Tag: I Read Odd Books

The Bizarro Story of I by Wol-vriey

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: The Bizarro Story of I

Author: Wol-vriey

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: There are many reasons…

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

Comments: This book may not be the best bizarro book I have ever read, but it employs one of the best mindfucks that I’ve encountered in this genre. And it’s amazingly simple. The protagonist is named I and the book uses a third person narrative. That really is a pretty simple device, but it forces the reader to pay attention because if your mind wanders the slightest, you find yourself reading a first person novel. But it’s not a first person novel. And you will lose track of that several times as you read this book.

It’s such a strange way to write a book yet so perfect I’m surprised I haven’t seen this before.

Here’s a quick synopsis, as well as anyone can summarize a book like this: I is married to a woman called Anorexia, who is the secret daughter and heir to a kingdom run by horrible, body-building weirdos called the Steroid Cowbiys. She is kidnapped one day and I goes on a quest to find her. He loses his mouth early on and is forced to type out his end of the conversations he has. The plot, like the name trope, is simple – man goes in search of his lady-love, who is in peril. As with all bizarro, the bizarro is in the details. There’s almost an Alice in Wonderland thing going on in this book. I genuinely do not have a chance in hell of explaining the details of this book with anything approaching brevity – they are just that involved and bizarre. I meets a weird little mouse thing called Chocolate Mousse, who corners the market on rat poison and warehouses it so it can’t be used to kill him. I meets a weird fish-woman hybrid called Girlzilla who helps him but also proves to be a bit strange in her own right. He does battle with the family of body-building weirdos and sort of saves his wife but his quest doesn’t end the way you would think. And of course, there is a whole lot more to it than that, but just think of it as a love quest sprinkled with characters that would have deeply disturbed Lewis Carroll.

This book is horribly edited. It would not have made my ten error cut off, but I had read it before I made that declaration, hence this review. But this was also one of the first books released by Bizarro Press. More recent offerings show a vast improvement in regards to editing. But still, this book has a lot of errors. I have to mention it because that’s just who I am. But those who tend not to notice these sorts of things are unlikely to find this book any worse than any other bizarro offering. Just getting this out of the way so I can discuss the rest of the book to my satisfaction.

The use of “I” as a name really is quite interesting because it forces the reader to interact deeply with the text. It reads completely naturally but in the middle of sentences I found myself wondering who the “I” referred to and remembered, “Oh yeah, it’s the protagonist’s name.” In a third person narrative, it should be all the clearer that all those mentions of “I” are referring to the title character but even as I read the last pages, I still had difficulty remembering that simple fact. 

Continue Reading “The Bizarro Story of I by Wol-vriey”

TV Snorted My Brain by Bradley Sands

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: TV Snorted My Brain

Author: Bradley Sands

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s a retelling of the Arthurian myths using a sullen teenager, a sleazy wrestler, and a mystical television remote.

Availability: Published by LegumeMan books in 2012, you can get a copy here:

Comments:  This is a book you will either love or hate.  I don’t think there can be much gray area.  The reason for this is because this book relies on a teenaged narrator, a particularly stupid teenaged narrator whose brain is given to repetition.  Lots of repetition.  I suspect a real teenager would find this book interminable.  But if you can remember yourself when you were annoying as the day was long, yammering about ANARCHY and hating everyone around you because they were norms, you may find Artie Pendragon as funny as I did.

This book is a retelling of the King Arthur story using ridiculous suburban schmoes in the place of heroic figures.  Excalibur is a remote control and Camelot is inside a television.  When Artie’s father dies and his mother marries his uncle, no one can work the television until one night Artie uses the Excalibur 3000 to navigate the TV and his entire family finds themselves sucked into a netherworld wherein actors really are inside the television.  Artie has to engage in a struggle against his stepfather and little sister as he hunts for the Holy Grail.  Can he save the land in the television?  Can he achieve his goal of anarchy?  Can he get his wife back from his stepfather and take his place as the rightful ruler?  Will his struggles be so silly that it makes the mythos of Arthur seem like little more than the backdrop to a Bill and Ted film?  The only question I will answer for you is the last one and I think you know what the answer is.

