Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Book: Tender Is the Flesh

Author: Agustina Bazterrica

Type of Book: Fiction, horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: I had to read it twice to really get it, and when I got it, I felt compelled to write this monster of a discussion. Anything that inspires this much of a reaction has to be a bit odd.

Availability: Originally published in 2017 by Scribner, the English translation was published in 2020 by Pushkin Press. I read the Kindle version, but you can also get a paper version here:

*some links in this book discussion may be affiliate links to Amazon*

Comments: Before I begin, let me be very clear on two points: this will be a very long discussion and I will be spoiling the novel entirely. If you have not read this book yet, and want to experience it fully, read this discussion after you have finished the novel.

So many people have discussed this novel in depth, paying a lot of attention to the dystopian nature of ecological destruction, the presciently eerie notion of a virus completely changing how the world lives, the repulsive brutality and cruelty that parallels American husbandry and slaughter of animals, and the notion of how fascism can quickly other entire sections of the population. These are unavoidable themes in this book, and so much happens in this short novel that it’s shocking how hard it can be to focus in on one area to discuss. Initially I was taken by the comparisons between modern butchery of animals and the ways humans designated as “special” meat in the novel are treated. However, when I reached the end, it was so brutal and stunning that I wondered if it was an unfair conclusion. I felt like the author had placed behavioral red herrings throughout the novel, forcing the reader to believe that the protagonist was a much different man than he really was.

I reread the book with the ending in mind and realized that was far from the truth. Bazterrica’s work has been translated into English, so there is no way that I can assert that what I read was exactly as Bazterrica wrote, but the translation neatly shows how wrong I was to think the ending came out of nowhere. As I reread I paid attention to the way the protagonist, Marcos, interacts with the women in the novel. Through his interactions with them, he shows the reader who he is, what he genuinely believes, and how his hypocrisies may uncomfortably mirror our own. This isn’t a feminist analysis but this is a novel that revolves around fecundity, sterility, and the ultimate separation between the good woman and the bad, the Madonna and the whore, domesticity and wilderness, and Marcos’s character is best revealed through the women in this book.

A short(ish) summary is needed before I discuss Marcos and the women who show who he is. This novel takes place in a dystopia in the not-too-distant future where a virus fatal to humans is found in all known terrestrial animals and birds. These animals are hunted almost as close to extinction as possible, but the need for meat causes society to slowly begin to rationalize, then legalize cannibalism. Those selected for meat are marked and branded and their lives and fertility are controlled in order to maximize meat production, while less ethical uses of these humans in hunts and terrible medical experiments are also legal. Marcos, our protagonist, lives alone in the country. His wife has gone to live with her mother after their infant son died in his sleep. Marcos is the right hand man for the owner of a meat processing facility, and his job is taking a terrible mental toll on him. One day he is given a female head (as in head of cattle, and note that when the terms “female,” “male” or “specimen” are used in direct quotes from the book, as well as “head,” the subject is a human being used as livestock) because a head supplier is trying to curry favor with Marcos. The arrival of this female sets in motion the events in the novel, set alongside the complete degeneration of human decency, because even if human meat isn’t cheap, life itself is and entire subclasses of people struggle to survive.

Marcos has reached a place of disgusted acceptance of his job and his life. He trains people to effectively and hopefully humanely stun and slaughter head, but also rejects and blacklists those whom he considers little more than serial killers or violent sadists looking to channel their urges into a paid job. He is forced to interact politely with companies and people who buy head in order to hunt them or perform terrible experiments on them, and he despises those people for purchasing the very product he sells. He holds in contempt those who refuse to engage in the social niceties that permit and absolve blame for legalized cannibalism, but also hates those who wholly engage in the social narrative. It’s hard for those around him to match his own back and forth, but those who do are treated far better than those who are complete outliers from the cognitive dissonance that governs his behavior.

There are six female characters in this novel who characterize Marcos. Mari is a secretary at Krieg and has worked there for years, for so long that she even knew Marcos’ father, who was also in the meat processing industry. Dr. Valka is a medical researcher who runs an appalling lab devoted to torture. Spanel is a woman who runs her own butcher shop and is utterly without empathy or sentimentality. Marisa is his sister, a vapid, shrill woman with social aspirations and very little in the way of maternal feeling for her two children. Cecilia, his wife, is a nurse and is emotionally devastated after they lost their baby, Leo, following years of fertility treatment. Finally, the most and strangely the least important woman in the novel is a female head who is eventually named Jasmine.

Tender Is the Flesh doesn’t necessarily bring anything new to the table. Media has offered a lot of movies and books about cannibalism in recent years. If you’ve read Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopic Never Let Me Go, you’ve gone down a path parallel to the one this book travels. Human beings are able to jump through some mighty twisty hoops to be able to justify our own craven desires. We tolerate abuses to other classes of living creatures that we would never stomach for our own. But Bazterrica does not focus on the people who are ill-used, as Ishiguro did. She shows the carnage and acrobatic moral relativism through the eyes of a man who seems like he is fairly resolute in his revulsion for the human meat market. We like Marcos because he seems more like us than anyone else in this novel’s hellscape. But the ending puts into question whether or not Marcos is a man dealing with the hand he has been dealt or if he is a plotting, opportunistic monster, and if that is the case, what does the novel tell us about ourselves? We are rooting for the best villain in a novel fairly teeming with them.

My very long analysis continues under the cut.

Workplace Horrors: a Quick Look at Matías Celedón and Christopher Fowler

Books/Authors: The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón and “Wage Slaves” from the Christopher Fowler* short story collection, Personal Demons

Types of Books: Celedón: fiction, art novel, conceptual novel, horror / Fowler: fiction, horror, short story collection.

