I
Read Odd Books

As my readers may know by now, when a bout of cyclical depression hits me I am very quiet.  People often have the idea that my lack of online presence during these times is because I am shuffling through my days like a middle-aged Sylvia Plath, tearing at my hair, or politely planning my suicide, stuffing my pockets with rocks as I walk dramatically into Lake Travis.

It’s far less cinematic than that.  Far less interesting, too.  When I am hit with a bout of my depression, which is sort of akin to a brain fog, I move slower, can’t sleep, and am down, to be sure, but the key symptom is a lack of attention.  I cannot hold a thread in a conversation.  I forget words for common objects.  I cannot really read anything longer than a blog entry, and I certainly cannot write well.  They last anywhere from a few days to a couple of months, but generally I get off lightly as they seldom last longer than a few weeks.

That is what it is, and I came out my my most recent bout in time to post that pile of words about Knut Hamsun.  Then I almost lost one cat, Miss Baby.  While we were worrying about her, a completely unrelated and seemingly healthy cat of ours, Wooster, dropped over dead.  Wooster was a strange, furtive, but lovely cat and his death was a blow to the house beyond anything we could have anticipated.

So I’ve been far more useless than I would like.  I have some interesting discussions in the works: an odd books zine from a writer in Australia, an Alasdair Gray collection, A New Bizarro Authors Week, and more.   I’m looking forward to the latter – it’s been a while since I had a giveaway.

But until then, let me share two of the amazing conspiracy theory sites I found when wandering the web late at night in the throes of insomnia.

The first is the site September Clues Research Forum.   This site is dedicated to the idea that 9-11 did not happen, that the attack itself was staged with media complicity, that no planes crashed into anything that day, and that not a single person died.  I found this site because I had a copy of Don Delillo’s The Falling Man and found myself Googling “falling man,”  the iconic photograph of a man who jumped from the World Trade center.  It was through that Google that I found this site.

It’s a small board, with a max of around 1000 members, far fewer active.  It’s beyond the Loose Change crowd (and the key players on this site declare that Truthers are part of the conspiracy, a smoke-screen so that no one focuses on the “real” truth).  It is some of the most hardcore conspiracy theory I have encountered in recent memory.  Convoluted, intricate and detailed, these particular True Believers have created an alternative reality wherein all the victim photographs are really photoshops or were created from one main photograph using photo manipulation.   The families of the dead are all actors or lying for some reason, the Ground Zero pictures were all staged, and everything we saw that terrible day was an elaborate theater used to trick us into war in the Middle East.  None of it happened.  Famous victims like Barbara Olson didn’t die on the planes – in Olson’s case, they posit that she got a ton of plastic surgery and came back to remarry her husband Ted Olson in a new identity.  Their proof for this is… both hilarious and the result of lots and lots of work.  If there is a means by which I can link to individual comments on posts, I cannot find one, but I also think this is for the best.  Little bits and pieces of this are almost worthless – one has to experience the whole of this by reading posts and threads as they come.

I seriously cannot list the amount of intellectual endeavor on this site, but a word of warning:  the makers of this site and the people who are key in this theory aren’t anything like the Loose Changers.  They are not engaging in a coy, “what if/I’m only asking hard questions” stance that the Truthers use to shelter themselves from the hard criticism that comes from asking “hard” questions.  The main players on September Clues Research Forum believe they have proven their case for this extraordinary conspiracy beyond any reasonable doubt and don’t like people challenging them because they brook no dissent.  So if you decide you want to interact with these folks, bear that in mind.

The second site appears to have been abandoned, more’s the pity, because, while not as outlandish as September Clues Research Forum, this blog contains some excellent conspiracy theory analysis. The site analyzes the use of Monarch Program, Illuminati and Masonic, and MK-Ultra imagery as found in movies, music videos, and photoshoots.   Pseudo-Occult Media is a site after my own heart – verbose, given to extreme analysis of media and completely whacked.  The author, one Benjamin Singleton, does not appear to be writing anywhere else, but if anyone knows where he is or if he is writing again, I would love to know what he is up to these days.

