door – if they sell enough books from their first effort, they will have a chance to produce more books with Eraserhead. If they don’t make their sales goal, their first effort will be their last. It may put Lowe at a disadvantage that his novella is so short because one of the complaints I hear most often about the bizarro genre is that the books are costly given the amount of content. For a bibliomaniac like me that seldom is an issue (and now that I have a Kindle it matters even less) but I hope Lowe does not have too many problems selling this short book.

But here’s an incentive for people who may be on the fence about spending close to ten bucks on a book this slim: In the month of February, Steve Lowe is donating all of the profit he makes selling this book to a foster care charity. Click here to read all the details. So if you are on the fence about buying a copy, let this charitable endeavor tilt the scale in favor of purchasing it.

And again, I am giving away a copy of this book. All you have to do to enter to win a copy is leave me a comment on this entry. Contest runs today, 2/15/11 until 9:00 pm CST. Comment early, comment often!

Author: Kirk Jones

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, novella

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Bizarro is always odd. Always.

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

Comments: And a new Bizarro Week begins!

This Bizarro Week is going to focus on books from the New Bizarro Author Series. Eraserhead Press takes a chance on new writers, allowing them to put out a book and if they sell enough copies, they get to publish more books. If they don’t sell enough, the first book with Eraserhead will be their last. Sort of draconian in a way but in a world where the number of publishing venues seem to grow smaller every day, a foot in the door is no small thing. So I plan to focus on the NBAS this week.

And best of all, I plan to give out a free copy of every book I review this week. In order to enter to win a copy of Uncle Sam’s Carnival of Copulating Inanimals, all you have to do is leave a comment to this entry before 9:00 pm CST. I’ll announce a winner shortly after. Anyone anywhere can enter because I take perverse pleasure in mailing strange books to the hinterlands. So hop to it.

Now to the book discussion.

I am beginning this Bizarro Week with Kirk Jones’ book because I am finally able to do one of those “It’s X mixed with Y if Z was really a school bus on Mars” sort of statement. I can really never come up with those because to me they are always such a horrible stretch and I am pedantic in so many pointless ways, but this time, as I was trying to explain this book to Mr. Oddbooks, I came up with the perfect summation:

If you put Charles Dickens’ tendency to heap ignominy and ill-use on his young heroes, Horatio Alger’s optimism for the merits of work and a job well done, a progressive eye for worker rebellion, a chat room of forniphiliacs, and the entirety of Tod Browning’s Freaks in a fast moving caravan and crashed it into an IKEA store, this book would be the result. Truly, this will be high concept. (In the interest of full disclosure, this book doesn’t technically portray forniphilia but that’s as close a phrase as my rudimentary research into sex with furniture revealed. I don’t think there is an exact word for this but if you read the book, I suspect my label will be clear.)

This book really did take some pretty disparate elements and blend then into a relatively smooth book. The plot, as is typical with most bizarro, is quite insane. Gary has led a life of woe. He lost an arm working as a wee boy, only to lose his parents later in a terrible car crash. He also loses a leg and finds himself a beggar. A chance question to a fellow two-limbed man, asking about a potential job, led him to yet another accident in which he is turned into an enormous blob of self-contained vitreous humor. Things happen, as they do, and he becomes a trainer for furniture – animated furniture. Traveling in a carny-style show, a HAARP device keeps the carnival just ahead of the terrible weather that seems to stalk the carnival, and Gary finds he has something of a skill for dealing with the animated furniture. Oh, and the furniture has sex with each other on command and those who watch the performances vomit to show their appreciation, as you do. Gary meets the blind niece of Uncle Sam, a girl called Liberty, and they fall in love but their love is threatened by Uncle Sam’s nefarious activities. The ending is suitably cathartic, restoring order and ending this book of strange combination in a dreamy manner that should not have worked but did.

