This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
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. You can get a digital copy on Amazon, or a used copy if you’re totally analog.
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.
The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and its Analysis by Ian Brady
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book Title: The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and its Anaylsis
Author: Ian Brady, with forewords by Colin Wilson and Dr. Alan Keightley, afterword by Peter Sotos
Why I Consider This Book Odd: It was written by Ian Brady, who, along with his girlfriend Myra Hindley, kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and murdered children in England from 1963-1965.
Type of Work: Philosophical treatise, armchair psychology
Availability: This book is still in print, published by Feral House in 2001. It was updated and re-released in 2015 with a prologue from Colin Wilson and an epilogue from Peter Sotos. Get the updated copy if you can.
Comments: Had this book been a person and it approached me outside of the supermarket, I would have crossed the street. This book is the crazy man who thinks he is sane and intelligent, raving on the traffic islands about whatever topic is in his head. It is hard to pay such people much attention and therefore, it was difficult to care about large chunks of this book.
Peter Sotos is the only person in this book who did not come off like a rube or a complete lunatic. If you are at all familiar with Sotos’s body of work, consider my statement and what it really means. He is the only one who seemed to understand that in addition to being a violent sexual predator, Ian Brady is also a master manipulator whose word on any topic should likely be taken with a grain of salt, if not completely disregarded.
I wanted to read this book because, in my typical fashion of wanting a book based on just small snippets of information, I thought in some sense that this book would be an explanation of what it was that made Ian Brady become a killer, of what it was about his personality that could have mesmerized Myra Hindley, an otherwise unremarkable woman, into a folie a deux murder streak that set the serial killing stage for similar fiends like Fred and Rosemary West and Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. I had long heard that this book was illuminating, a rare look into the mind of a serial killer, and while it is, it also isn’t.
All I learned reading this book is that I still have a sound psychopathometer (though Brady fancies himself a psychotic rather than a psychopath because the former are interesting to him) and that the only real insight anyone would ever have into Ian Brady’s mind is that he is a liar and a manipulator. He certainly conned Colin Wilson, who seems to think that the information that Brady provides about himself and fellow psychopathic killers, somehow gives Brady cosmic brownie points.
Wilson, with a level of naivety that he should not possess given his age and the range of his career, says:
In a letter of a few days ago, he wrote to me bitterly, “My life is over so I can afford honesty of expression; those with a future cannot. If I had my time over again, I’d get a government job and live off the state… a pillar of society. As it is I am eager to die. I chose the wrong path and am finished.”
As this book shows, that, at all events, is untrue.
If you feel that sort of rush of saliva that makes you think you may puke, be aware you will feel it again and again as you read this book. Part One consists of seven interminable chapters wherein Brady discusses psychopathy, psychotics, and a really inappropriate interpretation of what boils down to Nietzchean superman theories as they apply to killers. But in doing this, he uses dense, at times overly intellectual yet specious language to give himself some sort of authority on his topic. He creates what he thinks are trenchant observations about the way the media and society handle crimes like the Moor Murders, hilariously implying that we, the law-abiding people of the world, are really to blame for being interested and appalled when such crimes occur. At no time does Brady truly apply all his analysis to himself, but doesn’t hesitate to share the love in Part Two, where he analyzes the true natures of other serial killers. Worse, what little that Brady gives away about himself is contradictory, often without, in my opinion, the man even understanding he has done so.
Before I explain why this book was a sickening, masturbatory excursion into manipulative madness, let me share the sobering, sane words of Peter Sotos. His epilogue should have been a preface, because it could have saved many a reader from entering into this exercise of the damned thinking they would, in fact, be reading honest words.
Here’s a large chunk of what Sotos had to say, and in saying it, he revealed the only truth of the book:
First off, you don’t ask a child molester to write a book on serial killing. A child rapist. A child pornographer. A child murderer.
Colin Wilson, from his introduction:
“Therefore I advised him to do the thing I would have done: to think about writing a book. Since he obviously knew about serial murder ‘from the inside’, thus this suggested itself as the obvious subject.”
You don’t ask him to do the obvious. You especially don’t ask him to do what you would do.
Because the child rapist and murderer and pornographer will obviously lie. And, because he wants to believe you need to hear more, he’ll even start to enjoy telling you he’s lying. Because it’s the easiest thing to do. It is the obvious choice. He can adopt the dime-a-dozen serial killer front of puffed up superiority, all from his tiny cell and serve the typical cold dish of chest beating mental clarity over mental introspection…
Sotos is right, and the reader should know it before they even try to read this miasma of philosophical nothings. If you want to know the impulse of true deviance, read Sotos or de Sade. If you want to read the words of a man who has plenty of clarity but absolutely no desire to apply it to his own motivations, who is, in fact, probably lying to you, read The Gates of Janus.
Rest of my analysis under the cut.