I found this site after landing on the Daily Mail, of all places, reading an article about how happy John Mellencamp is these days after divorcing his supermodel wife, Elaine Irwin.  I wondered how some of the other supermodels from the 90s had ended up and began Googling “Tatiana,”  “Linda Evangelista” and “Karen Mulder.”  It was the search on Karen Mulder that led me to the site, to this article in particular, wherein Mulder’s images and erratic behaviors are discussed with the assumption that she was a Monarch Program victim.  Singleton analyzed dozens of pictures to show the links between Mulder and the Monarch Program and Illuminati sex slave programs.  This is one of those rare sites wherein I don’t want to contact James Randi and see how to debunk it effectively because unlike many True Believers, Singleton showed his work.  While I can look at the work and simply say, “Images of kittens and leopards and butterflies are just common in photography,” Singleton makes an interesting case for how these images are used to tell specific stories and the stories often end up being very similar.  One does not have to believe any of it to just marvel at the work that went into the analyses.

I am not even close to finished reading the site, but I already have some favorite articles.  Singleton’s analysis of the imagery associated with Lana Clarkson, the woman Phil Spector shot to death, was fascinating.   Equally interesting was the use of Monarch imagery and the use of Alice in Wonderland as it applies to programming victims and the images of Peaches Geldof and others.  Whether Singleton is a lunatic or the Sanest Person You Know, after reading his blog, you will never look at black and white stripes, red shoes, butterflies, kittens, wild cat prints and Alice costumes the same way again.  Or maybe it’s more accurate to say you will be surprised at how common and overused they are in media, fashion and film.  You don’t have to fear the New World Order to find this worth a read and Singleton has a ton of content on the now defunct site.

So that’s what I was doing over the past couple of weeks as I waited for my brain fog to lift.  Hopefully y’all will find it interesting to some degree and I’ll have some book content up here soon.  Hopefully the Alasdair Gray discussion will be up Friday or Monday.  If any of you have some odd website, message board or blog recommendations for me to read when the next fog rolls into my head, share them please!

This is an e-mail I sent to Mr. Oddbooks and he thought it might be fitting for a non-odd book discussion over here. These may be the most succinct reviews I have ever written.

Mar 27 (7 days ago)

My beloved husband,

I heard you speak of needing space on the Apple TV. I believe I have found a way to get a small chunk of space. Consider deleting the following Horror titles:

Ominous looks like it was cast by a blind man, shot with a cell phone and sound mastered in the dishwasher. Wanted to die after ten minutes.

Removal sucks more than anything has ever before sucked. It’s got the Fight Club trope of OH NO IT WAS ME but no one can act and for some reason Elliott Gould has a ten second cameo. It needs to go away.

The Task was so awful I now have cancer. Of the butt.

Trapped Ashes is a collection of assholes telling unscary stories (one involves cannibal breasts) to get out of a scary house. It could only be worse if my mom had directed it.

Urban Explorer had zero plot and was offensive to every sensibility. Nazi tunnels in Berlin, yay, let’s visit them with nary a gun to defend us from the racist chunnel dwellers we are sure to find there.

Vlog… words fail me. Seriously. I almost want you to keep it so I can dare you to watch it.

Last Breath is what happens when people decide to write a hackneyed script that no one cares about, cast their friends who cannot act, and decide to film it and call it indie horror instead of a homemade piece of amateurish crap that could interest no one with access to a Rubik’s cube.

Grave Encounters sucked the rancid teat of TV’s Ghost Hunters. Oh no, there are real ghosts in this here place that crooked paranormal researchers are exploring. Who would have thought such a plot turn could happen? Who, I ask you? But more to the point, we need to ask, “Who cares?” No one, that’s who.

Fingerprints stars two sisters who look about as related as any two random people might, features an actress who got her start on Laguna Beach on MTV and “acts” via showing her legs and guest stars the animated corpse of Sally Kirkland wielding an axe.

