Tag: fiction

Automatic Safe Dog by Jet McDonald

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Automatic Safe Dog

Author: Jet McDonald

Type of Book: Fiction, humor, just plain disturbing

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: This is an utterly fucked-up book that combines several genres into an unsettling, sometimes hilarious, sometimes trenchant book.

Availability: Published by Eibonvale Press in 2011, you can get a copy on Amazon or you can get a copy cheaper directly from the publisher.

Comments: When I began this novel, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to finish it because it features a business plan wherein dogs are turned into miserable, rigid, stationary pieces of living furniture. I cannot stomach cruelty to animals and, in a way, the cruelty to these dogs was all the more horrible because it was so bloodless, matter-of-fact and accepted by others in the context of the book. I suspect the reason I was able to finish the book in spite of the content is because McDonald managed to subvert the use of abused animals in a horror-like narrative. They aren’t victims of one specific madman but are a symbol of a larger societal callousness. Somehow, that distinction made it easier for me to tolerate what happens to dogs in this book, as unlikely as that may seem.

This is a dense book – a murder mystery in the vein of And Then There Were None, a frustrating love story, a story of corporate subversion and a moral awakening – so know my synopsis of the plot, by necessity, must leave out a lot of details. The protagonist, a sort of sad sack Everyman named Terribly “Telby” Velour, begins the novel working for one of a number of Pet Furnishings warehouses. There he meets a new employee named Ravenski Helena Goldbird, for whom he develops a deep infatuation. As he tries to impress her one day, he engages in an antic that breaks the back of one of the dog-furniture pieces and gets fired. He later learns Ravenski Helena Goldbird is actually the adopted daughter of the CEO of the Pet Furnishings firm and he decides to create a new identity in order to get a new job with Pet Furnishings. Ravenski Helena Goldbird is now part of the executive board and Telby cons his way into a job in research and development in order to be closer to her. Telby enters a labyrinthine world of corporate espionage, personal viciousness, wanton cruelty and salacious behavior, all tempered by subversive hilarity and sly ridiculousness that prevent all the horror from becoming too much. As Telby watches as his coworkers fall one by one to a mysterious murderer, he is forced to examine what he is doing and the morality of the job he has taken, the morality of those around him, and though I am not entirely sure what I think about the ending, Telby ends this novel consumed by a metaphysical sorrow that he did not entirely earn through his actions but has to experience nonetheless.

With my brief synopsis of this intense plot out of the way, the only way I can truly show you what McDonald is about is through text samples. Even as this novel hinges on modifying living animals into furniture, where, still living, they serve as settees and footstools and stands for televisions, there is so much humor, high ridiculousness, and an almost gentle sadness that it is a marvel that McDonald managed to pull it off.

Here’s one of the first passages I highlighted, and it’s an important one because it explains the title of this book. Ravenski evidently suffered some sort of breakdown after beginning to work for Pet Furnishings, but when she returned, she moved on quickly from her difficulties (likely caused from having to saw off dogs’ legs and similar).

She returned to Pet Furnishings and took a post on the executive board. It was she who was responsible for the Automatic Safe Dog. They developed a microchip that you could puncture through the dog’s skull; ‘With the chip of a mallet, the dog has a habit.’ The chip was studded into the dog’s motor cortex and pet sofas and divans were made automatic and safe so they didn’t howl, bite, shit or piss until programmed at preset intervals. This made for not just safer but cleaner furnishings. Our customers forever complained of the times their mutt would whine to be let out, just when they needed to pet it or love it or sit down for a cup of tea, and then they’d have to deal with the inevitable mud in the castors or dew in the tassels. But Ravenski changed all that with her bold new ideas and leapt up the career ladder, far away from the ‘real’ people.

This is some twitchy prose, gentle reader. Yet I struggled through horribleness like this – people making sentient animals into furniture and still being so craven that they resent the basic care their living divan upon which they settle their pampered asses requires in order to stay alive – because I hoped that the level of detail McDonald was giving this dystopia meant the novel would have some greater purpose than just inflicting such wretched details on the reader. My patience was ultimately rewarded, but this is an example of the careless cruelty that you will find in this book.