How does the furniture become animated? Well, that’s a mystery I can’t share or it would spoil the whole book for you but it’s suitably creepy and unsettling. Uncle Sam’s methods of maintaining his carnival are harsh and cruel and endanger everyone around him, even his loved ones.

As I said in my description of the words, ideas and style Jones uses, this book takes some very disparate elements and combines them into a narrative that feels similar to other things but is wholly new. The beginning had a very Dickensian feeling to me. This is the first line of the book:

Those who cared to peruse the historical records of Gary Olstrom, now known as the man made of tears, might observe that an extended streak of bad luck began for him, ironically, with a stroke of good luck at age eight…

Gary is near a mirror when it shatters and severs his arm and his boss quickly informs him that not only does he not have any insurance or means to go to the hospital, but he also will not receive his first paycheck as he will have his pay docked to cover the cost of the mirror. Very bleak to the point of wondering if there was gaslight. It goes on from there as Gary loses his parents:

While the news of their fiery crash distressed him initially, he recovered a few days later when he discovered that their departure from this world was preceded by their visit to the orphanage for disabled children, where Gary was shipped the next day.

It just gets worse in an Oliver Twist, workhouse for the poor sort of way. The orphanage sends Gary to work in a textile factory at age 12:

But upon re-spooling one of the nylon machines, Gary lost his footing, and, as a result, his right leg. Like many before him, his claim for compensation was denied, his employment terminated, and he was held fully responsible for cleaning his remnants.

But in among this modern slant on Dickens, there is a small amount of Horatio Alger and maybe a hint of Samuel Smiles, as well, for Gary never hates the shop owner who exploited him as a child and in fact considers his tight money management skills something to aspire to in his quest to prove himself. As a supervisor of other children at the textile factory, he is careful to deny all insurance claims made by his maimed peers. Even after he loses an eye, Gary is still quite certain that he will fight his way out of the gutter and continually looks for productive work. He danced for change, stole a cane from a blind man, and even when discouraged, managed to embrace the system that had deformed him, feeling, like the heroes in Alger’s tales, that hard work and determination will get him off the streets.

One day, he observes a man missing an arm and a leg and, his ambition still intact, asks for advice:

“Sir, by what means do you sustain yourself?”

“I’m employed by Uncle Sam, at the furniture factory,” the man replied.

“Would it be possible for me to acquire a job with him as well,” Gary asked.

The man looked doubtful. “Come with me tomorrow and we shall see,” he said, explaining, “I was in full health when I began working for him, and have been allowed to stay in due to seniority. Otherwise, I’d likely be accompanying you in the gutter. But I might be able to get you in. Meet me in front of the factory tomorrow.”

And Gary spurs himself into action, stealing a razor and tarting himself up as best he can, still too willing to become a cog in a machine that had already cost another man his arm and leg, only too happy to be similarly employed. But in another terrible turn of luck, his contact is crushed by a bus outside the factory and in another Dickensian detail, Gary steals his coat and gets mistaken for him as he enters the factory. Uncle Sam puts him to work, a disaster renders him made of tears and he hits the road with the carnival.

On the road, he learns to manage the furniture, encouraging couches to have sex with each other under the big tent, to the vomiting approval of the perverts who come to see the display. But as he interacts with the others in the furniture freak show, he begins to understand something is wrong, traveling to different cities in a wagon carnival caravan, leaving trails of murders in its wake. By the time he narrows in on the problem, his lovely Liberty is in peril and he faces with no small horror the terrible abuse the sentient furniture is experiencing.

But Gary, despite the brevity of this book, has a definite character arc. He reaches a point where he is no longer willing to be a company man and begins to question things, made angry by the ill-treatment of the furniture and concerned about the strange conspiracy around him. When he finally understands what is happening, he and the furniture storm Uncle Sam’s convoy, and Jones uses language that made me think of an epistolary version of the scene in the Frankenstein movie where the villagers storm Dr. Frankenstein’s castle, and I began humming La Marseillaise:

From the tent, a billowing cloud of shadows erupted, spreading across the landscape towards Gary and his inanimals. With them they carried weapons of graphite and shields of parchment, so they might rewrite history, revitalize movements and substantiate self-oppression.

