Tag: Short Story Collections

Discouraging at Best by John Edward Lawson

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Discouraging at Best

Author: John Edward Lawson

Type of Book: Short story collection, fiction, bizarro (borderline)

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd:While not as overly odd as some bizarro out there, this is definitely not a mainstream book. I have read Lawson before and some of his other works were definitely odd, so he gets reviewed here, even if this particular content is not that outre.

Availability: Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press in 2007, you can get a copy here (actually, no link on this one – Amazon’s direct link to this book is borked. So screw that – go straight to the source on this one.)

Comments: Okay, I’ll admit that a less than savory youth may have caused me to have certain memory problems. I’m that person who, when tired enough, will forget my own name as well as all sorts of important nouns crucial for effective communication. Mr. Oddbooks has enough experience that when I become bleary and say, “Bring me the thing. The thing… It’s in a drawer with some other things, maybe… In that place were we shower…” he knows to find my hairbrush. So while I like to think that this tendency does not dog me in my reading habits, the fact is that it probably does. However, when it does happen, I am generally able to say it was likely that the reading material was not memorable. And I am usually right. However, it happened with Lawson’s Discouraging at Best and this time I have to say that aside from one story, it was probably me.

It was unsettling to pick up the book and not remember much aside from the fact that there was an anthropological dig at George W. Bush. I read Sick: An Anthology of Illness years ago, a book Lawson edited, and vividly recall it that it was very good – it was one of the first bizarro books I ever read, though at the time I wasn’t aware of bizarro as a genre and lumped mentally in with extreme horror. I think I was expecting to be as enthralled with Discouraging at Best. I wasn’t but that does not mean that Lawson missed the mark. You can’t fall in love with every book. And a flip through it jogged my memory. When a book is utterly unmemorable, a flip doesn’t help. In this case, the flip reminded me how hilarious the story about the Nobel Laureate was. It reminded me how deeply sad the first story in the collection was, though peppered with dark humor. It bothers me that I didn’t remember it clearly, though that does not mean that this is a bad collection. It just means it likely will not be one of my favorite bizarro books.

Lawson, while an author I consider bizarro, is also an author whose sense of absurdity comes from the very real. For those who do not find the more outrageous bizarro authors who dwell in the fantastic to their liking, Lawson may be more accessible. While some of his prose comes close to being fantastic, this story collection tends towards lampoon, a desire to show the truly insane in our life, the craziness that is right in front of us. Much of this book is biting satire, and once I re-engaged with the book, good satire at that.

There are five short stories in this book. The theme of families and how they are too often broken messes is a major theme, but Lawson also wields a heavy political stick in these stories.

The first story, “Whipped on the Face With a Length of Thorn Bush: Yes, Directly on the Face” tells the tale of the Havenots, a poverty-stricken family whose patriarch is attempting to sell the services of his son. The service, as the title suggests, is beating people for a fee. Malcolm, the son, is quite unwell mentally, and Lawson presents Malcolm’s reactions and troubles in a way that is funny but also deeply unfunny. This story, told from the various perspectives of members of the Havenot family, reveal fear, anger and chaos. Published in 2007, it is not hard to miss the overt political commentary of a story wherein people are threatened by a thorny Bush. The ending is sad, horribly sad, and all the sadder because it is all too real. At times, the story threatened to slip into parody, especially via the use of the accented speech assigned to the characters, but overall, it was a strong story.

The second story, “A Serenade to Beauty Everlasting,” is of a Nobel Laureate, a despicable man who receives the ultimate honor for his writing. However, he is a complete assface. His wife and daughter loathe him. He is very much a man willing to cut off his nose to spite his face and his deeply negative internal dialogue spills over into his acceptance speech, made all the more bizarre by his grotesque appearance after a series of accidents, fights and exhibitions of sheer idiocy on the way to the party being held in his honor. Though I was not entirely a fan of the accented speech used in “Thorny Bush,” Lawson is clearly a writer who can adapt his style well to fit a number of styles of speech. Willard, the Nobel Laureate, is such a disaster he literally foams at the mouth, antagonizing his not-so-long-suffering wife and daughter until you wish someone would just hit him on the head until he is comatose. But rather, one feels that when his daughter begins to laugh in his self-important face, that is possibly the best punishment for him. As he gives his speech, the vile ideas in his mind spill over into his speech and so adoring and facile is his audience, they accept his half-baked explanation. Though this served for me as an excellent character sketch, the disintegration of this particular family as well as the look into literary circles were excellent. This was my favorite story in the collection.