Continue Reading “Automatic Safe Dog by Jet McDonald”

King of the Perverts by Steve Lowe

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: King of the Perverts

Author: Steve Lowe

Type of Book: Bizarro, novella, (borders on) pornographic (but not in a particularly sexy way)

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd:  Lowe created the “sexcathlon” and what I hoped were made-up sexual acts but weren’t, god help me.

Availability:  Published in 2012 by Grindhouse Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments:  I was expecting something far different when I received this book in the mail.  The cover, featuring a sleazy flasher with a bouquet of red flowers hiding his crotch, made my mind go to some very gross and demented places.  While this book was quite disgusting in some areas, it wasn’t The Diary of a Rapist made modern and set in a bizarro world.  It wasn’t even as subversively gross as some of R. Crumb’s drawings.  But it’s interesting to note how the absence of a continual onslaught of over-the-top sexual darkness made this book all the odder.  Not that there isn’t some disturbing content.  There is.  It’s just disturbing content mixed with a lot of humor.

Steve Lowe is an odd duck, which seems like a no-brainer because he is a bizarro writer.  Of course he’s a little odd, right?  Sure, but what sets Lowe apart from some of his bizarro brethren is that while he employs odd environments and strange plot details, he also manages to write excellent character-driven fiction.  And he manages to write character-driven fiction as he discusses arcane and/or wholly fictional (one hoped and one’s hopes were completely dashed) sex acts like the “Abe Lincoln” and  the “Alligator Fuckhouse.”   There were points during this novel when Lowe relied on caricatures, like the evil, money-grubbing ex-wife, and the protagonist, Dennis, sometimes was a bit too sad-sack for my tastes, but every step he takes in this book is a perverse step in regaining control of his life.

And yeah, the ending is… sort of rom-com-ish once you get past the horrifying, deeply disturbing section that takes place just before, but who cares when there’s violence, the mob, disgusting sex acts and even more disgusting sex acts.

I was a bit concerned when I realized that Lowe was mining a familiar vein – man down on his luck auditions for a controversial game show – but sometimes very interesting stories can be told within somewhat hackneyed settings, and Lowe does indeed tell an interesting story.  Hilarious too, but then again I’ve always found the scatological far funnier than the average person.

The story begins in medias res with Dennis contemplating how it is he is going to complete a particular sex act, for he has entered into a reality television contest wherein men compete to see who can complete the most esoteric and perverse sex acts.   Dennis is quickly in over his head, his innate decency at war with his desire to win enough money to take care of all the problems he faces after his financially and sexually profligate wife, Carrie, left him.  Dennis, who is actually a very nice and sexually average guy, is faced with completing a golden shower with an imposingly pretty woman.  Overcome by nerves, he is trying to get it all over with as easily as he can, but nothing really comes easy for Dennis, or without a lot of rumination:

Asking her to pee on me would go over better than asking if I could pee on her.  As far as I understand the rules of the game, a golden shower is a golden shower, regardless of the recipient.  So better me than her.

But I can’t honestly claim chivalry here.  There’s a performance anxiety element to this, like trying to piss at one of those cattle troughs in a football stadium, where you’re shoulder to shoulder with dozens of guys, staring at the wall in front of you, forcing your eyes to remain locked straight ahead and not wonder if you had the guy next to you beat in the meat packing department.  Nothing was worse than holding up the shuffling, drunken queue behind you because you couldn’t make wee-wee when the moment of truth arrived.

So how does his first golden shower work out for Dennis?

Waterboarded by a babe.

Dennis is clearly not into the experience.

I cough and blow urine from my sinuses, gagging on the bitter burning in the back of my throat.  When I can see again, I look up at her.  She’s dry heaving, holding her bucking guts with both hands, preparing to add an appletini chaser to my golden shower.  I scramble, slipping on the soiled slick tile flooring, spinning my tires in the puddle of piss beneath me.  I almost get away in time.

Almost.