As I mentioned earlier, this book is told from the perspective of an irritating and somewhat uninteresting teenager, a teenager upon whom fate has thrust greatness of sorts.   Through showing examples of Artie’s thought processes, I can demonstrate how simple and repetitive he is and, in my opinion, utterly hilarious.  Here’s a scene wherein he is watching his younger sister playing in a soccer game:

I sit in a folding beach chair on the sidelines, watching my little sister play out on the field.  The chair is uncomfortable.  A strip of polyester fabric is poking me in the ass.  I do not like to be poked in the ass.  But it is worth being poked in the ass.  It is a really great pee wee soccer game.  It is total anarchy, super-retardo anarchy awesomeness.  It is the most anarchist thing on Earth.

Oh wait, I forgot about riots in the streets.

But riots in the streets don’t have little girls picking up clumps of grass out of the ground instead of defending their goal, little girls chasing butterflies instead of the ball, little girls tripping over the ball, little girls kicking the ball into the wrong goal, little girls calling their opponents cuntbags, little girls screaming as they run away from the ball.

Riots in the streets don’t have soccer moms.  Riots on the streets don’t have soccer dads.  Riots on the streets don’t have riots between soccer moms and soccer dads over pee wee soccer games.  Riots in the streets are over real world issues.  Real world issues are fucking lame.

I say it out loud, “Real world issues are fucking lame.”

This is a long quote but I throw it out here because it’s a litmus test.  If you find this particular style of writing annoying, you will want to stop reading here and give this book a miss.  But if you find this strangely charming and exactly like the tiresome kid you sat next to in health class, the one who scrawled Anarchy! symbols all over his Trapper Keeper and quoted Metallica lyrics back before they “sold out” and totally did not give a fuck, you’ll enjoy the rest of this book.  And this really is the bulk of the book – the Arthurian myth as filtered through the mind and life of a kid who will remind you a bit of Dermott from The Venture Brothers.  There are the usual fantastic elements that accompany bizarro books but this book is quite simple in its execution – teenage dirtbag as King Arthur.  And because it is so simple, I think the best way to show how great this book is is by quoting passages.

Continue Reading “TV Snorted My Brain by Bradley Sands”

What, now?

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

I’ve been slacking off over here lately but this time I have a good excuse!  I swear!

I got sucked into a Munchausen by Internet/malingering/faker scandal and decided to launch a website looking into the situation because it is just that interesting. Since the early 2000s, a woman called Christina Iver-B* has been using various online ruses to prey on people for both attention and money.  I encountered her in an online watchdog group that kept an eye on misogynist, fundamentalist, evangelical religious movements, some of which I can comfortably call cults.  A plucky young woman called Ruth started discussing her flight from her ATI/Gothardite family and the many problems she faced as she tried to work her way back into conventional society, while begging for money because her life just never got on track.

Except she wasn’t a refugee from a violent, cruel, repressive religious family.  She’s a mother of four in her late 30s who has so many online identities that I have been researching for three weeks now and am certain there are many I don’t know yet.

This was completely up my alley and while it sucked up a lot of my time, it’s also invigorated my desire to write so now that I’ve got my crap together I hope to have more content up here.  Check back tomorrow for a discussion of a Bradley Sands book, as well as several other bizarro before I start transitioning into less genre-oriented odd books.

If you are interested in online scams, here’s my site looking into the mess Chris Izer-B* has caused.   If you are unfamiliar with this situation, you will need to read from the beginning.  Otherwise, see you tomorrow!

 

A Town Called Suckhole by David Barbee

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book:  A Town Called Suckhole

Author:  David Barbee

Type of Book:  Fiction, bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Dude…

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

Comments: Poor David Barbee. He has the decidedly bad luck to have his book come up for review when I am bizarro-ed out. I don’t think I can be as enthusiastic about this book as I would have had I not been reading so much bizarro that not even the strangest bizarro trope seems the least odd or outre anymore. But even as I am thisclose to eliminating bizarro from my reading diet until I can enjoy it again, I can say that I found Barbee’s novel amusing. I have a fondness for southern-culture-on-the-skids and this book totally delivers on that front.

Excuse me as I try to summarize this book, because it’s pretty heavy, plot-wise: Suckhole is a degenerate Southern town. It’s pretty much The Hills Have Eyes, Two Thousand Maniacs! and The Dukes of Hazzard with a dash of Matlock if Matlock was a genetically mutated abomination. It’s white trash, Mad Max and the Land the Civil War Forgot. So it’s going to be nasty and offensive. Sheriff Jesco Ray Bledskoe becomes the law in Suckhole upon his father’s death/murder. Suckhole’s denizens have been falling victim to a killer and what with the Hell-Yeah Heritage Jamboree coming up, he has to find the killer and quickly. Because he is an inbred simpleton, Bledskoe knows he must get help to solve these murders so he finds a horrifying mutation named Dexter Spikes ,who is the only creature smart enough to be of any use to him. Together, these two characters explore a really foul, post-apocalyptic landscape to find a killer. There are subplots with feral children that seem to hark back to Children of the Corn and there are succubi that are out to thwart Bledskoe and Spikes, but mostly you want to focus on the sheriff and his strange buddy-cop configuration.