Exorcismus is the sort of film wherein you want the girl to remain demon possessed. You may wonder why the hell the movie wasn’t about the girl on the the promotional cover – I can’t answer that but I suspect it would have been a far better movie than the piece of shit I watched. You also want her parents to die and her boyfriend to grind himself into hamburger, but neither happens so why bother.

Episode 50: See Grave Encounters.

Dario Argento’s The Card Player involves cutting edge computer technology from 1987, a plot so simple Gertie probably wrote it, and it’s mining a trope so overmined the shaft is gonna collapse.

The Cottage features the dude who played Gollum and I couldn’t last longer than ten minutes to see if it featured anyone else because it was all full of “Who fucking cares?” during the first few minutes.

Credo ( The Devil’s Curse ) is plotless, pointless, and you sort of want all the crappy-acting kids to die. Also seems like the sound was mixed in a Port Authority toilet.

Coffin features two living people buried in a coffin who are fighting for life and yet somehow the film still lacks tension. Oh, it’s a ransom film. Oh, it’s a “punish the adulterers” film. Oh, it’s a piece of fucking shit.

Bitten has Jay from Jay and Silent Bob fame when he was still clearly in the throes of some sort of drug addiction and a whiny, often naked vampiress with one of the most interesting overbites ever seen in a leading lady (note – twas not caused by tooth prosthetics). Lots of bodies stuffed in trunks and no one smells a thing and I think if you decide to keep this one, you should have to watch it with me as I mock your pain.

Bereavement makes no fucking sense, is horrible and exploitative (because making kids watch sex murders is a fresh, new, interesting hook, amirite?), and also who fucking cares?

Beneath – I will contact a lawyer if you don’t delete this piece of made for MTV shitburger. Don’t test me on this.

Bane is a bunch of really unremarkable British women tortured and killed for some sort of stupid project involving what looks like an animatronic roach with fangs sporting a large Giger-style hat. Someone inexplicably cast their boneless aunt, the one with the frizzy perm, and I also suspect these women were not given a script.

Amusement is the touching story of a kindergarten vivisectionist who decides to stalk and kill the three girls who were sickened by his mouse-torture exhibit for the school diorama contest. He tracks them down and kidnaps them as adults in a Rube-Goldbergian manner and takes them to what appears to be a disused grain silo with interrogation rooms. Four idiots enter, only one survives, and it’s the one who decided to go to sleep in a room with a human-sized clown doll in a chair. Hardly seems fair.

Medium Raw features a hottie psychologist in an asylum for the extremely criminally insane where people have sex against the walls of cells containing superhuman killing machines for the thrill and people bring their small daughters who wear red coats to work. The sexy psychologist’s husband sounds exactly like Ryan O’Reilly from Oz and there’s a whole subplot with him that involves lotsa flashbacks. The best part of this film was the cannibal lady who, sadly, failed to eat the protagonist, which would have been the best possible ending, in my book. So stupid that if you don’t delete it, you owe me ten bucks on general principle.

Needle is Saw with needles, combined with the first Hellraiser, with even worse actors.

The Quiet features Jack Bauer’s daughter as a bitch cheerleader with Kenny Power’s baby-mama as a best friend. We have beloved character actors Martin Donovan and Edie Falco selling their souls for a paycheck. There’s also a brunette pretending to be deaf and she’s, like, key to the plot but she’s not naked enough for the target market for this film. Incest, murder, who fucking cares. Notable only because of boobs, some of them Carmela Soprano’s.

This should clear up some space.

As always, your devoted wife

I thought I had flu. Turns out I really had strep throat and a sinus infection.

Down side is that having strep and a sinus infection blows colon. Up side is that they both respond pretty well to antibiotics. So you know, hurrah for modern medicine.

Despite falling ill, I kept trying to work and was going to post an entry about a book dealing with writings from mentally ill people. I worked on it as I was sickening, but glancing over it, it reads pretty much the way one would expect from a person with a high fever and a tendency toward verbosity. So I will work on it and come back here Monday, free of snot and chills, and hopefully post an entry that boasts some level of coherence.