Poor Dennis is clearly not an emetophiliac.  And we can also learn a very good lesson from this – never ask a very drunk woman to piss on your head.  You may end up covered in far more bodily emissions than you bargained for.

Though Lowe handles quite well Dennis’ progression from abandoned schlub to a man who manages his life and has a chance at genuine affection with an honest, decent woman, I think the reason to read this book is for the hilarious and bizarre descriptions of Dennis’ attempt to win the title of King of the Perverts.  To avoid spoiling the plot, I’ll have to restrain myself from going into too much detail but I really want to share some more of Lowe’s demented sense of humor.  He also has an excellent ear for dialogue and a style that is very appealing in its simplicity.  His clean and fluid style enabled me to read the squickiest of details without feeling overwhelmed by the sexually… interesting parts.

And there were many sexually interesting (and gross and hilarious) parts, a couple of which I swore had to be the result of Lowe’s fevered imagination.  Alas, a Google proved me wrong.  An “Alligator Fuckhouse” is a thing, people, though the online descriptions varied, as they so often do in such matters.  The “Abe Lincoln?”  Totally not made up and, interestingly, a source of great guilt for Dennis once he finishes the act.  So in a way, this book was an education of sorts.  A deeply gross education.  I’ll give a little context for the quotes but not too much.

Here’s a funny scene, when the game show organizer is giving Dennis a critique on his performance:

Peter’s voice kicks up an octave with excitement as he explains,  “We had to tweak the order of the challenges a little bit, but you managed to pull off two of them tonight in one spectacular performance.”

“I did?”

“Yes, you did!  First, you hung in like a trooper and went the distance to finish off that donkey punch but then you went the extra mile and snuck in an angry pirate.

“An angry wha-wha?”

“Technically, there were a couple of things not quite right with your angry pirate.  You nailed the cumshot to the eyes to produce a squint, but for a proper AP, you were supposed to follow with a kick to the shin to get her hopping around like she has a ‘peg leg’.”  He makes air quotes when he says peg leg.

“Your little bunny did that to herself tonight by running into the dresser, but the result ended up being the same – one pissed off bunny hopping around on one leg, squinting.  The angry pirate!”

It’s indeed a perverse world wherein one can find out one has completed an angry pirate without even knowing such a thing exists.  It was hard not to pity Dennis.  He feels very uncomfortable involving unsuspecting women in the perversions he is asked to perform, but his situation in real life is so dire (his ex has left him in horrible debt and gave birth to another man’s child while married to him, putting him on the hook for child support so he really needs the money from winning the contest) that he forces himself to continue.  And when he feels he wants to stop, he has a lunatic handler named Mongo who forces him onward in his perverse quest.

It’s also a perverse quest of the damned.  Poor Dennis.  His dirty sanchez does not end well and he wakes in the ER with no memory of the night before and a nurse named Sarah mocking his plight.

Was there a bar fight?  Did I get hit with a bottle?   That doesn’t seem familiar at all.

I can see stairs.

Did I fall down stairs?

And why do I still smell ass?  Something in here definitely smells like a butt.  I wonder if another patient in the ER has shit themselves, but Sarah sees me sniffing the air like I’m tracking foxes on a morning hunt.  She solves the mystery for me by pointing at the  tiny sink set in the wall next to the tiny desk.

“That smell is you,” she says.  “Wash your hands and face really well with that antibacterial soap.  Wouldn’t want anybody getting E. coli because of you, Señor.”

Oh, Dennis…  But perhaps this was his instant karmic-payback for involving unsuspecting women in his quest for the title of King of the Perverts.

This is novella-length book, coming in at 111 pages, and Lowe manages to cram a lot into those pages.  There are moments when it feels rushed but I also think that Dennis’ mess and desperation of his life had to be handled in a rushed manner.  What is remarkable about this book is how full a character Dennis is.  Lowe has a gift for creating believable characters with depth even in the middle of a ludicrous or extreme plot line.  I remember the body-switched husband and father in Muscle Memory, a man who is having to deal with horrible realities as the world around him is going mad in a comedic way.  This is not something you see a lot of in bizarro – excellent character development and growth are at times thin on the ground in the genre.  You can lose track of his excellent characterization in the midst of his extreme plot, but it’s there.