Why Do I Consider These Books Odd: Celedón’s work is odd because it encapsulates the plot of any number of two hour horror films into one 197-page book that has 1000 words or less, all written with a hand stamp and a pad of black and red ink. Fowler’s work is odd because his early work is so criminally under-known in the United States.

Availability: The English translation of The Subsidiary was published in 2016 by Melville Books and you can get a copy here:

Personal Demons was published 1998 by Serpent’s Tail, and appears to be out of print. You can try to score the occasional used copy here, though frankly I found all of my copies of his older works in used book stores:

Comments: I really adore the work of Christopher Fowler, and he’s a master of city horror, especially the terrors one encounters in office buildings. I don’t recall exactly when I began reading him but I know it was roughly around the time I learned about “sick building syndrome.” Sick building syndrome is the phenomenon wherein accidental design flaws result in very poor air circulation, causing workers to not only spread illness quickly, but also causes CO2 overload combined with inhalation of volatile compounds released by furnishings, cleaners and building materials themselves. That toxic soup leaves some workers feeling ill an hour or so after arriving to work, and the miserable ventilation in modern office buildings demonstrated how sick buildings could fuel contagions of illness, like Covid, due to a lack of healthy ventilation.

Getting trapped in city structures is a common horror trope. P2 tells the story of a woman trapped in a parking garage, and ATM features a trio of office workers who get stuck in an ATM kiosk (both are alternative Christmas movies too, if you’re tired of Die Hard). But in both of those films, the protagonists are stuck because a killer or maniac has decided to entrap them. In a similar vein, 2017 film Mayhem neatly wove disease with authoritarian building lock downs into a building horror when the CDC closed off an office building infected with a short-lived sickness that causes everyone who gets it to become homicidal. The Belko Experiment, also from 2017, is a gladiatorial contest wherein workers are locked inside their office building and forced to engage in murder sprees in order to survive.

The Subsidiary approaches building horror in the same vein as The Belko Experiment, in that the employees are trapped in their workplace without consent or warning. However, it has more in common with Blindness by José Saramago in that confinement brought out the worst in some of those locked in the building, causing them to prey on the weak. No one knows why the Subsidiary turned off the power and locked all the employees inside, but the Subsidiary ominously warns them that the first lockdown is coming, the Subsidiary takes no responsibility for any damages, and all employees are to remain at their workstations. The darkness begins on June 5, 2008 and ends on June 18, 2008. At the beginning shouting is heard as the power is shut off, the phones killed and the doors locked, but soon it becomes quiet. The first day is filled with TEDIUM and almost predictably, a fly left inside dies.

An unnamed clerk in the office uses his stamps and ink to make a record of what is happening to him and his coworkers, who all have names that seem a bit… on the nose. The Mute Girl. The Blind Girl. The Deaf Girl. The One-Legged Man. And so on. After the first day things start getting weird. The Deaf Girl slices his arm and licks the blood. Our clerk is evidently known for his pill habit and his coworkers come to pester him for drugs. There is very little food.

Somehow a lost child was found in the building and The Lame Man had to bathe him, whatever that means in an office building with no light or electricity. Somehow he manages to teach the child to read. We later realize that the child really should not be left with The Lame Man, and before long no one is safe from attack. In a terrible sexual attack in the bathrooms, The Blind Girl is left dead. She died naked and is quietly carried away, but soon the men, whom the clerk calls “animals,” come back.

A new order crosses the clerk’s desk because the men are filing a requisition: they’re looking for another girl. A woman near the clerk begs him to save her, whichever woman it is. This image reflects the clerk’s response to her request, and I frankly am not entirely sure what this means. Shortly after the clerk places his stamp on the request, the lights come back on.

I bought this book presumably because it seemed to be akin to Christopher Fowler’s works about urban horror. I had no idea it was a conceptual piece more than an actual book. It takes about 10 minutes, max, to read, and it is substantially enhanced by the memory of other works, like the aforementioned Blindness and Mayhem. Because I enjoy the unusual, I wasn’t put off by the fact that this somewhat pricey hardcover turned out to be an art experiment in story-telling using archaic office stamps, but I can imagine that this book requires a very specific kind of reader to enjoy it.

Even though I took the concept in stride, there is an interesting problem I had with the book. The use of the rubber stamps necessitates truncated story-telling, but the story being told is very expansive, including a section that causes the reader to wonder if any of this is really happening because the clerk may be a very unreliable narrator. This concept would have been far more effective had it been stamped into stony reality, using this unusual method of story-telling to make a specific and unwavering point. The almost-allegorical use of descriptive names also signals something that I don’t entirely pick up on because there simply is not enough in the book to explain why it is that these names signify something particular about the person. In such a heavy story, these nursery-rhyme names surely have meaning and it’s irritating that I don’t know what they signify. Add to this that there are so many high-minded utterances like “ALL NEGLIGENCE IS DELIBERATE” makes it all the more almost pointlessly artistic. And these last few sentences may make it seem like I didn’t enjoy the book, but I did find it interesting. Sometimes a fresh or ambitious approach is itself enough to praise (however faintly) a book.

Personal Demons is far more accessible and far less ambiguous, which may seem like points against its favor, odd-wise, but Fowler’s impeccable characterization and creation of technological ideas that seem possible even though they are from the not-too-distant-future more than make up for a lack of outright oddness. “Wage Slaves” tells the story of Ben Harper, a disgraced 26-year-old teacher (he encouraged his students to engage in protests that were categorized as “insurrection”) who falsified his CV so he could get a corporate job, and his realization that his new office is probably going to kill him.

His possible death is foreshadowed in the first few paragraphs of the story, but at that moment the reader does not know yet why Mr Clark, the head of PR, has beaten his subordinate, Mr Felix, to death with a cricket bat. He could just be a garden variety corporate psycho. But it doesn’t bode well for Ben.