If the antibiotic horse pills knock some of this out and I am safe to be around others, I may go to Domy Books to see a presentation from Process Books. You can read all about it here, and if you are in or near Austin, come. I would really like to meet Isis Aquarian, as well as Adam Parfrey. If you see a short, fat, dazed woman on the arm of a man with an interesting goatee preventing her from wandering into traffic in a fever-haze and you’ll know it’s me.

Otherwise, see you back here Monday. Get hand sanitizer and curse anyone who sneezes in your presence.

Book: Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory

Author: Mary Woronov

Type of Book: Non-fiction, memoir

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: There is nothing particularly odd about Andy Warhol, but the majority of the people who made up the Factory are very interesting and quite strange. Add to this that Woronov’s prose is unusual (in a glorious way), and this book just had to be discussed here.

Availability: My copy was published by Journey Editions in 1995. Other editions are available, and you can get a copy here:

Comments: I read Ultra Violet’s Famous For 15 Minutes just after finishing Woronov’s book, and I think the comparison between the two made me understand that Woronov’s book was odd. Ultra Violet was a conventional woman drawn to unusual people, and her memoir, while interesting, makes it clear that her scene was far more interesting than she was. Though if I think about it, I should not be too hard on her – better than anyone else I have read, she seems to understand why Valerie Solanas just needed to shoot Warhol.

Woronov, however, outshines those around her in the Factory. She writes with an icy fire, a remarkable combination that seems to encapsulate who she was at the time (and may well still be – aside from knowing her work as the principal in Rock N’ Roll High School and the female lead in Eating Raoul, I know little about her beyond this book). Her tale is not just a perfect capture of a moment in history, but it is the odd tale of an odd woman with an odd mind. Oh, I have such a girl crush on Woronov now and intend to read everything she has written and see every movie she has been in.

Before I begin, I have to admit that I’m not a Warhol fan. I don’t condemn those who love him, but I find him tiresome. He was an amazing parasite who convinced his hosts that it was beneficial to them that he consume them and give little back. When they finally objected to him leeching them dry, he finished his hosts off and yet people find it easy to remember him fondly. Clearly he must have been very good at it because he attracted such a collection of genuinely talented people while making mass market prints of soup cans. Not to say the man was not a marketing genius but he was no artistic genius, though these days one is hard pressed to tell the difference between the two. In that regard he definitely was a visionary. But let it not go without saying that I am not a fan. I find the people he surrounded himself with infinitely more interesting than the man himself.

Woronov’s tale of her time in the Factory is a sharp slice of a tin-foil covered history. An intense woman, she seemed naively charmless, and that, of course, was her charm. She “whip danced” with Gerard Malanga, performing with the Velvet Underground in the early Warhol presentation called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Also, she was in the only movie Warhol made that does not make me fall into a boredom-rage-sleep, Chelsea Girls (though I have to admit I saw it so long ago that I don’t remember much except reacting in surprise that no one stabbed Brigid “Polk” Berlin). She paints a picture of herself as a cold, imperious young woman, sexually aloof even while engaging in provocative dancing with whips, under pulsing lights. But even as beautiful, aloof and talented as she was, she was not immune from the mercurial, nasty nature of Warhol.  In many ways, her story was probably the same story of many of the women involved in the Factory.

The book begins with a young Mary being saved from drowning. During a day at the beach, Mary and her mother swam out too far and hit a riptide. Mary was sure she was going to drown but her mother somehow saved the day. Back on the beach, drained from the experience, Mary has a surprising revelation:

I started shaking. I just couldn’t stop no matter how many blankets they gave me, but Mom, she was happy again, her body glistening white against the fallen night. It was like old times – people fussing over her, me feeling pathetic, worried over nothing. I hated it. Every time she looked back at me huddled in my blankets, that strange smile would curve her lips, her eyes would glitter again, and my gratitude at being alive shriveled. She knew what she was doing all along. She had done it before, swimming out too far, scaring people so they paid attention to her, and now letting me swim into a riptide so she could save me. I hated her.