All in all, this was a very good follow-up to Muscle Memory.  Lowe’s humor, ear for dialogue, love of the nasty, fine characterization and willingness to plumb the depths of absurdity make King of the Perverts an excellent book.  It has its problems – like the rom-com sort of ending I alluded to earlier – but that which works in this book far outweighs that which doesn’t.  I recommend this book and would love to hear from anyone who managed to complete an Alligator Fuckhouse without going to jail afterward.

Carnal Surgery and Brain Cheese Buffet by Edward Lee

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Books: Carnal Surgery and Brain Cheese Buffet

Author: Ed Lee

Type of Books: Fiction, short story collections, extreme horror

Why Do I Consider These Books Odd: The extremity of the content.

Availability: Republished by Deadite Press in 2010 and 2011 respectively, you can get copies here:

Comments: I have not come close to reading all of Edward Lee’s books but, as I have mentioned in the past, I really enjoyed his “Infernal” books. I loathed the execrable Teratologist and I think my negative opinion of Portrait of the Psychopath as a Young Woman is quite clear. It’s not often that I have such diverse opinions about an author’s works but looking at the original publication dates of Lee’s works clears up some issues. Though Teratologist was written roughly around the same time as the “Infernal” series, the Ed Lee books I truly loathe were written in the same three-to-four year time frame.  It may seem like dirty pool to analyze so harshly books that may have been at the beginning of Lee’s career and don’t demonstrate his career arc, but these books were recently released by Deadite, and were new to me when I read them.  If a publisher is going to release old books and the author has no problem with it, then claims that these stories were early in Lee’s career and should not be read closely hold no merit.

One can see some commonalities in Lee’s works that I dislike.  He was on a pedophilia, child porn, mafia kick not unlike some of the works of Andrew Vachss, though Lee’s works are quite a bit less sophisticated. And, interestingly, I find myself disliking some of Vachss’ works for the same reasons I dislike these two collections of Lee’s, as Vachss, in seeming defiance of all of his goals in writing, sometimes presents a moral ambiguity about all the sickness in his content that left me wondering what the point was, to have endured all of that nastiness and have no conclusion, no relief from all the horror. Not every Vachss book was that nihilistic, but Vachss has a tendency to often end his novels in such an unsatisfying manner that I have thrown one or two against the wall when I finished reading it. Had these two Lee short story collections not been on my Kindle, I suspect they too would have been tossed in a similar manner.

Don’t get me wrong. Writing from the id is generally a commendable thing to do because it’s a sign of bravery. You are letting the world in on your subconscious as you ruminate on taboo subjects. It’s all the more brave when one is a horror writer because the author is showing some real darkness and asking the reader to be affected by the content yet not be repelled by the author. I respect people who show their darkness when they write. I just need the darkness to have a point so that it is worth dragging myself through the content. If one is going to write of decadence and sickness in such a way so that the decadence and sickness are the sole points, one must write in a manner that is absorbing, penetrating, or even beautiful. Lee’s writing is banal at best in both collections. So no beauty, no point, no catharsis. And that sucks. This is a problem that plagues most splatterpunk stories. If one just wants to wallow in sickness with no greater point or catharsis – something I enjoy doing from time to time – the writing must be good enough to make the wallow worth it. Otherwise we can all just go to grue sites and view crime scenes and watch suicide videos.

Additionally, as I read these stories, it became clear that Lee had no real focus in his story telling.  I have no moral issue with writing or reading gore. Splatterpunk is not always my cup of tea but, when written well, it can be a lot of fun. But it’s best to decide what the story is going to be. If one is going to incorporate fat women puking down a man’s throat, prostitutes made into living human stumps and forced into exploitative porn, an old man keeping, mutilating and raping women in his basement, and similar images into one’s stories, then perhaps the stories should have a simple plot.  The horror or camp of extreme images make most plots difficult to stomach and to follow.