Odd Book Title Nominees 2008
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Hurrah! We now have the short list nominees for the oddest book titles for 2008. The contenders are:
- Baboon Metaphysics
- Curbside Consultation of the Colon
- The Large Sieve and its Applications
- Strip and Knit with Style
- Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring
- The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais
I am personally pulling for Curbside.
You can read more about it here.
Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World’s Guilt by Jim Goad
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book Title: Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World’s Guilt
Author: Jim Goad
Why I Consider This Book Odd: 1) Jim Goad wrote it. If you have been paying attention to fringe and ‘zine culture for the last fifteen years or so, this should be enough said; and 2) The cover sports a pic of Goad praying under a large, behaloed turd. I love the cover. A lot. I have always had a healthy love of all things scatological.
Type of Work: non-fiction, memoir
Availability: This book is still in print. Published by Feral House, you can find it in any number of places. One of them is Amazon. Buy a copy, why dontcha?
Comments: Jim Goad is a lord of political incorrectness and the mind behind one of the most infamous ‘zines ever, ANSWER Me! Though I was aware of ANSWER Me! when I was in college, I never read any of the issues until 1-3 were released in a collection. Though ANSWER Me! only released four issues, this ‘zine landed Goad into all sorts of unintended consequences that cemented his position as a shit magnet. Shit Magnet is Goad’s side of all the notorious and, frankly, bad things that have happened to him, it is compelling reading to be sure and much of it is directly related to or stems from ANSWER Me!
Like when women felt violated, or raped as it were, by the infamous “rape” edition of ANSWER Me! and when they could not get the ‘zine removed from the shelves in a Portland store, they went after the stores on obscenity charges. The stores were found not guilty, but it seemed that most people missed the greater irony of the “rape” issue. The intent behind issue four was to demonstrate, as Goad eloquently put it, that “radical feminism had become so lost in theory and drowned in self-righteousness that rape had become viewed more of a political idea than a physical act. Feminism had grown unable to distinguish words from actions to such a degree that the two became switched: Women felt literally “assaulted” and “violated” by sexist language and imagery, whereas actual rape was viewed as an ideological tool of the patriarchy, almost more of a statement than an act.” By trying to convict book stores of obscenity because Goad’s language “hurt” them, members of the feminist camp just proved his point for him.
(As an aside, as I was reading Shit Magnet, a news story came on describing how a Habitat for Humanity construction site was robbed. The woman for whom the house was being built said that the theft was an assault against her and that she felt violated. This inappropriate use of words describing violence for non-violent acts is now firmly entrenched in the popular mind.)
But it got worse for Goad. The 1994 White House Shooter, who discharged an SKS assault rifle outside the White House, evidently read ANSWER Me! 2 and found inspiration for his actions. Francisco Martin Duran read “Can you imagine a higher moral calling than to destroy someone’s dreams with a bullet…?” and decided the way to do this was to shoot impotently near the President’s abode. Luckily Goad was not used as a witness at Duran’s trial, but the tenuous connection between Goad and Duran was cemented in the media and Goad became seen as a terrorist force.
And then the suicides… Three seriously disturbed young Britons took a bizarre inspiration from ANSWER Me!, came to the USA, and killed themselves. These suicides were especially haunting for Goad because one of the girls involved called him shortly before the suicides in order to verify his address (she did not explain why she needed the address nor did Goad ask why but after she was dead Goad received a sum of money that he returned to her parents). She was silent on the phone and Goad, unable to pull much out of her, eventually terminated the conversation. Goad empathized with the girl to an almost unbearable level, understanding all too well the impulses behind suicide and wishing he could have done something to stop it.
But while all of this and more show Goad’s role as a shit magnet, the soundest argument for Goad as a weather vane for bad juju happened in the form of Anne Ryan.
Loathsome Women: The Witches Among Us by Leopold Stein, M.D. and Martha Alexander
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book Title: Loathsome Women: The Witches Among Us
Author: Leopold Stein, M.D. and Martha Alexander
Why I Consider This Book Odd: The title made me think this was an odd book, and a reading completely bore this out. Some time ago, I saw this book mentioned in an online discussion about weird books. I didn’t write down the description but in my notes, I later saw the title and had to order a copy.
Type of Work: non-fiction, psychiatry
Availability: This book is out of print, but copies can be found at various book seller sites, like Amazon or Abe Books. So shop around for the best deal.
Comments: Okay, let’s get this out of the way: I don’t dismiss Jung or psychoanalysis. But for the love of sanity, you will not find a more bizarre approach to psychoanalysis than you will in Dr. Stein. Add to that bizarre approach his misogyny and his overt and cringing fear in the face of four mentally ill women, and you’ve got yourself one odd, or dare I say very odd, book. It is hard to restrain vitriol in the face of such a monster, but I managed it. I did not, however, restrain my snark.