Within an hour of being on the job, a co-worker named Marie, who had been canoodling with the late Mr Felix, pegs Ben as a poser with no corporate experience. She blackmails him into meeting her for lunch on pain of her telling everyone he is a fake. Marie is very concerned that there is something wrong at her place of work, Symax, whose motto is “the future is now.” She takes him to a restaurant outside of the building because everything done inside the Symax building is recorded and can be used to fire them. Or worse.

Poor hapless Ben who just wants to keep his new job of a few hours, is openly dismayed that Marie is dragging him into a potential conspiracy. Over lunch he passively pleads for her to back off.

“The secretaries are always off sick. They say there’s something in the air that makes you ill. At this height the windows can’t be opened because of the wind. Then there are the phone lines. They randomly switch themselves around like they’ve got poltergeists or something.”

“It’s my first day,” he pleaded.

“The staff can sense that there’s something wrong even if the management can’t, but no-one – NO-ONE – is willing to talk about it.”

“The suit is brand new, Marie. And the tie.”

Mr Clark quickly becomes suspicious of Ben. It hardly matters that he and Marie met outside the building because the office monitors everything and soon it is clear Ben is snooping around.

Mr Clark glowered at him. “I don’t like you, Harper? Why is that?

“You haven’t tried my cooking yet?”

The rest of the office receives an email warning them about Ben but it speaks to the increasing chaos inside Symax that no real action is taken. What Ben discovers about Symax is unnerving. Symax’s headquarters is a “smart” building. It reacts instantly to all input, attempting to keep a continual state of static equilibrium. Doing so creates constant change. For example, if clouds pass over the sun, the building immediately brightens the indoor lights, which causes computer screens to adapt their brightness. This is one small chain of events to keep the building in a specific state of being perfectly lit. Imagine all the chains of events needed to keep the place clean, temperate, with moderated sound and so on. Even empty the building would be constantly working to overcome any deviation from its main programming objectives.

But what happens when you add people to the mix? Well, as the architect of the building explains to Ben:

“A building is not just a box made out of bricks. It’s organic. Shaped by the needs of the people within. This building responds. People cause disorder, no matter how well controlled they are. The Symax system is responding to human chaos with counter-balancing chaos. Action, reaction. People break down – what happens to buildings?”

Mr Clark, who was a career asshole before the continual electromagnetic shifts in the Symax building exacerbated the worst of his tendencies, eventually fires Ben, but not before dragging out of Ben the reasons why a man so desperate for work that he would lie about his experience would so quickly trash the opportunity by becoming a spy for a disgruntled coworker.

Ben thought for a moment. “Human nature.”

It would have been better for Ben had Mr Clark fired him a couple of days earlier. Mr Clark had the entire company working non-stop and overnight for a big deadline and the building had gone as insane as the people inside of it. Clocks ran backward, Biro pens spun clockwise when placed on their sides, water coolers created typhoons inside the plastic until it exploded, and the electronics that controlled the place began to malfunction in such a way that the electromagnetic waves caused an executive to swan dive out of his office building window while other people had complete nervous breakdowns.

Never fear, though, the smart building has a smart solution for when things get as out of control as they were getting at Symax. Fowler leaves the gory details to our imagination.

I’ve always maintained that I am not as visually oriented as I am a fan of the word. I can appreciate the experimental, artistic nature of Celedón’s building horror, but appreciate more Fowler’s humorous attempts to demonstrate the real horrors of working in a closed off space with a lot of unstable people. All that’s missing in the real life office is the sentient building waiting to correct everything, but then again I have not worked in an office in a very long time, so maybe we’re closer to experiencing Fowler’s dystopian office building than I know. All I know is I’m really suspicious of that Alexa things.

I’m glad I don’t have to deal with offices anymore. I had a fear of door handles that predated the fear of fomites Covid brought us temporarily. People are gross, and it’s daunting being around them in poorly ventilated spaces where the windows can’t be opened and there is a heavy reliance on elevators. Christopher Fowler neatly pokes at this nervous fear of contamination and confinement very well in his urban building horror, and that’s why his work is so effective for me. His short stories take the tiresome nature of grocery shopping, the worries of what you may really be eating when you order fast food, the potential for use of little nooks and crannies in downtown buildings, things so many people in the West experience daily in our lives, and reminds us that so much can go wrong in our orderly lives and how there is still the potential for discovery in even the busiest cityscape.

Celedón’s work is probably only worth it for the story if you can get it on sale, though people into interesting artistic conceits may disagree. Fowler, however, is worth it for me at any price. Unfortunately so much of his work is out of print, especially his early short story collections, like City Jitters, The Bureau of Lost Souls, and Sharper Knives. If you are a fan of that sort of humorous, witty, familiar horror, Fowler’s early works may delight you as much as they did me. He can also slide into deep human emotion, dabbles at times in deep horror and gore, and handles body horror in a way that still haunts me to this day. Grab his work if you can get it.

Do you have any building horror pieces that you enjoyed? City terrors? Share. And if you’ve read any Fowler, let me know what you think of him.

*Christopher Fowler died in early March, 2023. I’ve been more or less offline for five years, and am filled with regret that I never interacted with him on his blog or on Twitter. He was a kind, funny, accessible, extremely talented man, and one of the best horror/mystery/slipstream writers of the late 2oth century and early 21st century. I need to write about him more in the future. His memoirs will be published posthumously and I’ll be sure to discuss it here, whether it’s odd or not.

Elaine by Ben Arzate

Book: Elaine

Author: Ben Arzate

Type of Book: Fiction, novel

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because I descended into the depths of a rabbit hole as I tried to puzzle out what this book meant.

Availability: Published in 2020 by Atlatl Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: On the surface, Elaine appears to be a relatively straight-forward read. It’s a fun little book, creepy and frustrating with forays into the incestuous and the priapic. Good times!