This sentence is also a good example of some of the damn fine writing Jones executes in this book. Despite, or maybe because of the bizarre premise, he manages language in a manner that is quite lovely, creating beautiful scenes without venturing into baroque over-description.

All in all, this was a fabulous novella. Of course, I have no idea what Jones’ influences were – though increasingly I have some contact with bizarro writers in other venues, I still try my best to remain in my own little headspace wherein I know little about the authors whose work I critique. But the fact remains that this novella for me evoked Dickens, Alger, and Browning while utilizing elements of an interesting sexual fetish and ideas of labor revolutions. A nice little love story in a dreadful alternate universe not wholly different from our own but still different enough wherein the media is literally made of shadows and HAARP devices are portable. There were some small editing problems but compared to a lot of bizarro books, they hardly bear mentioning.

I hope Jones manages to sell plenty of copies because I think he’s got a unique voice, and that may sound spurious since I think his voice reminds me of so many other voices and ideas, but the only conclusion that leads me to is that Jones is likely an indiscriminate reader and consumer of various media. You read and watch enough, your voice becomes full of the best of what affects you. This was an excellent, strange, well-written, inventive book and I definitely recommend it.

If you’d like a copy for yourself, be sure to enter the drawing for a free copy. Just leave me a comment to this discussion and you’re entered. The contest ends today, 2/14/11, at 9:00 pm CST.

Author: David W. Barbee

Type of Book: Bizarro, novella

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s a part of the New Bizarro Author Series, which is generally a good indicator of oddness.

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

Comments: Bizarro Week is still chugging along and today features another book giveaway. You can win a copy of David W. Barbee’s Carnageland one of two ways: leave me a comment in this entry today, November 11, before 7:00 pm PST, or retweet any of my Twitter posts with the hashtag bizarroweek. Doing either will throw your name in the hat to win a copy of the book. I’m giving away two free copies and you can both leave a comment here AND retweet in order to improve your chances of winning. I will choose one random commenter and one random retweeter after 7:00 pm PST.

With that out of the way, let’s discuss Carnageland. This novella is part of the New Bizarro Author Series that Eraserhead publishes. This series is a testing ground for new writers to prove that they have what it takes to sell books so the writers in the NBAS pretty much have to hit one out of the park in order to get a book contract with Eraserhead. While I am not sure if Barbee scored a home run with this book because that is definitely a mileage may vary statement, he definitely got on base with an amusing, foul, interesting novella that is worth a read. I have read far worse third and fourth efforts across genres and while I see room for improvement, the fact is, I also see a lot of talent that makes me want to read what Barbee comes up with for his second and third and fourth books.

Carnageland tells the story of Invader 898, a priapic little alien sent to a strange backwoods planet in order to prepare it for invasion. When I say he is priapic, I mean that he wants more or less to have sex with all vaguely feminine creatures but he has undergone strict training that has taught him to curb those sorts of urges. But he comes unglued at one point. You sort of knew he would. You’re just waiting to see how bad it’s gonna be when it happens. Believe me, it’s gross.

The planet he is combing over for alien occupation is a Disney and Grimm Brothers nightmare, an inversion of all that is sweet, moral and touching in those stories. In Barbee’s hands, the stories of Peter Pan, Rapunzel, dragons and trolls all become something quite horrible and nasty. I mean, dragons and trolls and witches in fairy tales are fearsome but in Carnageland, they are just horrible and foul. Tinkerbell, who becomes Tinkerslut in this novella, experiences some really harsh treatment. I recall being actually disturbed reading it and, not to spoil too much, was secretly relieved when she died. That whole scene was just full of the yuck and those who love bizarro for the foulness and disturbing content it often brings to the table will enjoy this novella.