This isn’t just angst. It’s foreshadowing. I seems a perfect encapsulation of the Warhol experience for many people.

Woronov’s brain is a crispy, knife-edged place and this is a very bestial, feral book.

There is Violet, my dog – my violent temper – the kind of thing you get a reputation for, and I must also confess to being the abused owner of a rage rat. This rodent is a voice in my head that never shuts up. I don’t know how I acquired it. I suppose it was given to me at an early age by some malicious adult, or perhaps every head comes equipped with one – you know, the “rodent included” plan. I’ve already packed these two in their traveling boxes; others are too prehistoric to catch, nobody would want to go into the black waters where they live. And there are also animals I don’t want to catch; rather I’m afraid of them catching me, like coyotes that carry insanity like a plague. I’m afraid they will find out where I’m going and follow me. Every time I find a new animal, like my party squirrel or my comedy crow, I give it a cage and a feeding schedule. And of course there are the rabbits – little habits that I’ve stuffed into every possible space in my suitcase – habits of speed, junk, pills, and any other poison I can get my hands on.

Either this passage grabbed you with both fists and shook you a bit and you need no explanation as to why I found this so amazing, or it meant nothing and any explanations would be meaningless. Read the rest of this entry »

I think my off-topic entries I had previously called “Media Dump” will now be called “This Is Not An Odd Book Discussion.” My media dumps were really just media trickles. Better call them what they are: “This Is Not an Odd Book Discussion.”

With that out of the way, let’s talk about a mild but still unsettling musical experience I had recently. I was listening to “Diane” by Hüsker Dü and though I have known of and played this song since I was 16, there was something new to it. I could hear something in it I had not heard before. I am not a person who has a wide musical vocabulary so bear with me if what I am saying sounds amateurish and if you have a better explanation for what I am trying to say, please speak up.

The weird feeling of hearing something new focused around Bob Mould’s guitar work. The clearest example of the part that started niggling the back of my head happened around 0:22 – 0:33. His guitar work is sort of shrill and desperate. You hear those chords throughout the song.

Because I have a touch of OCD in my genetic makeup, once that feeling that I was remembering something hit me, I had to listen to the song over and over until Mr Oddbooks begged me to give it a rest because some people have to get up in the morning, dammit.

And I was lucky he was so desperate for sleep because putting it aside for a day or so enabled my brain to clear and it became apparent what I was thinking of when I was listening to “Diane.” It was a song I have already and recently discussed, “We Are Water” by Health.

I do not know what the instrument is that makes the upsurge of noise that occurs at 0:41-0:46 and again at 2:06-2:13. And the tempo is not even similar to Mould’s guitar work in “Diane.” But there is something about that shrill noise from both songs that caused me to link the songs in my brain.

But then the obviousness of it settled in. I said in my last discussion of “We Are Water” that the surge of noise I delineated above reminds me of screams after seeing the video. Mould’s guitar work is shrill, a sort of on-edge sound that I now also associate with screams because “Diane” was written about a woman, Diane Edwards, who was killed in 1980. She was a waitress in St. Paul, MN, and she was 19 when a man named Joseph Ture abducted, raped and murdered her.

Having heard that jangling noise in “We Are Water” and associating it with screaming after seeing the video of the young woman or man being chased down by a demented killer, I think I had that association of discordant noise as a female scream implanted in my head. And now all of Bob Mould’s guitar work in “Diane” sounds like screams, too.

I wanted this to be a synchronous event. I wanted there there be more coincidence to it than there was. Eric Wareheim (yes, that Eric Wareheim) directed the video for “We Are Water” and was once in a sort of punk band himself. I looked him up, certain he was born in Minnesota and had grown up on Hüsker Dü. Perhaps he felt the same sense of being screamed at as he listened to both songs and had “Diane” in his mind when he created the video.