But say you’re a woman who has recently been thinking of immigrating to Finland* because you are certain the legislature, the governor, the climate and the slowly crumbling infrastructure in Texas are all teaming up in some god-forsaken superhero quad that will destroy the world in general and you in the specific. If you are such a woman, you might find yourself a bit… uneasy. In fact, I’d finished reading a book about the charming custom of kalsarikanni, translated as “pantsdrunk,” right before picking up Elaine. The Finns take relaxation and drunkenness very seriously, it seems, but mostly I mention this because it seems a bit weird that once I had finished a book about Finnish relaxation, I immediately picked up a book, written by an American, that was populated by Finnish-Americans, most of them named Elaine.

Synopsis: Chris is dating a woman named Agnes, who grew up in a town in Michigan called Elaine. Agnes’s mother just died and Chris is joining her in her hometown as funeral plans are finalized. The roads to Elaine are closed, and the only way he can get there is by train. Every woman he meets is named Elaine, and none of them seem aware that every other woman is named Elaine, too. Agnes functionally disappears for the duration of the novel, leaving Chris in the company of her father in a town that is isolated, empty and unnerving. Chris is disturbed by bizarre, sexual dreams that initially focus on his sister, growing to include Agnes and other women he encounters in Elaine. No one is where they should be, Chris cannot find Agnes, her father eventually disappears as well, the town seems like a ghost town and the train in and out of Elaine stops running. Terrible things happen to Chris at the hands of the Elaines in Elaine, he finds disturbing connections between Agnes and the Elaines that are increasingly menacing and sexually overwhelming, and all of this is punctuated by a creepy, incestuous TV preacher who encourages father on daughter incest. Later Chris finds photos of Agnes with an Elaine who behaved sexually provocatively around him, and it seems very likely that the overall atmosphere of sexual degeneracy in the town caused Chris’ dreams that began on the train into Elaine. Was Agnes a victim of the Elaines herself? Maybe – the ending makes me believe perhaps she was. But all of this doesn’t really help me answer the question of what the absolute hell was going on in Elaine?

It’s a quick and fun read, but my inability to answer the above question plagued me. I didn’t descend directly down into the fear, paranoiacally assuming that the book was cosmically trying to tell me that my desire to go to Finland was a bad idea, Ben peppering the text with clues that would convince me to stay put. But Elaine did raise a lot of questions that I cannot answer. Well, I can’t answer them yet. I finally asked Ben some very generic questions, just outright demanding to know if there was subtext. Ben said there is, that he intends to follow this up with a story that will answer some questions. He didn’t give me any specifics, thankfully, but that confirmation that my instincts are on the mark, that there is something going on and the text gives clues caused me to descend yet again into the rabbit hole and worry all kinds of names and details to see if I could connect the dots. I haven’t connected them yet but give me time.

Some rabbit hole samples:

“Elaine” is a French form of the Greek name, “Helen.” Helen literally means “shaft of light” or “rays of sun.” That might lead one to believe that there is some greater truth in Elaine, a symbolic revelation that occurs when in Elaine, or a beacon that leads people to Elaine so they can experience some form of enlightenment.

But the link to Helen also makes me wonder if all those Elaines wandering around the city of Elaine were the mid-western equivalents of Helens of Troy, possessing such intoxicating beauty that men would engage in all kinds of heroics to possess them. Most of the Elaines were young and very sexually attractive, and seemed more akin to sirens than a beauty so profound wars were fought over her, but the point is certainly worth mulling over.

A young couple goes missing early on in the book. A cat finds their bodies and the cat’s owner isn’t the least bit alarmed when her cat comes back home covered in viscera – in fact, the cat’s first instinct was to eat the couple’s exposed organs, which is weird behavior for cats. I know we all hear the stories about a cat lady dying and her starving cats eating her body, but cats have to be pretty hungry to do such a thing, and the cat, named Prami, is a pet who is presumably fed by its owner. But the cat is its own rabbit hole. “Prami” is a Finnish name that means “the sea” and a variant of this name is “Pontus.” Pontus was a son of Gaia, ruling the oceans before replaced by the Olympian god Poseidon. We also see the name in “Pontius Pilate,” the man who ordered the death of Jesus Christ. There’s so much there but I have no idea how to pull it together, and it’s made all the more maddening that I am doing this with a cat’s name but what would you have me do? Not worry all these details?

The couple who went missing in Elaine were young, and Elaine is an easy town to disappear into, as Chris will himself experience a bit later. Elaine appears to be a ghost town almost, but there are always people around the corner, in a store, scurrying around unseen until they enact some form of violence or create confusion for Chris. The town also has issues with power supply and cellular phone connectivity so one cannot seek help very easily. The couple who disappeared immediately rang a bell for me. In 2005, a young couple became lost in the Nebraska winter. They were on meth, and became so hopelessly turned around in the snow at night that they could not give accurate information to 911 operators, and their cell phone pinged from one tower to the next, making it impossible to narrow down where they were. The couple eventually left their car and died of hypothermia, but this case has some interesting traction because, much like the Elisa Lam case, many have a hard time believing that psychosis is a thing that happens, be it via mental illness or drug consumption. The couple reported seeing people in the trees, dressed in robes, convinced that they were being stalked and were about to be murdered. Some believe the couple were indeed being stalked by a cult of some sort, and were specifically driven out of their car into the snow in an attempt to kill the couple via hypothermia, based on the female’s account of blacks and Mexicans in cult garb moving cars around to confuse them. There is something very dark and cult-like in Elaine, something that obviously killed the young people whose innards ended up as cat snacks. And cell phones wouldn’t have saved the dead couple in Elaine either.

Does this mean anything? Probably not. But maybe?