Despite not being wholly “into” extra bizarre bizarro at the moment, I was still very pleasantly surprised to see how Barbee’s writing has progressed. His NBAS book, Carnageland, was a good first attempt, but it had its problems. A Town Called Suckhole has its problems too, but far fewer, and the narrative in the book is far cleverer and absorbing. It’s nice to be able to see a writer’s style and skill improve from book to book. Barbee has definitely shown himself interested in the craft of creating a good book, as well as creating a good bizarro book.

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Godspeed, Iain

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Iain Banks lost his battle with gall bladder cancer today.  The Wasp Factory is one of the books most frequently mentioned to me as a book I should discuss on this site and it is an odd/sick book classic, a piece of dark genius.   Banks was an author who was truly sui generis and I hope when my time comes, I am able to go with the same black humor Banks showed at the end.

I felt a strange kinship with Banks because I know so few people in real life who never feel lonely.  He was raised an only child in a bookish home and as a result, he grew into an adult who never needed company because he was never at loose ends with himself and he didn’t feel the aching loneliness that seems so much a part of the lives of many people.  It’s a gift from the Universe to be given the sort of personality wherein one seldom if ever feels boredom or isolation from others.

Banks’ writing as Iain M. Banks informed a lot of how it is that I look at odd books.  It’s deeply saddening that he is gone.

Regular posting resumes next week

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

I had planned to have another “Bizarro Week” but the tepid turn out for the last one has convinced me to wait a bit before engaging in such an endeavor.  However, I still plan to discuss some bizarro in a lump, more or less.  Then we’ll leave basic bizarro and branch out into other books, and hopefully some non-fiction.  I miss discussing non-fiction over here.  But in the upcoming weeks, look for discussions of Bradley Sands, David Barbee, G. Arthur Brown, David David Katz, Kevin Astkin, and hopefully in July I can get back to discussing odd non-fiction as well.

I’ve been busy at work over on Houdini’s Revenge.  A mention on MetaFilter and an indignant conspiracy theorist resulted in an onslaught of new readers and all sorts of comment situations.  I thought running IROB for five years had prepared me for the worst that “creative” thinkers bring to the comment section.  I was wrong.  Oh, was I wrong.  Mr Oddbooks wants me to close comments,  but I am leaving comments open over there and just keeping my ban hand strong.  In five years of IROB I’ve had to ban two people, and one of them was unbanned later.  Not the case over on HRev.  In another two weeks, I think I will be in possession of a data set that will show a definitive link between Tor accounts and anti-semitism.  Maybe I’ll apply for a grant to complete a study, or maybe I’ll just smack myself in the head repeatedly with a copy of Modern Trolling.

On another note, I noticed some incoming links from a site called HTML Giant and found I had been referenced in a very interesting analysis of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel.  I am unsure if being “compellingly tedious” is a good thing yet the description delighted me.  It’s possibly the best description of what I do, now that I think of it.  But back to Lin.  Increasingly I feel less… offended by Tao Lin and warming toward his style or his schtick, or whatever it is he has going on.  And the article over on HTML Giant is very much worth a read so have a look if you have an opinion on Lin.

Thanks to all who offered support during my resent “unpleasantness.”  The situation is largely resolving itself and while one can never say never, I don’t see a similar problem cropping up any time soon.  I am working very hard to catch back up and an heartened that I have such great readers here.  Lurkers are awesome too because you raise your heads at just the right moment.   IROB’s readers rock!

See you next week!

 

What I Did This Weekend: or, Fuck My Life

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

So, for the four of you left who read here regularly, you may have noticed that the site was offline this weekend.   I had some… issues.

I am conflicted because I would like to tell you all what is happening but if I do, it may just get worse.  But before long, someone is going to have to go jail.  I’m not kidding.