No luck. He’s from Pennsylvania. It’s all just in my brain. As usual. I bet people reading this and listening to the songs at the appropriate places will not hear a damn thing I did. And that’s cool. I often go through these weird musings wherein I see connections that a normal person does not hear. I’m used to it. And really, given that “Diane” is about a murder victim, had I any sensitivity, I should have heard the screams before. Regardless, I can’t listen to these songs again for a while because now I hear a real woman screaming at me and I have enough really horrible stuff going through my head at the moment.

So, dear readers, are there any songs that began to fuck you up in ways you didn’t expect when you first heard the song? What’s your version of suddenly hearing a woman screaming in a guitar part in a song you had heard for years?

Book: The Cryptoterrestrials

Author: Mac Tonnies

Type of Book: Non-fiction, speculation, metaphysics, aliens

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it posits a theory that the little green men, I mean grays, are not from outer space but really live on or in Earth and have been deceiving us for years.

Availability: Published by Anomalist Books in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I had planned to do an “Alien Intervention Week” here on IROB, but at some point, I think I realized  that discussing all of the books I read on the topic in the space of one week would kill my spirit for months.  Most of the books spoke of a mindset that challenges my love of the odd, steeped in strange science and spurious proof that if challenged would result in months of unsettling e-mails sent to me from people whose sense reality would make it hard to respond, yet their earnestness would demand a response.  So I am going to spread these books out – it may take me years to discuss the handful I read – so that I can distribute the agony in such a manner that I don’t get emotional cramps every time I need to check my e-mail.

Plus I’m not that “into” aliens as a whole.  Discussing aliens has become not unlike discussing religion for me – a tiresome argument that no one can win. Yet the idea that aliens have intervened in the human race for assorted reasons falls into this category of “fringe” for me so of course I am drawn to it.  So it’s not like I can’t read it even as every bit of my common sense tells me to leave the topic alone.  It’s maddening.

You know how it is.

But this book was a reasonable breath of fresh air where odd theories of aliens meddling with humans beings go.  Mac Tonnies wrote a fascinating book of speculative ideas and  it was disheartening, to say the least, to learn that this interesting book was published posthumously, for Tonnies passed away in 2009 at the age of 34. If you have some time one day, comb through Tonnies’ blog, which I link to above. His ideas on transhumanism are engrossing.

In a way, this book is a perfect example of the sorts of ideas that made me a fan of the odd.  When I was a kid, books on Forteana were not so insistent.  They posited what happened (fish falling from the sky), posited a few potential answers (waterspouts drawing water and fish from streams, or an angry god), and left the reader to wonder and maybe discuss the topic.  Now the book on fish falling from the sky has spurious science to prove a particular point of view, all other points are dismissed, and the discussion becomes entrenched and adversarial.  Tonnies’ book made the fun of Forteana real again.

So Tonnies puts forth the idea that aliens are not from other planets but may be “cryptoterrestrials.”  Humans or near-humans or humanoid-like creatures that live among us.  Those who see little green men or little gray men are not seeing creatures from other planets but instead are seeing creatures that have lived among us on Earth.  Hidden creatures that may or may not be our genetic brethren, but that have nevertheless been with us for millennia.

This is an interesting idea and Tonnies goes about discussing it using a calm erudition that was thrilling (and appalling in a way because he is gone and there will be no more from him).  His prose is very crisp and delivers complex ideas in manageable bites so that readers like me don’t choke.  But I think the best way to show you this book is to give you snippets that resonated with me, examples of an excellent mind and an excellent book.

Read the rest of this entry »

Book: Museum of the Weird

Author: Amelia Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Hale better train his dog.

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

Later in the story:

Frogs croaking.

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

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

DAY 2

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

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

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

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

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

“You did not.”

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

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Ray,” said the penguin,

“That’s a nice name.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book: Ruthless: An Extreme Shock Horror Collection

Author: Collection edited by Shane McKenzie

Type of Book: Horror, extreme horror, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Extreme horror will always have a place on this site.