Last point I niggled around with was Pastor Toivo, the repulsive televangelist whose giddiness describing biblical incest was unnerving. Later the pastor revealed he himself had been having sex with his daughter, named Elaine of course, and had sired children with her. Agnes’s father doesn’t have much of a reaction to any of this and says that he knows Pastor Toivo and that he can introduce Chris to him. Agnes’ father, Karl, says Toivo isn’t that much of a kook once you get to know him. If Ben revealed Toivo’s last name, I missed it, but “Toivo” means “hope” in Finnish. Pastor Toivo was the final nail in the coffin for me, so to speak, where Elaine was concerned. A lot of what is happening in Elaine can be explained away as just a young man experiencing sexual dreams under stress, a sad daughter acting strangely after her mother’s death, a small town that seems strange to outsiders, an overzealous police force with a Barney Fife level of incompetence combined with a demented blood lust. But Pastor Toivo? What father is okay with a man who uses the Bible to justify raping his daughter and having children with her? Who can look at such behavior and call it kooky? There’s something very wrong in Elaine and even the common folk there don’t seem to recognize it.

There’s more in this book to analyze, from the sexual behavior of the Elaines to a cloying figurine with an upsetting spiritual message. But you can also ignore all of my digging around and just enjoy the strangeness and upsetting nature of the book, which is often softened a bit by some of the ridiculous things that happen to Chris. Ben’s style is one I enjoy – he paints a picture without excruciating scene setting. He uses caricatures of specific behavior to paint ambiguous looks at surprisingly complex characters. It’s an enjoyable book that doesn’t require the sort of poking I do to enjoy it. But, if like me, you have a love of Finland combined with a lot of knowledge about weird stuff that resonates with you as you read, this book may become a bit more than a story of a young man in love being swallowed up by a weird town full of malignant people.

I recommend this book and really need for Ben to explain what Elaine is. I’m very likely on the wrong path, not seeing what Ben is hoping to convey in Elaine, but even if I am completely lost, it was still an enjoyable trip. This is a book that invokes a sort of creepy, insular pagan behavior that causes outsiders to call out for a cleansing fire, though who should burn isn’t entirely clear. Have a read and let me know how you feel at the end.

*Invariably, when I mention my desire to live somewhere in Scandinavia, people helpfully mention that it is cold there. It’s evidently very hard for people to believe a native Texan would want to go to some place so cold, and I guess they figure I must not know that Finland is a bit nippy at times and want to save me from making a terrible mistake. To me, the weather in Finland seems delightful because the only time they really seem like they are sweltering is when they specifically recreate in their saunas the conditions I find on my back porch nine months out of the year. Though as I type this I am sort of remembering how awful the February snow storm was, but I suspect Finland doesn’t have the same grid issues we have in Texas and I would have access to heat when the snow begins to fall in Helsinki. Even so, I would consider such cold to be a feature, not a bug.

Leaves from the Smorgasbord by Hank Kirton

Book: Leaves from the Smorgasbord

Author: Hank Kirton

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, flash fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because the collection begins with this disclaimer:

Most of these stories were written while I was either going through chemotherapy or locked in rehab. That might help explain things. Or not.

Availability: Published by Crumbling Asphalt in 2017, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Oh god, that disclaimer tore my heart into several pieces. And filtering these stories through that disclaimer ground those pieces up into a sort of heart hamburger. I don’t know Hank Kirton very well. I know him in that vague way many of us know each other – he read my site, I read his books, sometimes I see him on Twitter, I wouldn’t recognize him in real life though he might recognize me if I haven’t changed my hair in a while. But even though I don’t know him, I still know him because there are too many times his words have stepped off the page and recognized me and I waved back. Those words know me because Kirton and I share similarly strange cultural references. They know me because Hank Kirton writes in a way that gives shape to some of my thoughts, creating cultural links between unlikely ideas. There is a confluence of ideas, concepts, and milestones that happens when I read Kirton’s short fiction.

I still think of his story “Jelly” every time I hear Ulver’s “Nowhere Catastrophe.” Had Kirton heard that song before writing “Jelly”? Did it somehow influence him? It makes me wonder because the two pieces merge so seamlessly, a story and a song about human transformation into music, the written and musical notes at the end of a transfiguration. Because he is able to tap veins so similar to my own, I think of Hank Kirton, the Writer, several times a month. Which is awful because as I consider him in his role as the Writer, I had no idea he was suffering as Hank Kirton, the Human Being. I know now. I have the physical representation of his time in hell right here in front of me, waiting for me to finally discuss it. I keep putting it off because this year is the decade anniversary of my own time in hell, a different sort of hell than Kirton’s but similar enough to show me that, again, I know Kirton, in the most miraculous and miserable ways possible.

Leaves from the Smorgasbord is a collection of 32 stories but is only 181 pages long. Kirton is a master of flash fiction, but routinely nails longer stories, too. This collection begins with “Hello,” a story about a desperate fifteen-year-old girl reaching out for help as she experiences a bad acid trip. She randomly dials a number in the middle of the night, and reaches Don, a 47-year-old Asian man who is sufficiently alarmed and kind enough to stay on the line with the frightened teen until she feels settled and safe. Then the rug gets abruptly pulled out from under the reader with a nasty slap in the face. When I finished this piece I recalled Johnny Truant’s story of salvation in House of Leaves that turned out to be a lie that any astute reader understood was a lie. I missed the lie and had a warm feeling of relief, that Johnny, strung out and without tether, was finally going to be okay. At the end of that lie and “Hello,” I felt the same sense of “how the fuck can I, an adult in Current Year, still buy into and feel comforted by treacly examples of human beings at their best?” But I do. And it still feels bad when my faith in mankind is tested and mankind fails. But this story is also pretty much a fantastic way to begin a short story collection written by a man who was undergoing chemo or detox as he wrote it. Goddamn it.