I decided to discuss in depth the first stories from these two collections because both collections are more or less interchangeable in content as well as the problems that plague them. Then I’ll just pull the most egregious examples from stories from both collections to illustrate in micro the major problems I encountered.

Carnal Surgery and Brain Cheese Buffet were repellent collections so gorehounds will like some elements of these books.  Additionally, at times both had some clever or funny content. But the pluses were outweighed by the following minuses:
–Terrible, pompous, or unlikely dialogue
–No characters, just caricatures or characters who are extremely unrealistic
–Unlikely or fuzzy plots
–Inappropriate word usage and writing that verges on gibberish
–Grotesque imagery that in no way fuels the stories but isn’t well-written enough to enjoy on its own merit
–Puerile humor
It should be mentioned that one of these stories, possibly the worst of the bunch, was nominated for a Stoker Award. So, like, you know, this is just my opinion, man…

By the way, this is a very long discussion. Very long, and hopefully entertaining, but mostly very long. I’m telling you this so you don’t have to click the “more” link and be surprised by the length. And if you click that link and then get all “tl;dr, you verbose bitch,” I will mock your hair and slut shame your dog. Cool?

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A Hollow Cube Is a Lonely Space by S.D. Foster

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: A Hollow Cube Is a Lonely Space

Author: S.D. Foster

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

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it is. Hope that helps.

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

Comments: So my love of short stories and flash fiction should be well known by now, but it bears repeating that one has to really fuck things up for me not to enjoy a short story collection. And I’m happy to tell you that Foster fucked nothing up. This is a very good short story collection, maddeningly good. I say maddeningly because I suspect that much of his writing was amazing to me because his stories so often appealed to my own mental quirks and, frankly, personality issues. I’d like to say there is something for everyone in these 23 stories but people are weird and obnoxious in so many ways there is every chance that some of you might not love this book as much as I did. So, given all of the human perversity I often face as I discuss books, I’m going to share the stories that pinged me as amazing and hope for the best.

Foster begins this collection by appealing to my innate animism. “The Course of Clementine” tells the story of a little piece of fruit, a clementine to be clear, and her voyage from tiny “sour green baby on the branch” to a grown piece of fruit purchased at a supermarket. She knows her history, told to her from Father Tree, and has a modest but deep ambition to be consumed, as to be eaten and enjoyed is her destiny. She worries as she sees other clementines rot, she worries she may not taste good. Almost like a child from a divorced family, she worries endlessly, taking on all sorts of little issues as her fault. She often feels inadequate to other foods and she ends up living her own worst nightmare. This is ultimately a very sad story, and for a woman who apologizes to the floor when she drops a fork (and to the fork, too), I now look at all the food in my refrigerator and wonder about its mental state.

“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Chimp” is the story of an orphaned chimp who was bullied by his peers, who find his higher aspirations laughable. He spends his time with the birds and becomes a singer, leaving the jungle and finding a soft-hearted landlady who will rent him a room until he can get a job. He finds a job singing but he is not treated as an artist – he is treated as a novelty act and paid in fruit. His landlady puts him out and he finds himself forced to live with an uncle at the zoo. He continues to sing but one night loses his shit completely, returning to the zoo to face the life that humans will let him have.

For the first time in my life, I was glad my parents weren’t alive to see me like this. But then again, maybe it’s all they would’ve ever wanted for me.

Such a sad, bleak story.

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Placenta of Love by Spike Marlowe

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Placenta of Love

Author: Spike Marlowe

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, novella

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Many reasons. Many. The best one I can offer here is that this book features an artificial intelligence with borderline personality disorder who exists in a large placenta.

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

Comments: Placenta of Love is a very strange, unsettling but interesting and hilarious book. It’s quite insane, with a disturbing concept executed in a well-developed alternate world.  Punctuated with descriptions of a theme park on Venus, Placenta of Love tells the story of an automaton pirate called Captain Carl, who is created by a robot maintenance worker called Zampanò (a nice reference to House of Leaves, so yay to that) to have superior intelligence. Zampanò treated his pirate automaton as a student, teaching him philosophy and other subjects. Then one day Zampanò’s cat, Jiji, an intrusive but seductive beast who likes frequent “spankies” shows up to tell Captain Carl that Zampanò has died.