The third story is the one that was least memorable to me. I suspect I would need to reread it completely word for word a second time to be able to comment on it intelligently. So take that for what you will – either it was the weakest story in the bunch or it was the one that my admittedly weak memory just couldn’t bank on.

The fourth story is probably the funniest. “Maybe It’s Racist…” follows a modern phrenologist as she manages to make her way into the inner sanctum of the White House. She measures the skulls of the First Family and President and comes to some startling conclusions. Well, not so startling when you take into account that the President being parodied is Bush. If you were a Bush Republican, this story will piss you off unless you have an excellent sense of humor. The First Family is a degenerate, crude group and you will likely know the punchline to this story a few paragraphs in, but that makes it no less amusing in my book.

The final story ties the previous four stories together relatively neatly.

Overall, these were provocative stories, disturbing and funny. They were not as deeply memorable as I prefer but again, sometimes a book’s entertainment value can be fleeting. Not every book is going to be To Kill a Mockingbird (and some of you may say, “From your keyboard to God’s ears!”). It was entertaining as I read it, amusing and horrible at the same time, and there are times I don’t ask for more from a book. This is one of those times. Also, from the pictures I have seen of him online, Lawson appears to be some breed of giant and as a very short person, I feel we should all encourage the very tall among us.

And with this disjointed recommendation, I am going to take a nap and hope my memory is better when I wake up because I have no idea where my hairbrush is.

Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror, edited by Cheryl Mullenax

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror

Author: Various, edited by Cheryl Mullenax

Type of Book: Extreme horror, short story collection, fiction

Why I Considered This Book Odd: My arbitrary criteria tells me that I need to review and discuss extreme horror over here. And extreme horror does often fall under the auspices of what is odd because true foulness is often very weird.

Availability: Published by Comet Press in 2009, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I don’t know. Extreme horror just isn’t that extreme for me anymore except in what seems like the pervasive poverty of concept. I’m unsure if I’ve just read so much real extreme horror, meaning nastiness with a real plot and real characterization, and splatter, which makes no pretense about being simply an attempt to gross-out, that it takes a lot to move me. Perhaps I just lucked out in the beginning of my literary life and read good horror, good extreme horror and now little measures up. I mean, you have writers out there like Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee, who write hard content in the course of telling one mean story. The horrific content happens because the tale itself is horrific but you get a plot, you get characters you give a damn about, you get a tight story that draws you in even as it appalls you. Then you have collections like Excitable Boys that are meant to be grotesque and nothing else and present no pretense otherwise. And then you have collections like this, wherein the stories which were meant to be actual stories were poorly written vehicles in which to deliver a gross-out, and not very gross gross-outs at that.

I know, I know, some are going to be tempted to say, “Look, Sugarpants, you just don’t get extreme horror. It’s not meant to be good fiction.” To which I say, “Feh.” Too many writers manage to get it right, marrying excellent story-telling and fabulous gore, for this argument to hold water. Accepting the mediocre because it is gross demeans the whole genre. This collection was neither good stories with extreme content nor a straightforward nausea-fest and as neither fish nor foul, it occupies an uneasy nether land, all the more uneasy because the stories were so… nothing. Nothing to them. It never bodes well when after reading a collection of short stories, I find myself rereading the whole thing because I can’t remember it. Sometimes you need a refresher when you want to discuss a story. You can jog your memory by reading a few lines. Not here. I had to reread entire chunks of many of these stories to recall what they were about, so unimpressive were they as a lot. A few were decent, three were quite good, but the rest were terrible and one so bad I could not get past the first few paragraphs.

It is not too much to ask that a story decide what it wants to be. Be a good tale with nastiness or nothing but nastiness but don’t waste the reader’s time with poorly constructed drek passed off as characterization and plot so you can include some cannibalism or butt-related content. Write something a person can remember after reading it, dammit.

Yeah, this is gonna be one of my harsher reviews.

The Book of a Thousand Sins by Wrath James White

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: The Book of a Thousand Sins

Author: Wrath James White

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

Why I Consider This Book Odd: This book is not odd in the way many of the quirky, weird, off-beat and off-kilter books I review here often are. This book is only odd in that it is of an extreme, and that extreme is horror. This ain’t a book for the squeamish and the extremity of the content is what I think makes it fodder for my odd mill.