Invader 898 works his way through the planet on a slayer quest that is cartoonish and quite like a video game, conquering one Disney or folklore character after another. I could easily see this book as a console game, licensing issues aside. A small alien dealing with an ocean of cartoons and characters found in children’s books, a complete bloodbath. Barbee has no problem completely destroying the icons of my youth, and it was actually pretty fun, the Tinkerslut scenes notwithstanding, seeing what amounted to Disneyland get taken down by a little green man with an erection.

Barbee’s story isn’t profoundly unique. Killing off the symbols of purity and childishness, inverting them to show the seediness that was always probably there, is common enough. What made this book entertaining for me is the excellent synthesis of these things from childhood: in a book that seems like a video game, the symbols of childish stories get annihilated. This is a book with a clear protagonist but it is also a book without a hero, and in a way, that is one of the most subversive things Barbee could have written. I could not root for anyone in this book and I kind of liked it that way.

All in all, this is a sound first effort. There are some sections that could have been more polished but overall, a few clunky paragraphs in the face of an good story are small criticisms. If you’ve spent your childhood (and possibly adulthood) playing video games, if you ever fantasized about putting Disney characters in their place, and if you just like good old fashioned quests filled with blood and guts, you will like this novella.

And just to drive this home one last time, I am giving away two copies and you can win one if you comment to this review or if you retweet any of my tweets with the tag #bizarroweek. Contest ends Thursday, November 11 at 7:00 pm PST.

Author: Andrew Goldfarb (Gah, I cannot find a site for him – if anyone knows his blog or site [no Facebook, please] let me know and I’ll link it asap!)

Type of Book: Bizarro, novella, fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, a monkey, something called a Slub Glub and a guy named Millford travel the world, to the sun and back and solve a mystery in a hot air balloon. And they break into song periodically.

Availability: Published by Eraserhead Press (my god, I think I type the name of this publishing house more than I type my own name), you can get a copy here:

Comments: I’ve been reading a lot of bizarro and I realize that this is my third bizarro review in a row. I’m gonna mix it up, I promise. But until next time, I have to say that this was the sweetest, most charming, happiest book I have read in a long time. It was a fairy tale combined with a really positive acid hallucination combined with a hokey 1950s musical. I could not have loved this book more had it baked me brownies when I was finished reading it.

Each chapter was quite short, the storyline was amazing and loony and to give even the smallest plot encapsulation risks ruining the book, but I will try anyway: Millford Mutterworst suspects he is being poisoned and his ever increasingly flat elbows prove him right. A series of unlikely events lead him to take flight in an air balloon with a squid-like creature called the Slub Glub and a monkey. He travels to the sun, to South America, the Slub Glub almost gets eaten by an alligator, and the monkey via quick thought and action save their collective asses a couple of times. His alarmed fiancee, Edweena Toadsweater, takes off after him in a boat, where she saves a ventriloquist’s dummy from drowning, but not the ventriloquist, sad to say. There is a climax aboard a boat captained by Millford’s mother and it all works out in the end.

Oh yeah, they break into song periodically. It’s awesome, having a book serve as a musical, and as someone who hates musicals, this is no small statement from me. The songs are captivatingly silly.

Oh yeah part two, Millford is also married to the sea. Literally. His parents betrothed him to the large body of water when he was young. That’s why Edweena is merely his fiancee.

Oh, what a wonderful, absurd little book this was. This is a short review, possibly the shortest I will ever write, but as I said, there is no way to discuss it in depth without ruining it. I think if you are having a bad day and need some light, lovely, absurdism to cheer you up, this is the book to read. Eighty chapters, most a page long, ridiculous songs, amusing illustrations – you can read it in a sitting and then keep it on hand to lift your mood on that inevitable cloudy day when your boss yells at you, you get a flat tire, and you realize your tea tastes funny for a reason.

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, novella

Why Did I Consider This Book Odd: Because I walked into it knowing it was about a man with a suit of cockroaches. Also bizarro.

