Book:  Janitor of Planet Anilingus

Author:  Andrew Wayne Adams

Type of Book:  Fiction, novella, bizarro

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd:  With a title like that, how can it not be?

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

Comments: We begin day three of my New Bizarro Authors Week with Andrew Wayne Adam’s Janitor of Planet Anilingus and, in all honesty, I started this book with no small amount of trepidation.  As it is, about 35% of the search strings that bring people to my site involve necrophilia and horse dildos.  I wondered what legacy this book would leave behind in the searches I view daily in my site statistics.  Moreover, the title itself is enough to give one a bit of pause, I think.  Planet Anilingus was likely to be a place wherein a tired woman would find little solace as she read late into the night, her husband snoring lightly, the suburban street silent as the normal people slept on, unaware that there was a place in the literary landscape dedicated to anus-licking.

Luckily for me, Janitor of Planet Anilingus is not the utterly ass-centric debauch I thought it would be.  It has its moments of sexual lunacy but this is mostly a quest novel wherein a man loses everything as he tries to save the woman he thinks he loves.  It has some atrociously gross moments, don’t get me wrong, but one of bizarro’s secrets is that the stories are the same as those you will find on the best-seller list.  The stories differ only because they are peppered with unusual sex, weird species, grotesque details and strange and over-the-top humor.

The hero of this novella, Jack, as the title implies, is the janitor of Planet Anilingus.  Planet Anilingus is a sort of destination spot, a DisneyWorld of sorts, for people deeply involved in butt-licking.  Jack is completing a 40-day period, a time of Lent, wherein the planet is closed to visitors, spending his time tidying up and doing a deep clean before the revelers return.  He is the only person on the planet, until a hairless, humanoid woman with helicopter blades that shoot up from her back lands on the planet.  Someone is trying to kill this hairless woman, Nimue, and Jack does his best to protect her.  In the course of his interactions with Nimue, he stops going to work and his boss, Bishop Eichmann, replaces him with his nephew Tommy.  Tommy and Jack enter into a rivalry for Nimue’s attention and both end up, god help me, pregnant after her sexual ministrations.  What the pregnancy does to the men is easily the grossest part of the book but I enjoyed it because poopy stuff makes me laugh.  Nimue ultimately is not what she seems and even knowing of her sexual perfidy with Tommy, Jack still wants to save her from the rocket launching lunatic chasing her.  Jack is not a man given to much in the way of emotion, probably because all the ass licking he witnesses has numbed him, and it’s an interesting choice on Adams’ part to insist that Jack be so removed emotionally because in the midst of all the chaos, any one else would have freaked out.

Before I begin telling you why this is a very good, funny, gross quest novella, I need to say that hallelujah, kiss the ground, this book is cleanly edited.  I mean, there are a few errors, but this is the cleanest Eraserhead Press book I’ve read in at least two years.  I swear on all that is worth discussing, half the battle with me is editing.  I hate to seem like my standards have been lowered so much by the small presses that just reading clean copy makes me want to give a rave review but it’s getting to that point.  However, I am going to show why this book is a good read on top of being edited well enough that nothing distracts the reader from the text.  (Well, the content can distract a certain kind of reader, but it won’t be because the comma usage is maddeningly bad.)

Jack enjoys his time alone on the planet, except that being the only person around makes him the sole target of the cupids, a mutant insect.

One more week and Lent was over, and then the cupids would not bother him.  His only trouble then would be the hundreds of thousands of people licking each other’s assholes day and night.  They blanketed the planet, an orgy visible from space.  Nonstop until next Lent.

At first there is nothing exceptional about this passage until one finishes the book.  Jack is not a man who exaggerates and the third-person narration in this story follows suit with flat and earnest descriptions.  After finishing this book, I realized the orgy likely was visible from space, and as a result, I felt extreme despair alongside Jack.  A week of that sort of thing?  Might wear thin after a few days.  Months and months of so much butt-licking it is likely affecting the cosmos?  Poor Jack.

And it just gets worse.  Poor Jack, indeed.