Availability: Published by Two Backed Books in 2005, it appears not to be in print any more since the imprint itself is no longer in business. You can, however, still score a copy on Amazon if you don’t mind paying at least twice cover price:

Comments: Wrath James White interests me on a personal level. Admittedly, all I know of him is what he puts online about himself and what he reveals about himself in interviews. He is someone I can see sharing a beer with, and talking religion and philosophy into the wee morning hours. He’s an interesting man with an unusual life arc and based on what I had seen of him and what others writers say about him, I bought blind three of his books. Not unusual for me. Before Richard Laymon died, I knew nothing about him but bought five of his paperbacks I stumbled across in a used bookstore based solely on the covers. I am a bibliophile and the -phile part makes me take chances on the unknown.

So, I had three White books, and one was his collaboration with one of my favorite horror writers, Edward Lee. The book, Teratologist, was possibly the most disappointing book I read in 2008, and I paid an arm and a leg online to get a signed, hardcover copy. I had not read a single review of it when I bought it and likely would have bought it even had I read a few but even so, I did not enjoy it. The book couldn’t even keep the names of the characters straight, sometimes getting the names wrong, as well as misspelling them (“Michael” frequently became “Micheal,” sometimes in the same page). I am a picky reader – every book on the planet has a couple of errors, and I am that snotty reader who generally notices them – but the grammar, spelling and punctuation in Teratologist were egregious to the point of distraction. Problematically, the topic was also a miss for me, a contrived and unlikely attempt to force a confrontation with God via the creation of human monsters using a vile drug that mutates the human sex drive. The grandiose and philosophically questionable nature compelling the book’s plot put me off. I bought my White books in 2008 and after reading Teratologist, I put the others away. I recently discovered them in the back of my nightstand cupboard, pulled them out and decided to give it a go. The Book of a Thousand Sins was strike two.

I always feel odd giving bad reviews on fiction, even when I emphatically think a book is not good. It is one thing for me to pull apart non-fiction books on conspiracy theory and new-age nonsense that asserts the soul of Einstein is on the planet Marduk. It is another to find fault in fiction because all fiction comes from a place of inner experience and not to like fiction is, in a sense, finding fault with the author him or herself, even if that is probably not the best way to look at things.

But however odd I feel giving a thumbs down, I didn’t much care for this book.

Necrophilia Variations by Supervert

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Necrophilia Variations

Author: Supervert

Type of Book: Fiction, short stories, necrophilia

Why I Consider This Book Odd: Well, the author goes by the moniker Supervert. That is what I like to call a clue. Also, necrophilia. Yeah. Necrophilia.

Availability: Published by Supervert, Inc. in 2005, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Finally! A book that I consider eros and thanatos. All the books recommended to me as being eros and thanatos were all thanatos and no eros. Or the eros was so bizarre that I had no chance of relating to it. I am thrilled to finally read a book that contains both to equal degrees. I am surely no necrophile (which it annoys me even to have to say but if I don’t, I will get e-mails from people wondering if I am because I read this book and am talking about it) but I spend a fair amount of time photographing cemeteries, so in many senses, I understand the appeal. Death holds a quietness and a comfort – remembrance and the very real sense that the worst has happened and you have nothing left to worry about.

You pick up a book that is called Necrophilia Variations, and it is safe to assume all the stories are going to be about having sex with the dead. But Necrophilia Variations, while it does include tales of sex with dead people, is more a collection of stories of people dealing with the confluence between sex and death. The notion of le petit mort is an idea that is not new, yet the idea that the sex impulse is closely linked to death is hard for many to swallow. Though visionaries and poets, like Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mirbeau, have tread this ground before, it is refreshing to see these sorts of ideas written by a modern for moderns. Heartbreaking, sickening, humorous – this short story collection pushes boundaries, and does not just push them for the sake of pushing, as I felt was the case when I read Bataille’s Story of the Eye (a book I am willing now to say I simply did not get and likely never will).

The stories have merit, the ideas are intriguing. This really is intellectual eros and thanatos, not grotesque splatter for those who like lots of excessive violence with their sex (not that there is anything wrong with that, but too often it comes off clownish, an attempt by certain authors to one-up each other in the gross out factor – this book is not that sort of thing).

The book begins with a quote from Baudelaire: “It is one of the considerable privileges of art that the horrible can be transformed, through artful expression, into beauty.” I am unsure if it is because I have been immersed in the outre for so long that I don’t consider this book to be much in the way of horrible, or if Supervert managed to make the horrible so beautiful that I did not see it for what it was, but there is a lot of beauty, emotion and depth to these short stories. Overall, this is an excellent collection.

Here are some of the stories I liked best:

Sex with the dead? The hell you say!