Multiple DMCA notices were filed against this site and Houdini’s Revenge, all of them bogus.  Complaints were also made about the content I produce on IROB.   It was alleged that I have reproduced child pornography and wrote entries to incite people to commit acts of pedophilia and rape.  None of these complaints had any basis in reality (no shit).  My hosting company had limited choices because I was less than cooperative but they were on my side and all of this has been resolved in my favor.   Seriously, they were very professional and very sympathetic.

Because I am very tired I have cancelled ANSWER Me! week because I can only imagine the complaints that will get lodged if I discuss all four issues in the depth I prefer.

If you are a writer who suspects your work may have been twisted up in this mess, please know this nonsense was wholly directed at me.  There was no vendetta against any writer involved, and especially no vendetta against Jim Goad, whose work I planned to tackle this week.

I genuinely don’t know how I am going to get this weirdness to stop.  Mr Oddbooks and I have explored legal options but then we decided we couldn’t justify the hassle or the expense so we’re gonna lie low and hope it doesn’t happen again.  I plan to write here, probably next week, but I have a limited capacity to deal with much in the way of bullshit, which is why I collect books and write online rather than have a real job.  So we’ll see how this goes.

Also, while I’m feeling a bit testy, I need to let everyone who has sent me books to read know that I have made a decision about how I plan to handle the books that remain to be read.  If I count more than ten grammar, spelling and/or punctuation issues in your book, I won’t be discussing it.   It’s harsh but really, it’s not.  Lately a lot of the literature I have read has been difficult to appreciate because of all the errors, which makes me tired as I try to find ways to praise good ideas with crappy editing, and I need to recharge my mojo, which will be hard in a world without Ray Manzarek, but I’m going to give it a try (note: avoid using sentences like this one when you write books).  I’ll handle rejected novels quietly.  Thanks for your understanding. (Edited because I found a nicer way to say what I needed to say.)

ANSWER Me! Week Starts Monday

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Hey everyone, sorry to have been so quiet since the end of the NBAS week but I’ve been busy over on Houdini’s Revenge. In fact, I knocked out an attempt to debunk of one of the more involved “it was staged” theories regarding the Boston Marathon Bombings, as well as writing about some of the backpack theories. I hope eventually to amass a clearinghouse of all the theories, debunked (or confirmed – it could happen) and in some sort of order. For those who enjoy conspiracy theory, have a look.

I made an interesting decision about discussing ANSWER Me!, issues 1-4. I have been working on these discussions for months, almost a year. And when I say I “these discussions,” I really mean Issue 4, the infamous Rape Issue. I have never hit the backspace key more in my life. I have read almost all of Andrea Dworkin’s body of work to make sure that I have my ducks in a row if the Andrea Dworkin Lie Detector types show up. I have agonized over word choice, trying to make sure I conveyed the point I wanted to make without offending the usual suspects, even as I sort of want to call out the usual suspects (:cough:melissamcewan:cough:) for trivializing rape to the point even ardent liberals are sickened by their penny ante and Penny Arcade antics, making rape seem trivial as they wage war against fictional creatures committing impossible acts against cartoon characters that in no way represent any living person, past or present. And I will have to mention Peter Sotos. Sotos is a polarizing dude, and by polarizing, I mean I get rape and death threats when I talk about him. I can cope with that sort of shit – welcome to the Internet, Baby Girl! – but it can get a wee bit demoralizing.

All that agonizing has let me to this interesting decision: I am trashing everything I have written and will begin again on Saturday morning, cranking out text quickly and from a place of reaction rather than contemplation. When I am forced to write quickly, I have to stop dithering. When I stop dithering, I can say what I want to say and not worry about who may be offended or that people I want to offend may find my POV to their liking, which is almost as bad.

I may be cranking out Friday’s entry Thursday night but, even if it is rushed, it will be better than the tentative semi-turd I have right now. Hopefully raw writing will encourage raw and interesting discussions.

I had planned to host a giveaway for this themed week but I am 86ing it for two reasons. One, all of the ANSWER Me! books are out-of-print and the last I looked on Amazon, the affordable copies were in crappy condition (acceptable on Amazon means someone’s cat shat on it), all the reputable dealers want way too much, and easily half the listings were from dropshippers, the scourge of the online book purchasing experience. I could give away Goad’s other books but that seems weird since I’m not discussing them. Two, the last two giveaways I hosted had really lukewarm reactions. I’ve seen hundreds of people freak out at the chance to win a $10 card at a coffee shop and I had 26 entries for a $50 Amazon card, and those entries represented nine people. Maybe 10. I’m too tired to go back and look. At any rate, though I really like sharing the book love, there is a fine line between Sharing the Love and becoming That Girl Who Looks Like She Is Begging For Readers. I love you guys but I feel like I’m forcing my love down your throats. Which seems an appropriate way as any to end this entry that basically bemoaned my neurotic inability to write from the hip about rape.