“Why don’t you turn him back on?” Captain Carl asked.
“Zampanò was human. His body is real. You can’t just turn him back on,” Jiji said.
“Well then. We’ll cobble together a new one. We’ll insert his back up, and…”
“Human bodies don’t work like that,” Jiji said. “He’s gone. For always.”
“Oh,” Captain Carl said. “He should have backed himself up.”
“An important lesson for us all,” Jiji said.

Jiji then gives Captain Carl a large, orange vibrating finger that is essentially a dildo with three settings because she likes being rubbed with it. Jiji is indeed a perverse little cat, but I really preferred her to the mate Captain Carl ends up with. Better to have a demanding cat than an enormous, destructive, needy placenta as a wife. But I am getting ahead of myself.

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Trashland a Go-Go by Constance Ann Fitzgerald

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book:  Trashland a Go-Go

Author: Constance Ann Fitzgerald

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, novella

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It is the tale of an undead stripper, or maybe a formerly dead stripper, in an endless waste dump.

Availability:  Published by Eraserhead Press in 2011 as a part of the New Bizarro Author Series, you can get a copy here:

Comments:  Discussing this book is troublesome to me because as a first effort, I can see just how it is Constance Fitzgerald is going to be an excellent writer once she has more experience under her belt. I really like her writing style and see a lot of talent, but ultimately this story did not appeal to me.

A short synopsis:  A stripper named Coco takes the pole on stage only to find a jealous rival has greased it down. She goes flying off the pole into the sound equipment and dies.  Her craven boss and his rapey/necrophilic assistant cram her into a dumpster so they won’t have any trouble with the law and she wakes/comes back to life in an endless dump.  Many disgusting things happen. Many. She is befriended by a fly, she meets the queen of the trash world and has to engage in a battle of wits and will to survive.

The hell of this discussion is this:  what I don’t like about this book may really appeal to some of my readers.  Seriously, I know there are several of you who are all, “Dead stripper in an endless wasteland of trash – where do I sign up?”  So I’ll include some quotes so you guys can get a really good taste and smell of what this book is about.

So here’s what I don’t like about this book.  First, Coco, the main character and heroine, is largely irritating, and while annoying women can be fun, I need to care whether or not Coco lives or dies.  I need to care that she is miserable and I need to like her enough for the humorous parts to be worth reading.  I don’t.  Coco is tiresome, bitchy, and so unpleasant that I am totally on the side of the stripper who greased down the pole.  Who could blame her?  

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D.D Murphry, Secret Policeman by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Massie

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: D.D. Murphry, Secret Policeman

Authors: Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Massie

Type of Book: Fiction, themed short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because the whole book is based on the delusions of a seriously mentally ill man.

Availability: Published in 2009 by Raw Dog Screaming Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I’ve been thinking about the mentally ill a lot lately. I technically have mental illness, but given my recent methods of fighting back as well as the relative mildness of my condition, I am getting very close to being The Sanest Person You Know. Earlier this year I read Pete Earley’s book, Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, a sickening and sobering look at the mental healthcare system nationwide, but especially in Florida. When the face-eating cannibal case hit the headlines, my first thought was, “I bet he was a schizophrenic.” News said it was bath salts but the autopsy said all the face-eater had in his system was marijuana. I looked it up and sure enough – Rudy Eugene had a rich history of untreated schizophrenia, resulting in many assaults and several arrests.

It is with Earley’s book and the recent graphic example of the mental health care system failure in Florida in mind that I am writing this discussion. There is a lot that is funny in this book. Clark and Massie wove a mentally-ill conspiracy so well that it is pure genius – at times I wondered, briefly, if the conspiracy was real, that perhaps Murphry was ill but was also being used as a pawn by a malevolent force. So strongly does Murphry believe the truth of the misfires in his brain that the reader, even with strong clues that this is indeed a mentally disturbed man acting out what is happening in his mind, cannot help but think there is some truth to such energetic and labyrinthine delusions.