Availability: Published by Swallowdown Press in 2006, you can get a copy here:

This novella is also available in the Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange), which has the works of other bizarros in it as well. I always recommend giving money as directly to the author as you can, but this could be a nice intro to bizarro for new readers. Gina Ranalli’s novella, Suicide Girls in the Afterlife, also reviewed here, is also in this edition.

Comments: I was discussing this book with Mr. Oddbooks and trying to explain it. Mr. Oddbooks is a prosaic sort of guy, whose reading tastes run towards tales of the open sea and computer manuals. “So why was the President wearing a suit made of Twinkies? Did he really think that they would protect him from the effects of nuclear war?”

I had to think about it. “I’m not sure. Maybe because they are so filled with preservatives? But that’s not what’s important…” And therein lies the awesomeness of bizarro when it is done correctly. Outrageous, surreal story-lines with insane details that once you are accustomed to reading such details, they don’t really even register. You get into a headspace where you have to say, “Well, why wouldn’t the President be wearing a suit made of Twinkies.”

I said in another bizarro review that you cannot go looking for plot holes in bizarro because you will find them. This is not a medium in which reason means much, surrealism and wonderment taking a far more important role. This was a fine example of bizarro, and a fascinating book regardless of genre.

To give a bare-bones plot description: A man who anticipates a nuclear holocaust designs a suit made of cockroaches in order to survive. His suit eats the President, who was, as I mentioned already, unwisely encased in a Twinkie suit. He meets God, or a God-like spirit who has come back for mankind only to find a few men left on Earth. He travels the remains of the world looking for safe food and water and meets a woman who has survived with the help of ants. Together they have to stop a formicary adversary who means to conquer what is left of the world.

The novella is filled with subtle humor. Take this passage when the protagonist, Dean, meets the God-like spirit, known as Yahmuhwesu. Yahmuhwesu is having trouble getting the Rapture to start and needs the help of… well, someone else:

“How much do you know about super-strings? Whorls? Vortex derivatives?”

“Oh god, nothing at all.”

“Okay, that doesn’t help. Is there someone else around here that I can talk to?”

I am almost certain that would happen to me at the end of the world. I suspect most of us sense we may not be wholly spiritually worthy to stand in the presence of the Divine but really, perhaps we need to work on our math skills instead of morality.

Dean is an odd man, a man who evidently saw a lot of the world before the bombs fell, with many experiences that make coping with a destroyed Earth a bit difficult.

…he realized he should have hooked up a gas mask instead of a portable breather unit.

But he couldn’t submit himself to that level of suffering. Dean had a severe aversion to having his face enclosed in rubber; an extraordinarily rough time with a dominatrix in Iceland had forced him to swear off such devices.

While I could not really connect to Dean or any of the other characters in the book, that is okay. It’s hard to see how one could connect with an expert on cockroaches who travels a post-apocalyptic world on his back, carried by the hearty cockroaches he has sewn to his suit, roaches he eventually develops a wavelength with. But Dean’s thoughts are interesting and ultimately, his mind and his actions have enough universally human about them that we recognize our own feelings in some of what Dean does. After a battle with a deranged ant-expert, Dean thinks:

One day you fall asleep happy. Next to a river under a dark sky. Then you wake up and everything has changed. Including you. You changed so much that for the first time you actually risk your life.

For what?

Love. It’s as good a word as any. It will do.

And you’ve gone so crazy with this feeling, call it love, that you find yourself in an absurd situation, humming moaning at telepathic bugs and killing brainwashed entymologists.

I know.

It sounds silly.

But it feels important at the time.

And this passage pretty well sums this book up: Absurd, silly, yet ultimately important. There are overtones of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. There is a sense that Vonnegut could have written this. It mixes the sublime and the ridiculous superbly. I very much like this novella and recommend it. I look forward to reading more of Jeremy Robert Johnson in the future.