Funny how that works.

Tune in Monday for ANSWER Me! week. It should be interesting.

Another Bizarro Week is Over!

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Thanks to everyone who supported me this week! I really appreciate the comments and hope the few new names I saw stick around.

I assigned all the first comments from each entry a number and used the random number generator at random.org to determine the winner. Donald Armfield won the giveaway! Donald, check your e-mail. I sent you a message about the giveaway and what form you want your gift.

All hail Donald, the King of Bizarro Week.

I’ll be back next week with something, though I don’t know what exactly. I will also be writing some over on Houdini’s Revenge so if you are conspiratorial in nature, check me out over there.

Thanks again, and have a good weekend!

House Hunter by S.T. Cartledge

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: House Hunter

Author: S.T. Cartledge

Type of Book:  Fiction, bizarro, action, novella

Why Do I Consider The Book Odd:  Because it appeals to my animist tendencies to see inanimate objects as living creatures.

Availability:  Published by Eraserhead Press in 2013, you can get a copy here:

Comments: We end NBAS week with S.T. Cartledge’s House Hunter.  I am torn about this book because it has so much going for it yet pings a lot of problems I have with female characters in fringe literature.  It’s almost become a cliche to me that when a badass female character is introduced and she has an unnatural hair color, I’m gonna hate her because her hair serves as her personality.  Imogen, the heroine of this book, has blue hair and is not my cup of tea, so my dayglo-hair theory is still intact.  The characterization in this book, as a whole, isn’t great but it’s also a plot-driven book.  In fact, it’s a pretty decent plot, but like so many NBAS books, it suffers from being novella-length.  This is another one that really needed space to expand and develop its plot.

The gist of House Hunter is this: Imogen is a House Hunter.  Houses, in this novel, are living creatures, some domesticated for human use, some still running wild.  Imogen is a very good house tamer and is pulled into a plot wherein a cabal of architects are trying to use a legendary house called the Jabberhouse that can destroy homes and create new ones, entire communities, that will permit the architects to take control of the houses and control all the communities and the people who live within them.  The wild houses will be stamped out and liberty will be lost.  Imogen is drawn in by a man named Clint and they engage on a quest to stop this from happening.  Clint is not who he says he is, and that plot twist really doesn’t change things as much as you might think.   There are interesting details, like cockroach people and pygmy houses and overall, this is a pretty good first effort.

This is a very action-oriented book, and when Cartledge gets into a tight action scene, you can see his strengths.  However, action-oriented books are hard for me to discuss because one has to be an excellent storyteller to pull off an action book.  Storytelling is not necessarily the same as wordsmithing and as a result storytellers tell amazing and interesting stories without engaging in the sort of writing a reader wants to quote.  Rather, the reader who loves the book is more likely to recount the plot than the beautiful writing.  Think of most Stephen King books – though King is, in my opinion, a very good writer and one of the best horror writers ever, one generally does not find oneself quoting him at length, outside of trenchant one-liners that often come up.  I explain all of this because I want it to be clear that my failure to quote much is due to this being a plot-driven novel.

This is also a book that is an homage to others authors, yet draws on influences without becoming a pastiche.  There is some clear Mark Danielewski-love in this book, with sentient houses and a character with the last name of Davinson (House of Leaves hinges on the Navidson record, this book involves the Davinson Initiative).  There are shades of Palahniuk in here, too, with a character identity revelation at the end that makes sense and is interesting but doesn’t really change much (think Invisible Monsters). There is also a video-game feel to this at times, especially during the scene wherein Imogen uses a controller of sorts to have a house duel with another house hunter.  I am not well-versed enough in video games to be able to assign scenes like this to a specific game but gaming is undeniably there.

While I don’t really like Imogen that much – blue-haired heroin who complains more than the average action heroine and isn’t particularly interesting –  I can admit that my distaste for her at times is strictly personal.  However, there are some concrete problems.  This book achieved a new editorial issue for me.  While it was peppered with editorial problems here and there, most notably with word repetition (“and and”), it had a glaring continuity error.  A character loses an arm and then throws her hands up in the air in a moment of anger.  Now she’s not throwing her severed arm up in the air – this sentence is written as though all limbs are still connected.  Very shortly after she tosses her arms into the air, another character notices her missing arm.  Sigh…  Another problem is that the novella length forced Cartledge into the dreaded “telling” rather than “showing.”  There was a lot of plot handled via conversations between characters.  I generally think telling and not showing is a garbage complaint – all science fiction requires this, especially books with this much world building, which Cartledge handles admirably.  But toward the end, it happened enough for me to notice and it became a bit tiring.