His normal uniform consisted of nothing but a pair of lace underwear and a bow tie.  It was crucial that no irregularity should sully the planet’s atmosphere of total debauchery and a stinky janitor intruding upon the middle of an orgy would certainly do so.  The job even required him to practice erotic body language as he went about his work, movements choreographed to make dusting and mopping look sexy.  And if some random reveler stole a lick of his ass, he had to pretend to like it, then extricate himself as expediently as possible.

What would OSHA make of that? I can’t help but think that a lot of the bizarros held very difficult menial jobs, or perhaps still do.  If the above description involved dealing with feet and far less sex, the mental impact would not be too different from selling shoes.  Kissing asses, handling feet – it’s all so demoralizing.

In addition to being inappropriately groped at work while mopping in a sexy manner, the rest of Jack’s job sucks as well.

“These men and women haven’t licked an asshole in six weeks,” the Bishop continued.  “All they are dreaming of now is a return to Anilingus.  They’re drooling for paradise, and we must deliver.  I’m talking true Eden, Jack – as in, not one goddamn dust bunny on the planet, and every cobblestone, every leaf, shined to look like a scale from the reptilian skin of God.  Can you handle that?”

Jack said, “I’m on top of things.”

“If you fuck up, I’ll have you peeling potatoes on Vore.”

A demotion to peeling potatoes on Vore.  Jesus, the implications… This passage made me laugh so hard that Mr. Oddbooks wanted to know what I was laughing about.  I was shocked when he knew what “vore” meant.  I don’t really know him at all, do I?  Here’s another section that made me laugh and I don’t know if I can explain why.

Against the evening sun, Vatican Headquarters posed like a mole on a fashion model.  Jack fixed it in his gaze.  He sent out a distress signal with his mind.  He had a fuzzy imagining of some bored deacon perking up at his terminal as the panicked brainwaves blipped across it: MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY.  TROUBLE ON ANILINGUS.  MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY.  I NEED TO URINATE.  (It was hard to control what got picked up in a brainwave scan.)  The deacon would ring a big brass bell, and ten to twenty other deacons, weary but alert, would jump up from their buncos, slide down a pole through a hole in the floor, and barely clear the opening bad door as their emergency vehicle wailed into the night (in Jack’s imagining, there was such a thing as “night” in the sun).

He waited for some sign of rescue.  He didn’t know what he was waiting for.  Sirens?  Flashing lights?  His mommy?

There was none of that.

And then there is this.  Cleaopatra is the chicken:

Jack had never before been in an orgy with a mysterious woman and a chicken.  The experience was astounding.  Nimue climbing into the chicken coop, into the golden and dust-filled light, seeming effervescent in an aura of motes; Cleopatra rising from her armchair, the sensual bulge of her breast feathers in an analogue to the human breasts now bouncing in sex on the muted television; woman and bird reaching for Jack to draw him into the coop, the assertive fingers of Nimue already at work on the zipper of his coveralls…

I share this section because I sense that IROB has not tapped into the chicken-sex readership that is surely lurking out there, underrepresented in the perversions I so thoughtfully review.  I also shared this because there is a genius in how Adams handles this sex scene, without any sort of slapstick, with prose that verges into purple and twitchy.  This is hot romantic sex with a hairless woman, a chicken and a janitor and at no point does Adams do the obvious and play this for a joke.  It’s uncomfortable to read what Nimue does to Jack in this scene but Adams handles the… tension, I guess I’d call it, by giving us this scene the next morning, after Jack has developed some profoundly awful stomach issues after sex with Nimue.

Jack said, “Did you give me syphillis?”

Nimue walked past him and leaned into the chicken coop.  She stroked Cleopatra’s wing and said, “Good morning.”  Cleopatra gave her an egg.

No one ever plans for the morning after a chicken/hairless woman with a three-foot tongue/buttlicking-planet janitor three-way, but Adams had them covered!

Jack gets fired and has to train his replacement and starts to descend into paranoia.

What relation had Tommy to the Bishop?  Son?  Nephew?  Developmentally challenged younger brother?  Jack even toyed with the idea that Tommy was the Bishop himself, mustache shaved as a disguise and years shed from his face by the simple trade of sourness for cheer.  The possibility filled him with a swimming sense of unreality.  He imagined Tommy as the Bishop in disguise… the Bishop as the Pope in disguise… the Pope as God in disguise… and God as inscrutable and malefic bent only upon the sabotage of Jack’s mind.