This story was strange for me because it was short, consisted solely of dialogue, yet I felt like I knew Don at the end. I had the sense that even though there was no way I could really make such an assertion, Don was the sort of man who, even after being set up for cruelty, would not hang up the phone should another person call in the middle of the night, needing someone to talk to. I don’t think Don was ultimately bothered much – he was probably just relieved to learn no one was really in any sort of trouble. Don is sort of a placid lake onto which tiresome stones were skipped but ultimately his surface would smooth out once more. Don is a stable mooring to which the other stories are secured, keeping the reader from drifting out into a miserable sea of bad, baffling and surreal behavior.

Hank hits way too close to home for me with “Blimpo Saves.” It’s 1971 and Neal, a stoner up way too early on a Sunday morning, eating a bowl of Frankenberry cereal, is watching a Christian cartoon wherein a blobby clicking atrocity brings the love of Jesus to the children unlucky enough to be awake and watching television before the sun comes up on the Sabbath. Neal becomes increasingly disturbed by Blimpo. The kids in the cartoon translate Blimpo’s weird clicks but Neal senses that there is some sort of unholy Morse code behind the clicks, and Blimpy triggers a paranoia I’m so completely familiar with.

Blimpo says, “Click-click clickety click. Click click click!” and Neal shivers as if he’s just heard his own epitaph. The kids translate: “You don’t have to be scared of God’s love. It will protect you.” They say this to a frightened cartoon puffin named Paul.

Then Neal wonders if the kids translating Blimpo are actually Satanic minions, a reasonable conclusion to reach.

Neal begins to resent Blimpo for giving him The Fear. He decides Blimpo is a misguided messenger for Christian deliverance. Those clicks of his are jive, he tells himself, mere jive, but this notion offers no consolation. He wants to change the channel but is afraid to move. He feels hypnotized by Blimpo’s clicks, his swollen ping-pong eyes.

Neal’s feelings about Blimpo closely mirror my own about Jon Konrath’s fine lunacy. But I also know what he means about Blimpo, a gross Christian pablum panderer that I sense may be based on the eerie and unwholesome JOT.

Did you ever see a JOT cartoon before you had the vocabulary and life experience to explain why watching it felt so very, very wrong? God, that thing was absolutely horrible, but at least Jot could speak. And actually, now that I think about it, clicking would have been better than that chirping voice that shows that the Uncanny Valley can have an audio component.

When I was a kid, there was a locally-produced show in Dallas that came on before church called The Children’s Hour. The host, a well-intentioned man, I am sure, entertained children in a Christian manner, showing Christian cartoons and offering commentary. Puppets were involved. I am unsure what the goals of that show were but I suspect that they didn’t mean to plant seeds that bloomed into atheism. But what sort of lessons did they hope to convey, showing JOT, this minimalist biblical burden on children who don’t need to ponder the moral relativity of not getting dirty when they can’t even really speak properly yet? JOT was twitchy, man, with those hands (dirty or clean) that disappeared when he wasn’t moving. Where was his nose? Why didn’t his mother notice her small son had hands caked in mud, spit in a tissue and wipe him down before sending him off to Sunday school? Better yet, why didn’t the dumb creature just go back inside and wash his hands quickly before it was time for church? If he could open the door and get out into the yard, he could have gone back in and quickly washed his hands. But then they’d have had to teach us how dawdling made Jesus cry so there was really no way out of being taught a largely irrelevant moral lesson about how being a small child capable only of the thoughts of a small child was probably an affront to God. The only truth I could find was that devout children as portrayed in cheaply-made cartoons were very stupid.

The Night Country by Stewart O’Nan

Book: The Night Country

Author: Stewart O’Nan

Type of Book: Literary fiction, fiction, novel, ghost story

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s a wholly modern ghost story and part of the selection of books that I reread every few years or so. I do my best to read this book at least every other Halloween.

Availability: The edition I own is the 2004 Bloomsbury edition, which isn’t easily obtained, but the novel itself is still in print and you can get a copy here:

Comments: Stewart O’Nan is a pretty mainstream author and I doubt he’ll come up too often on this site in the future, but I couldn’t let another Halloween go by without discussing The Night Country. O’Nan is not a particularly odd writer and his stories can be remarkably prosaic but he is a master of characterization and his characters never fail to appeal to me in a very direct way. Mr OTC keeps me in middle class splendor, but I have some very working class roots (as does Mr OTC, for that matter). O’Nan captures perfectly the life of the man who clocks in and works an hourly wage. He depicts relationships in a tender manner that lacks sentimentality. His novel Last Night at the Lobster was a revelation to me – I discussed it on my old and now defunct site, I Read Everything, and that book alone cements O’Nan as one of my favorite mainstream writers.

But it was a bonus read because The Night Country was already in my to-be-reread-until-I-die rotation. I’m going to force myself to write as concise a discussion as possible because I don’t want to run the risk of spoiling this novel for anyone because I think just about everyone who reads here will like this book, and I hope you all read it after this review. That’s going to be hard because this book causes me to want to go on at length and explore every line. Let’s see how succinct I can be while honoring my desire to rave.

Here’s a quick synopsis: A year prior on Halloween, a car with five teenagers caught the attention of a patrol officer and tried to outrun him. The officer gave chase and the car crashed, killing three of the teenagers inside, gravely injuring one, while one walked away with few injuries. Marco, Danielle and Toe (real name Christopher) died. Marco is narrating this book while Danielle and Toe serve as a sort of third-person Greek chorus, chiming in with opinions and dark humor when they feel the need. Kyle suffered brain damage that rendered him child-like, and his mother is trying to hold on to hope now that she has a son who will be mentally a grade-school boy the rest of his life. Tim, who sustained no harm in the wreck, is groping through as he grimly plans to recreate that terrible night as best he can this Halloween. Brooks, the cop who gave chase in dangerous conditions, has lost everything – the esteem of his fellow officers, his wife left him and he is being forced out of his home because he can no longer afford it. Brooks senses that Tim is not going to let the first anniversary of the accident pass without some dark action but has become so uneven at performing his job that the reader has no idea how (and if) he can help Tim come out the other side of Halloween.