It is impossible to discuss the structure and plot of this book in much depth because to do so would utterly spoil the book. So I plan to give a bare-bones plot synopsis and then discuss the parts of chapter one that resonate with me. D.D. Murphry is a mentally ill, mostly homeless man. When a social worker helped him get on disability or some sort of Social Security, he interpreted that as having been hired by the “True Government” to spy on and take action against the “False Government.” His interpretations of various situations, as filtered through his damaged mind, range from the hilarious to the deeply disturbing, often depending on how it is he decides to react. He believes a librarian named Kate, who fears and loathes him, is his secret bride, given to him by the “True Government.” He believes her nasty reaction to him is a facade assumed to throw off others and he longs for the day he can finally consummate their marriage. Kate inadvertently provided a large source of fuel for Murphry’s delusions, as she taught him to use a computer and access e-mail. Murphry sees spam as secret communications from the True Government and Clark and Massie really shine when they show how he manages to find real life corollaries in the simplest things that match the messages he thinks he received in the e-mails. Murphry careens from humorous misinterpretation to grave acts of utter mayhem as he tries to make the world a better place for the True Government and foil the actions of the False Government.

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Gardens of Earthly Delight by George Williams

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book:  Gardens of Earthly Delight

Author:  George Williams

Type of Book:  Fiction, bizarro (sort of), short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd:  It’s hard to put into words…

Availability:  Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press in 2011, you can get a copy here:

Comments:  The title of this book references the Hieronymus Bosch painting, The Garden of Earthly Delight and it is in reference to Bosch that I can best explain how it is that Williams is odd.  Williams clearly structured his stories in various manners so as to hark back to that famous triptych – man in paradise, man in sin, man in Hell. In fact, the cover of this book is a fragment of the center panel of The Garden of Earthly Delight – my favorite part of the painting – and is why I decided I would read this book when RDSP contacted me regarding some of their newer titles last year. The cover features, in the midst of extraordinary and intense revelry, a naked couple, reminiscent of Adam and Eve before the Fall. They are sitting in a glass bubble, separated from the chaotic carnival around them, but the bubble is cracking. Before long they will be in the world, no longer in a safe place of innocence.

With a cover like this, I had certain expectations of the stories within the book and Williams delivers. He writes stories that indeed mimic the progression from paradise into hell.  But there was an element to his writing that recreated the cracked glass bubble in a manner I could not have expected. Williams is a minimalist writer, his words echoing the simple, uncomplicated affection the two naked souls in the glass bubble expressed in the midst of sexual revelry.

Additionally, Williams has a muffled quality to his writing that ordinarily would have irritated the hell out of me, but somehow worked well with his subject matter and overall style. There is a remove in his writing, a distance between not only the reader and the story, but the writer and the story as well. Williams writes without using any sort of conversational punctuation, a style I loathe, and Williams is a writer whose minimalist approach definitely keeps the reader focused on the surface of the story.  I never once felt a deep kinship with any of the people in this book because I was observing, not absorbing.  Minimalism as a rule does not interest me much, but Williams’ style is so in keeping with Bosch’s theme conveyed via the couple in the cracked bubble that I want to read more of his work and see if this was a happy accident or quite deliberate.  I hate to invoke his name because he comes up too often as a reference every time anyone reads minimalism, but there is a definite Raymond Carver feel to these stories

Actually, if I think about it, this collection is a Raymond Carver/Flannery O’Connor hybrid.   You can best see that confluence in the story I liked best in the collection, “Dickson.”  In “Dickson,” an unnamed couple have an undetonated nuclear missile that had washed ashore for them to find, despite the Air Force’s frenzied attempts to locate it.  They show it in small towns in Tennessee, charging a fee to look at it. They meet up with a Pentecostal preacher who persuades them to let him use the bomb to show in his sermons in exchange for 20% of the tithes the preacher takes in.  Whether or not the bomb is real will spoil the story but even avoiding spoilers still leaves plenty to discuss.