Adams engages in some pretty twitchy prose throughout this book, as the above section shows, but he also engages in what is literally bathroom humor.  Jack’s replacement, Tommy, finds himself in a tryst with the hairless Nimue and finds out that anilingus with her comes with a great price the next morning.

Jack awoke to the sound of a toilet being destroyed.

Literally, destroyed.  Tommy gripped the sides of the bowl, his body lifting off the seat with each propulsive blast of pandemonium from between his butt cheeks. The porcelain was cracked and crumbling from the repeated shock.  The toilet shook like an animal in the throes of death.  Jack pitied it.

Tommy looked confused and miserable.  Seeing his plight, Jack felt his own bowels begin to turn.  He shushed them.  He waited until Tommy was done – a long wait – then said: “I told you she had a venereal disease.”

I found it awesome that Jack pities the toilet more than he does Tommy.  After this scene, Nimue comes in with plates of eggs, the salve to any horrible case of sexually acquired diarrhea.  Also they are both pregnant by Nimue now and the rectal horror will just go on from here.  I spoiled nothing telling you this, I promise.

And in this state, the two have to resume working, as Jack trains Tommy to take over.  As Jack demonstrates how to clean the sand, this happens:

Tommy watched, seeing how it was done, then started to help.  He was no longer whistling.  He looked out over the Vast Emptiness and said, “I’m depressed.”

Jack said, “Get used to it.”

Tommy cleaned sand.  His pig hand made it difficult.  “I think I am in love with Nimue,” he said.  “And I think she is in love with me.”

Jack said nothing.

“All day I have been hearing a voice sing inside of me.  Is that love?”

Jack said nothing.

“I mean there is literally, not figuratively, a voice singing inside of me.  In my anus, to be specific.  Is that love?”

Jack tires of this conversation, for he too loves Nimue and now this kid whom he is training to take over his job is speaking of  loving her, too.  He loses it and yells at Tommy and then this happens:

Jack felt sick.  He listened to Tommy whimper.  He heard another sound, barely audible, and listened closer.

It was “Earth Angel” – the 1950s hit – as sung by a child-like voice within Tommy’s anus.  Jack stood there and listened to the rest of the song, falling out of love with the world.   He thought about Hell.  Tommy bled in the sand.  The sun persisted, quiet and cruel.

Hell was an empty threat, Jack decided.

He said, “I quit.”

I’ve had that moment wherein I just had to leave a job.  No one bled from the ass but I sort of wish they had.

But even as Adams engages in deeply funny and gross dialogue, he also has the capacity to bust out amazing writing like this:

Jack had never before been fired at by a rocket launcher. The experience was astounding: the neat, rational load of fire unleashed along its inexorable trajectory; the hiss, the roar, as the instant before death contracted, expanded, got stuck in a loop, freeze-framed; the rocket unzipping the air, tweezing apart its interlocked molecules… groping ahead, not blindly, but with utter acuity, for Jack, to unzip his carbon chains…

This is beautiful prose.  In fact, some of the lunacy in this book may not register immediately because of Adams’ smooth and at times beautiful sentences.

I have to stop because I could quote from this book for at least another hour.  I clearly love this book.  You pick up a book about a janitor on a planet devoted to ass-licking and you end up with a quest novella that also comments trenchantly on the plight of the blue collar worker.  That’s awesome.  You expect the weird sex, but you expect less the hilarious and cramping outcome of that weird sex.  It’s cleanly edited, quite funny, seriously gross and beautifully written.  I highly recommend this book and if you decide to follow my advice and read it, buy a copy now.  Like all the other New Bizarro Author Series writers, Adams has a limited time to sell enough copies so that he can be offered a writing contract.  His is a voice I definitely want to read again.

Now for business!  With all my themed weeks comes a giveaway.  This time 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 on this entry.  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.  As you comment, feel free to share the worst thing that ever happened to you after a sexual coupling.  Marriage does not count.