Sex Dungeon for Sale! by Patrick Wensink

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Sex Dungeon for Sale!

Author: Patrick Wensink

Why I Consider This Book Odd: Well, Eraserhead Press published this book, and they are generally a pretty good weather vane for oddness. But I also suspected the book was odd because the author contacted me so he could send me an ARC because he wanted me to review it (yes, an ARC!!! I swear to god I almost wept because only certified, authentic reviewers get ARCs, right? Right?). If an author reads this site for any reason, chances are his literary output is going to be odd.

Also, I heartily encourage this trend of sending me actual books. Not only would I get free books, but my delusions of grandeur mean I am likely to review said book because I am still in the early OMG THIS MEANS I AM A REAL CRITIC stage of the game. So yeah, send me your odd books, odd authors. Also, I am not above using the emotion card, so send them to me because I love you. All of you. Even that weirdo living in a basement who keeps e-mailing me chapters of his novel about his dog’s wang.

Type of Book: Fiction, short stories, flash fiction, bizarro

Availability: Published by Eraserhead Press in 2009, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Okay, yeah, this was my first book offered to me because I review odd books, but don’t let that make you think I am gonna give this book a sweetheart review on that merit alone. Also, I’m not giving it a sweetheart review because I’m a known sucker for flash fiction and short, short stories. I’m giving it a sweetheart review because it is a good book. The stories, some odder than others, are all pretty solid, and one of the stories has resonated with me as being not only a clever concept, but haunting and upsetting.

This book may actually be a good bridge into bizarro for some readers because while it is odd, it does not cross wholly into the full-bore weirdness one experiences reading Carlton Mellick III, one of the best-known bizarros. Additionally, these stories are very much, for the most part, grounded in reality, not incorporating the heavy use of magical realism that one sees so much of in bizarro. I find magical realism amazing when done well, but it is no black mark against Sex Dungeons for Sale! that the stories are so grounded. I know many think that bizarro is schtick, the replacement for pulp sci-fi for a more jaded generation and they are wrong. While bizarro’s certainly entertaining, increasingly the writers in the genre produce literary quality works, pieces that would not be out of place in Zoetrope or Zyzzyva. That is why I think, for those who want to dip their toes into high weirdness, Wensink’s book would be a good starting place. I could see some of these stories in edgy mainstream lit journals. They are odd, but odd in a way that is extremely relatable.

Wensink’s stories are clever, amusing, and in one case, disturbing

Severance by Robert Olen Butler

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Severance

Author: Robert Olen Butler

Why I Consider This Book Odd: This book has an absolutely lunatic premise. It is said that a decapitated head can remain in a state of consciousness for 90 seconds. In heightened states of emotion or agitation, people can speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. Combine the two and you have the micro stories in this book.

Type of work: Fiction, short stories, flash fiction

Availability: Published by First Chronicle Books in 2006, this book is still in print. You can buy a copy here:

Comments: It’s weird, including a Pulitzer Prize winner here, but hell, I already got me a Nobel Laureate, so why fight it. The acclaimed can also be so very, very odd.

So, as I said above, this book combines the premise of consciousness in a decapitated head and the ability to speak quickly when under duress. This book is a series of tales from heads speaking approximately 240 words. I initially did not like this book and set it aside for a few months, but when I picked it back up again, I fell in love with it.

The tales from heads separated from bodies range from the touching, to the horrific, to funny. Anne Boleyn’s words after her head is severed from her body are to her daughter, Elizabeth, and they are heart wrenching:

…but still there is my sweet girl my Elizabeth her pale face and her hair the color of the first touch of sun in the sky, the pale fire of her hair, she turns her gray eyes to me and I know I am soon to leave her… and I say rise my sweet child and she straightens and lifts her face and I bend to her, I draw near to her, I cup my daughter’s head in my hands

The story from Lydia Koenig, a woman who was beheaded by her son in 1999, is just dreadful:

…my baby, my own baby boy his bones deep and untouchable inside him, I dress him in pink thinking it makes no difference I hold him baby and then in plaid and he has freckles on his nose… and the man is gone and my baby cries all night through, though he is no baby he is returned and he says help me find a vein help me tap this vein and I cannot…

The story from Gooseneck (Gansnacken), a dwarf who was a court jester to Duke Eberhard the Bearded, who beheaded him in 1494 for sad, but funny actions beyond his control:

…I am jester not a sailor the goat breaks his knot and bolts just as I leap from the rope and fly at my stricken lord and fall heavy upon him, crotch to face, and alas I am already full excited at my joke, like a lover

The book contains many famous beheadings, like John the Baptist, Mary, Queen of Scots, Lady Jane Grey and similar, but also has more modern, less famous decapitation victims telling their tales, like people beheaded in the Middle East since 9/11. There are two non-humans in the book – a chicken, whose body indeed ends up crossing the road, and the dragon slain by St. George (who is also included in the book). There is a man beheaded in 40,000 B.C. and insanely, the chicken speaks better than the dragon, who speaks better than the Cro-Magnon man. Most insane and odd of all, Butler records his own putative decapitation in 2010, losing his head when he sticks his head ill-advisedly out an elevator.