But even as I found Imogen lacking and despaired at some of the editing problems, there is a real kernel of fun in this book. The concept is unique and can easily be seen as an allegory to modern farming wherein corporations are using patents to destroy independent farmers and eliminate crops that are not genetically modified, but this connection is made without any preaching. As I mention above, the world building in this book is quite something and Cartledge creates a world the reader can immediately focus in on without feeling forced into the sort of heavy-duty otherworldliness that I find so wearying about a lot of fantasy and science fiction.  He really does give us details about the world almost effortlessly:

Imogen followed Mary around the side of the house and across a paddock of funnel web ponies.  They stopped at the gate to a paddock with a big acorn tree and at a two-story farm house behind it, standing about a foot off the ground on hundreds of matchstick legs.

Funnel web ponies may not make sense now but in the context of the story they will not trip up the reader.  It is in his worldbuilding wherein Cartledge really does show and not tell, and he’s able to create an at times sweet other world full of rich details that never verges into the outlandish.

Because this is an action bizarro novel, here’s a passage of some excellent action writing:

The old farm leapt and quivered.  Imogen’s head slammed into the porch. Sparks flew from the lightning cannon and danced across the timber deck.  She banged her fist hard on the steps.  A hoof flicked up on to the porch, brushing over her shoulder.  Imogen squeezed the trigger on the cannon and punched it into the steps.  The front legs buckled then flew up, throwing Imogen into a puddle of pigs’ blood on the sloppy ground.

The house came at her with frantic, toothy legs scraping and ripping apart the soil.  Imogen switched the cannon to scorch and fired at the front of the house.  She held her arm up in the general direction of the centipede legs and held her fire until she could no longer feel the feet clawing at the blood-soaked ground.

This is some pretty decent action writing, I think.  Action writing does best when it is simple, without a lot of flourishes.  When a character is wrestling with a house with centipede legs and brings a cannon into play, we don’t need a whole lot of extraneous details.  And to be perfectly frank, I was never one for overly descriptive novels.  I love the mystery novelist Ruth Rendell but tune out whenever she goes into great detail with plants and architecture and the arrangements of high streets.  I am partial to writing that is less baroque and Cartledge appeals to me on that level.

But that is not to say that this book is wholly without some pretty writing.  This scene comes from when Clint and Imogen are in a labyrinth and realize it is alive and is moving.

They came out of one passage into a wide room filled with plants and trees that flickered with light instead of fruit and flowers and leaves, and filled the room with the scent of peaches and roses and eucalyptus.  The plants grew from little islands of red soil that were surrounded by a black liquid sea. Along the walls, eyes watched them.  Imogen went out into the sea, knee deep.  Ellis followed.  In the centre of the room, a tree spiraled like a staircase, disappearing into a hole in the roof.

Overall, there was enough good in this book to distract me from what I didn’t like.  There was little in the way of character development, Imogen’s got the dreaded blue hair that often serves as a place marker for personality, and there were editing issues that were really distracting.  But the world-building, the action sequences and the plot were spot-on.  I recommend this book and hope that if you read it you come back and tell me what you think of it.  But as I have mentioned before, the New Bizarro Author Series writers have a limited window in which to sell enough books to be offered a writing contract.  If this book sounds interesting to you, then get a copy sooner rather than later.

Having reached the end of my NBAS week,  you guys have until 6:00 P.M. PST to leave comments in order to enter my giveaway.  I am giving away a copy of each book I discuss this week OR I am giving away an Amazon gift card in the amount that the paper versions of these books would cost.  All you have to do to enter the drawing is to leave me a comment in each of this week’s entries.  One comment on each discussion is an entry into the drawing.  Leave a comment all five days and you will have five entries into the drawing.  Only one comment per day counts as an entry but don’t let that prevent you from engaging in conversation about the books.  For all the details of this contest, visit this entry.

I will announce the winner of the contest in a separate entry and will contact the winner via e-mail.    Thanks for all the support for this endeavor and happy reading to you all.