This book is a traditional ghost story, in a way, in that the dead come back to comment on the living, but this is a ghost story full of meta. The ghosts know they are ghosts and at times find the whole thing very tiresome but they have no choice in the matter – when the living invoke their memory, they are summoned and they cannot refuse. The three dead teenagers find themselves being pulled all over town the Halloween the year after their death and sometimes it’s miserable and sad, but sometimes the teens snark on the nature of being a ghost, invoking Dickens’ Marley, moaning and rattling metaphorical chains. But the teenagers know the fallout their deaths have caused Tim and Brooks. They also know how their deaths affect Kyle’s mother because she’s been faced with a death of her own – the black-jean-and-leather-jacket-wearing son she raised, the rebellious boy who listened to death metal, is now a shuffling, clumsy teenager who needs supervision constantly. He can’t even tie shoelaces anymore and must use velcro sneakers. He has a part time job at a supermarket that he maintains because he and Tim work together and Tim supervises him closely. But Kyle also must ride the special education bus, is gaining weight at a rapid clip and it can be said the old version of him died in that car Halloween a year ago. But his mother knows three families lost their child and feels that she must feel grateful because her child lived, even though she knows, really, that he died, too.

Tim especially feels disembodied in his life. Danielle was his girlfriend and because she wanted to sit in his lap that night the two of them moved to the backseat. Had he remained in the front seat, he would have died. Instead Danielle was thrown from the car and Tim doesn’t have a single visible scar remaining of that night. But his psychic scars tell him in no uncertain terms that he and Kyle should have died that night and is on a mission to set right that cosmic oversight. He’s going through the motions and no one but Brooks seems to understand that Tim is not okay, that he is not handling all of this well, that he needs far more from his parents than they realize, but Brooks has issues of his own. His entire life has fallen apart because he blames himself for what happened that night and so do many others.

After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones

Book: After the People Lights Have Gone Off

Author: Stephen Graham Jones

Type of Book: Fiction, horror, weird fiction, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Ultimately this may not be an odd collection but this book creates the feeling that the reader is consuming something wholly new. Too often originality in content and voice in the horror genre are somewhat odd, sad to say.

Availability: Published by The Dark House Press in 2014, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I already know, writing the first sentence of my discussion for After the People Lights Have Gone Off, that I will be using the delete key quite a bit. I find it difficult to put into words why some stories in this collection were the literary equivalent of throwing a lead weight over the side of a ship and why some stories soared, excellent examples of literary horror at its best. Some of Jones’s stories were so perfect that I felt that familiar pull of envy that comes when I read something so wonderful that I wish I had thought of it first. But some of Jones’s stories were impenetrable for me, leaving me wondering if he missed the mark or if I was just too dense to understand what he was trying to convey. Ultimately I decided I just wasn’t the sort of reader to appreciate those stories, that taste was at issue and not talent.

The hell of it is, this has been a pretty dense year for me. Sort of muddy and brackish. I don’t feel as on the ball at the moment as I have in years past. But what made me decide that my divided reactions are righteous was analyzing why I am so divided about the stories in this collection. The answer is that while Jones has a distinct voice, he is also a malleable writer who is moving around within his chosen genre. The stories that have a familiar ring to them are written in a style that makes them seem fresh, but Jones also ventures out into new territory, with strange ideas and storytelling techniques that can be maddening when one is the sort of reader who needs the conclusions to be neater. Jones may luck out and find readers who love every bit of his work, as he twists the horror genre into new shapes, but chances are he’s going to end up with a substantial number of readers who love it when he’s wearing a particular storytelling hat but less so when he puts on another.

One hat that Jones kept on throughout this collection is the “weird” hat. Much of this collection could be considered weird fiction, which may be one of the reasons why some of the stories didn’t work for me. I like weird fiction, as a rule, but this horror subset lends itself well to muffled storytelling, mushy conclusions, entire story lines that can be up for interpretation. I’ve been clear in the past how I feel about such writing. That sort of remote remove in writing irritates me because it is too often a cop-out, a lazy attempt to force the burden of storytelling onto the reader. Jones, when his writing is up for interpretation doesn’t echo the laziness of others who write this way, and this entire collection is refreshingly devoid of irony, but even purposeful, earnest writing that employs this sort of post-modernist equivocation will likely always ring false to me.

In the Sky by Octave Mirbeau, translated by Ann Sterzinger

Book: In the Sky

Author: Octave Mirbeau, translated by Ann Sterzinger

Type of Book: Fiction, literary fiction, novella

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: This book reached into my chest, grabbed my heart with both hands, and wrung it out.

Availability: Published in 2014 by Nine Banded Books, you can and should get a copy here:
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You can also get a copy directly from the publisher.

Comments: This book broke my heart. There are books you read at moments when you need to read them and this was one of those sorts of books for me. I was left feeling unsettled the first time I read In the Sky, and read it again to see if I could pinpoint what this book was trying to tell me. The second read was more of a revelation, and I’m not going to discuss the reasons in any real depth because, even though I discuss books in a confessional manner, this book caused me to consider my life in a manner that I prefer not to discuss overmuch. As much as I tend to treat this site like a diary, even I have parts of my mind that don’t need to be shown because the contemplation trumps the discussion. That should be in itself an excellent reason for any regular reader here to read this book. A book that helps me cauterize my continual brain bleed is a rare, interesting, compelling book.