This book is a short little read, but you may find yourself going back to reread the tales. It’s a delightful, odd little book, built around an odd but amazing premise, the sort of idea that makes you smack yourself on the head and wish you had thought of it yourself. The brief stories are richly detailed and full of both history and emotion. It’s amazing what Butler can do in 240 words. I am a well-known lover of excellent flash fiction and Butler’s flash is breathtaking.

The Overwhelming Urge by Andersen Prunty

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book Title: The Overwhelming Urge

Author: Andersen Prunty

Why I Consider This Book Odd: It was published by Eraserhead Press, a print house that embraces bizarro authors.

Type of Work: fiction, short story collection

Availability: This book was published by Eraserhead Press in 2008 and is available through a number of sources, most notably Amazon.

Comments: You can acquire the taste for bizarro fiction, but more likely than not, you are born loving it. Many can read bizarro fiction and wonder, “What the hell was the purpose of that?” and toss the book away, the literary equivalent to the reaction many had the first time they saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead. But as a genre, and a relatively new one at that, bizarro fiction goes much deeper than just the surreal and insane (possibly unsane) tales the authors present. Underneath crazy tropes, nightmare landscapes, and outright absurdity lies much more if the reader is willing to untangle the words, suspend disbelief, and enjoy the ride

Andersen Prunty’s The Overwhelming Urge already had a mark in its favor, as I love flash fiction when done well (and it is very hard to do – try and tell a story in 1000, 750 or 500 words or less). Prunty does flash well, and there are a couple of short story length pieces in the book. His spare writing style can cram a lot into a few lines, and in the midst of all the absurdity, there is a pathos that drew me into the stories.

For example, in the story “Bully,” the trope is that the protagonist sent a story to the wrong sort of venue and the editor not only rejected it, but showed up at the protagonist’s home to challenge him to a fight. As one reads the description of the bully and the protagonist, then looks at Prunty’s author picture on the back page, the resemblance between the three is clear, and one wonders if this tale is possibly a clever, short look at the writer’s war with himself. The mistakes, the potential for humiliation, the sense of horror when work is rejected by peers. Of course, the story is littered with strange details that could mean the piece is simply an attempt to entertain using absurdity, but as someone who tries herself to write fiction, I left the piece with this interpretation.

I also loved “The Bright Side,” a piece where a young man’s father is having trouble drinking a beer, which is understandable since his father is an antelope. The father asks the son if he is embarrassed by him, and the son denies this, pouring the beer into his cupped hands so his father can lap it up. Yet later, he realizes his father must have sucked up all the spilled beer from the carpet, and he cringes at the thought. As his father tries drunkenly to walk on his hind legs, the son wonders, with trepidation, what the old man will do next. You can shoot me in the head now if the changes in our aging parents have not led to similar feelings of love combined with dread.

Some of the stories are straight up absurdism mixed with horror (“The Hole” is eerily close to a nightmare I had once about a stinking hole in my face that sickened everyone around me), but each story, whether it ends well or sadly, etches a picture of the human conditions of love, cooperation, hubris and suffering. A man with clown shoes too big for him finds a defeated man with shoes too small and they trade, making life easier for both. A vain man is bested by his overtight pants. God becomes a jaded rock star and shows clearly that man is made in God’s image. A man wakes up to discover that he has changed into the handsomest man alive, but it doesn’t matter because everyone else has turned into Picasso-esque monstrosities who find him repellent.

But my favorite piece is “The Fancy Hairs.” A middle-aged man called Carl gets a perm and initially his friends circle him warily, unsure about his new hair, attuned to his new difference like dogs can smell fear. Carl begins to regret his fancy new hair, until the next week, when his friends all show up with fancy, permed hair, too. They stand around smoking, and whistling at young women, all with a new, if low-brow and not entirely useful, lease on life, but a new lease nonetheless.

I liked this book a lot. I will definitely be checking out more of Prunty’s work.