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

Comments: I think that I may have reached my saturation point in terms of what can horrify me. I can recall the first time I saw the movie Scarface and watched the scene with Angel and the chainsaw. I was still technically a kid and I remember feeling nauseated and light-headed. It was the first time any form of media had that effect on me, but now it’s like every movie has a chainsaw, even the romantic comedies. Even so, it still happens from time to time, that feeling that I might vomit as I am being exposed to something terrible, but not often. The Throbbing Gristle song “Hamburger Lady” is the only form of media I can think of that still upsets me when I am exposed to it. It’s not even the lyrics. It’s the strange, gravelly but warbling siren sound that recurs in the song. My microwave makes a similar sound when the glass plate inside gets unstable, so my microwave also upsets me a little. It’s a sound that always makes me feel desolate, like no matter how good and careful I am that my life could still end up an exercise in pointless brutality disguised as medical advancement, that I could end up in a place of unending agony perpetrated against me for my own good. This is an unpleasant feeling to have come over one’s self when reheating leftovers.

That sense of nauseated terror or grim but panicked fear of pain is what I expect of extreme horror and it seldom happens anymore. It could be because I am too hardened, having exposed myself almost relentlessly to the real and fictional bad men can do. But mostly I think extreme horror often goes for the gross out, cartoonish violence that has no punch after the initial sense of “Gross!” The Three Stooges with cleavers. Luckily this collection has more good stories than bad, and given some of the really unimpressive collections I have read over the last couple of years, just being better than average means this collection stands above the rest.  But little of it was particularly horrifying as I read it, and that which did horrify me crossed the lines of a personal taboo that I suspect fans of extreme horror would not find that upsetting. There was no “Hamburger Lady” equivalent in this collection, but there was enough gross out combined with good writing that allows me to overlook the absence of the sort of extremity that can truly affect me. Read the rest of this entry »

I am working on my take on the Norway killer’s manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Even though I am dividing my discussion into three parts, it’s still going to be long. Very long. Probably heinously long. I found it fascinating, tiresome, and infuriating.

But since it may be Friday at the earliest, more likely Monday, before I post the first installment, let me share a few, minor interesting things I have discovered as I read and researched this disjointed, rambling, narcissistic, unorganized mindfuck:

1) Fjordman, real name Peder Jensen, is an asshole and yet I pity him even as I take meticulous joy in mocking his ideas.

2) Little Green Footballs, a site I had not visited in years, no longer appears to be one of the Worst Sites on the Internet. There were moments in 2007 when it was like Stormfront Lite. So good for them, not catering to race haters anymore.

3) Anders Behring Breivik has received praise in parts of the Internet, and I was a much happier person before I knew Pamela Geller and Debbie Schlussel existed. I almost shouldn’t mention them lest knowing they exist impact the quality of your lives, as well.

4) Anders Behring Breivik, on the basis of my armchair psychiatry, has an interesting mix of personality disorders. Most interesting to me is that he seems so narcissistic that he appears a caricature of self-involved, metrosexuals. All decent people should from this day on never again wear Lacoste clothing just out of the sheer shame that ABB has brought onto the brand.

5) I find it really quite irritating when people use my favorite writers and poets to support twisted ideas that are in direct defiance to purpose behind the literature. Stupid Fjordman…

Anyway, this may be book-length by the time it is over, but once started I have to finish. If anyone has any questions that they have about the manifesto, ask now and I will try to address them where appropriate. I cannot imagine my lovely, sane readers (or even my lovely, less-than-sane readers) would want to slog through this mess so since I’ve already taken the hit for you all, so to speak, I’m happy to address any questions anyone may have about the text.

So hang around just a wee bit longer. I will have far too many words at your disposal in the very near future.

Hi, all. If you have been trying to get in touch with me and had your message bounce or I never got back to you, it is because my hosting provider e-mail screwed everything up and I didn’t know it until Mr. Oddbooks took matters into his own hands and fixed it today. I lack the vocabulary to explain what happened and the will to understand it better to get the vocabulary to explain it but it should be fixed forever, hopefully.

So I promise I am not a heinous witchgirl who refuses to communicate. I’m just avoidant where this sort thing is concerned. Sorry. And seriously, if it was important, get back to me because though I don’t like e-mail, per se, I always answer it.