Mirbeau is a genius. He portrayed with great intensity a quietly malignant life, a person rotting inside because of tension and fear, a person for whom a blue sky is a crushing reminder that there is no freedom, only a mocking emptiness that can never be filled. This is a book about a man who died while still living, who kept dying long after the disease had eaten its fill. That Mirbeau never finished this novella makes it all the better a representation of the life half-eaten, half-lived, never complete. Ann Sterzinger is also a genius to be able to read these words in their original French and convey such exquisite misery so precisely yet with such raw, bleeding emotion.

Penpal by Dathan Auerbach

Book: Penpal

Author: Dathan Auerbach

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it is both excellent and terrible.

Availability: Published by 1000Vultures, you can get a copy here:
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Comments: If you are a Redditor and subscribe to “nosleep” then chances are you are already aware of Penpal and Dathan Auerbach. Dathan posted a series of stories to “nosleep” that became so popular that he expanded them, eventually self-publishing the stories as Penpal, using his Reddit name, 1000Vultures, as the name of his publishing company. The book has had moderate success and has even been optioned for a film.

Nosleep and the phenomenon of “creepypasta” have expanded into YouTube serials wherein voice actors read the stories, but it has to be said that most of the stories that get posted and then turned into audio-videos are mediocre. Some are so bad they are of the “then who was phone” variety. But sometimes some excellent gems are posted to the subreddit. For example during the summer of 2014, Reddit user natesw posted an account of how his dead girlfriend was talking to him via Facebook chat. It was a creepy and well-executed story, and it went viral. Unfortunately going viral was probably the story’s undoing because it caused an influx of people into nosleep who had no idea how the community worked and didn’t read the sidebar rules. You see, nosleep operates as if all the stories posted there are true. Even if they aren’t true, they are true. The readers interact with the author of the story as if the author is the protagonist or in some manner part of the story, and the author responds in character when replying in comments. Natesw’s story got so barraged by people unclear on the concept of nosleep that he more or less abandoned it. Newcomers were analyzing exif data trying to disprove his story, doing their best to track him down on other social media sites and doxx him to prove it was a hoax and it all got quite ruined for those who understood what was going on. Luckily, Dathan’s stories didn’t fall victim to people unclear on the concept until the stories had enough traction that such nonsense didn’t affect them, but if you Google any element of this book, one of the autofill menu items will always be “is penpal based on a true story” or some variant.

But such is the risk of engaging in writing and theater online – if you do it well it will be indistinguishable from real life to those who never read the community guidelines.

Penpal is the story of a young man’s very disturbing childhood, and his attempts to make sense of what happened to him and his friends. The first two chapters are golden, truly creepy and leaving the reader with the task of deciding the reality of the situations the author presents, especially in the first chapter, “Footsteps.” The first two chapters are not in chronological order – “Footsteps” takes place when the narrator is six, “Balloons” takes place when he is five – so I am going to discuss “Balloons” first because it will make this discussion easier to follow.

Pinkies by Shane Hinton

Book: Pinkies

Author: Shane Hinton

Type of Book: Fiction, short stories, flash fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Is Odd: Because it’s not immediately clear which Shane Hinton wrote this book.

Availability: Published by Burrow Press in 2015, you can get a copy here:

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Comments: Shane Hinton has a bit of Jon Konrath in him, or maybe Jon has a bit of Shane in him. Or maybe they both have a bit of someone I have yet to read in them both. But this collection shows that Hinton has an eye and ear for the absurd in daily life, though he ventures into the speculative more than Konrath does. And I only mention Konrath because I found myself chugging NyQuil Cough formula like it was soda the other day and ended up having a bad dream about that infant-mouse-covered snake on the front of this book. In my dream the snake had charmed the mice like a sort of reptilian Charles Manson and they were ready to do his bidding, except I also think the snake was female. A lot of it I’ve forgotten, which is probably a good thing. But I did have the nightmare. That much I do know.

Before I begin to discuss this book in earnest, I want to mention that there is some interesting meta going on in this collection, and meta I have seen in other books recently. I don’t think it’s happening enough to call it a trend, but this summer I managed to read three books wherein the characters were named for the authors. Hank Kirton named a couple of characters in his short story collection Bleak Holiday after himself. Brian Whitney’s Raping the Gods sports a protagonist named Brian Whitney, which may be because the book is autobiographical (and I am afraid to find out if it is indeed autobiographical). And every male protagonist in Pinkies is Shane Hinton. One story boasts dozens of Shane Hintons.

I can feel the desire to go on at extraordinary lengths rising up because I genuinely enjoyed this collection, so I’m going to limit myself to the stories I liked best. Every story works on some level – there wasn’t a clunker to be found – but I decided to limit myself to four of the sixteen stories in this slim volume. Let us all cross our fingers that such a measure keeps my verbosity more or less in check, but I think it’s safe to say this is going to be very long, because this is a good collection and because this is the first book review on Odd Things Considered and I feel self-indulgent with celebratory bookishness.

Down Where the Devil Don’t Go by Paul Bingham

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Down Where the Devil Don’t Go

Author: Paul Bingham

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because one of the stories is entitled, “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Hollywood”.

Availability: Published by Nine Banded Books in 2014, you can get a copy here:
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Or you can order it directly from the publisher.

Comments: My love for short story collections has been firmly established by now, so, in spite of the picture of the deformed kitten on the cover, I was already inclined toward liking this book. I was somewhat disappointed. Bingham’s prose style is similar to my own when I write fiction – Bingham relishes ridiculous and horrible details yet writes about them in a spare, concise manner. He eschews over-use of adjectives and adverbs, which gives his prose an immediacy, a sort of direct punch that doesn’t get dragged down by needless scene setting or excessive characterization. This is not beautiful prose; rather, this is effective prose. But even as the prose is effective, I still found it difficult to like this collection as much as the solid writing would ordinarily inspire in me.

The book consists of four stories and the first, “Population I” verges dangerously into cliched territory, yet is the best story in the collection.