Continue Reading “Gardens of Earthly Delight by George Williams”

Fractal Paisleys by Paul Di Filippo

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Fractal Paisleys

Author: Paul Di Filippo

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, science fiction, proto-bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Pia Zadora as a magical Queen of the Pixies. I shit you not. Di Filippo’s id is a magnificent place.

Availability: Published by Four Walls Eight Windows in 1997, the book appears to be out of print. However, you can get a used copy online at various locations:

Comments: Paul Di Filippo was recommended to me by a woman I have a passing acquaintance with in LiveJournal political communities. Once upon a time an author I discussed invoked my mental health and acted really creepy.  The author is on LJ and is a peripheral part of the conservative community there, so when the unpleasantness happened of course my discussion of his book came up several times. Whenever my site is discussed in non-odd-book quarters, invariably people recommend books to me. Generally the recommendations are along the lines of, “Have you read American Psycho?” or “That Chuck Palahniuk is really weird – you should read him.” Which is cool – Bret Easton Ellis and Palahniuk are both diving boards into the pool that is weird literature so I’m glad they are on peoples’ radars, but neither are particularly helpful to me at this point.

But this time I was recommended a truly whacked-out writer and I am the richer for it. Though I suspect Di Filippo is as famous in his own right as Ellis and Palahniuk, not being a fan of science fiction means Di Filippo is completely new to me and his whacked out writing is a thing of beauty. Di Filippo is a very fluid writer and you can read his works very quickly and easily come back to them after interruptions. That came in handy when I found myself stuck at my hematologist’s office for two hours one day. I read the bulk of this book sitting in a cold office waiting to discuss my platelets. Good times! And I cop to the fact that because Di Filippo rescued me from hours of boredom I may be positively inclined toward him on that merit alone. However, I also think this collection of short stories has enough odd merit to stand tall on its own weirdness.

Di Filippo’s book forced me to create a new category – proto-bizarro. While he is not bizarro, per se, he comes the closest to being a bridge between pulp sci-fi and the current batch of hardcore, horror-infused weirdness that I have read. Basic, (mostly) Earth-bound sci-fi blended with pop culture references, fringe culture, high weirdness and elaborate plots – if Di Filippo’s book had included more gore I would consider it bizarro outright.

Most of Di Filippo’s plots can be described thusly: A person finds a thing. The thing is magical. The Magical Thing is used. There are unintended consequences when using the Magical Thing. The Lone Sane Person tries to set things straight, with varying success rates. Di Filippo definitely has a formula and while formulas can be trite, Di Filippo’s formula is sort of comforting. In the midst of high weirdness, having something familiar to fall back on isn’t a bad thing. Besides, formulaic writing is why I read writers like Stephen King. Formula is all that separates fringe from genre sometimes and while some condemn it, I don’t. If one can write well within a formula, that’s what is important, and Di Filippo can write very well within his formula.

But that brings me to an interesting situation with Di Filippo that I have not faced in a long time: There is not a single passage I want to quote here. Weird, right? I am the Queen of Long-Ass Quoted Passages. But Di Filippo is not a writer who is going to wow you with the power of his prose (or perhaps I should say his writing in this book will not wow you). These stories have consistent characters whose behaviors sort of blend into each other. The power of Di Filippo comes from the insanity of his plots. His stories are exercises in fine lunacy, so fine that his smooth, contemporary prose, his characters whose traits span the distances between urban dumbasses to southern-culture-on-the-skids clods without much delineation between the two, fade into irrelevance.

These are some seriously amazing plots. So intricate I am actually afraid to read a novel by this man for fear of what one of his book-length plots would do to my brain. The plots are worth the cost of admission. Plots so fabulous they are works of art.

But excellent plots seldom leave much to quote. So I’ll just synopsize the plots without spoiling them.

Continue Reading “Fractal Paisleys by Paul Di Filippo”

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Hunger

Author: Knut Hamsun

Type of Book: Literary fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue Reading “Hunger by Knut Hamsun”