When this book arrived in the mail, I scanned the book and a little of the content and wondered if it was really an odd book after all. In small doses, in Loathsome Women it seemed like Dr. Stein was approaching his patients’ manifestation of problems using Jungian archetypes to relate to the patients. It didn’t hit me when I just scanned the book that Dr. Stein evidently believed that his patients were real witches and that he was possibly the most misogynistic writer I’ve read in years.
But he did. And he was. Read the rest under the jump.
Shrouded by Carol Anne Davis
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book Title: Shrouded
Author: Carol Anne Davis
Why I Consider This Book Odd: Davis deals with a taboo subject – necrophilia – in an intricately and at times outrageously plotted novel. Readers with triggers should also be aware that this novel deals with terrible child abuse, murder and has elements of rape.
Type of Book: Fiction, novel
Availability: Written in 1997 and published by Bloodlines, this book was reissued in 2006 by Snowbooks. I cannot tell if it is still in print but you can still find affordable copies on Amazon.
Comments: While this book is outrageous in many respects, it is not as visceral as some other books that deal with necrophilia, like Exquisite Corpse
Rest of review under the jump. There are incomplete spoilers so be warned.
Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America by Stanley Burns, M.D.
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
Book: Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America
Author: Stanley Burns, M.D.
Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Contains photographs of dead people, many children, from the turn of the 19th century and while beautiful, it is somewhat morbid. If you have an aversion to such photography, give this review a skip.
Type of Book: Photography
Availability: While I am unsure if this book is considered rare, per se, it only had two editions. Mine is from the second edition. Clearly, the first editions are far more expensive, but the second editions are pricey as well. One can obtain a copy of either edition if one is willing to pay between $400-$1000 USD. Had The Strand not had a copy with a damaged book jacket selling for cheap, I would not have a copy. Amazon appears to be the best source for this book but it’s hit or miss.
Comments: This book is one of my most prized books. I waited for almost a decade to be able to afford a copy, and even after I ordered it, I bit my nails until it arrived for fear that there was some mistake and they were going to notify me that I had been undercharged. Reading this book on loan from a library began my intense interest in memorial and death photography. It is one of those treasured books that I still cannot believe I own.
This book examines postmortem photography from 1840-1930. A practice that may seem morbid to some, death photography was actually quite common for those who could afford it. In a time when photography was still expensive, many times these photographs of the dead would be the sole picture people would have to remember their loved one, especially if the deceased was a child. The pictures in this book will often stay with those who have just glanced through it. After discussions online, there have been a number of times wherein people who could remember a particular image sent me messages asking me if I could provide details. One photo in particular, “The Murdered Parsons Family,” generates more messages than any other. The picture shows a father, a wife, and their three children, laid out on a bed like cord wood, bullet wounds visible on their faces and bodies. I think this is the most remembered picture because it plays into so many different modern fears. Home invasions, violent murder, children in danger. Many of the pictures in this book depict deaths that seem like they could no longer happen to affluent Americans. Emaciated babies and typhoid victims are thin on the ground these days. Kids dying from bullets are not. I think every person willing to have a look at this book will find a picture that will haunt them. Or, as was my case, many that will haunt them.
But most of the time we will have no real idea why certain photographs affect us other than the obvious pathos involved in looking at the dead. To this day I am not sure why I am so deeply interested in these photographs. Stanley Burns says in his preface, “Nineteenth-century Americans knew how to respond to these images. Today there is no culturally nominative response to postmortem photographs.” And that is why many of us, myself included, are awe-struck by these photographs, unable really to explain what we find so appealing and appalling about them.
Though many pictures in this book affected me, during the reading I did before writing this entree one photograph seemed to affect me the most. And bear in mind that I can on some level state intellectually what interested me in this photograph, there is likely a visceral response that I could never express.
This picture is quite striking to me. As Burns indicates in the notes for this picture, it is uncommon to see fathers posing with their dead children. More often than not, mothers posed, or the child was photographed alone. That the father is the primary parent in this photograph is touching because it is so atypical.
Another poignant part of the picture is not immediately obvious, but if you look in the lower left hand corner, you will see the mother’s hand stabilizing the pillows that prop up her dead daughter. That action was among one of the last things she could do to help capture the memory of her child, a little girl whose death took her far beyond the reach of a mother’s desire to nurture.
And my god, the little girl… In many of the photographs in Burns’ book, the children look like they are sleeping. But some look obviously dead, with bloody faces, severe emaciation, or evidence of disease on their still bodies. This little girl straddles the line between sleeping and hard death. As you look at her, you can tell there is something very off about her eyes and the pose she is in. It looks like she is either beginning rigor mortis or leaving it. But by not appearing that she is sleeping, and by not looking as horrible as some of the corpses in this book, she is in a netherworld where, to the casual viewer, it may not immediately be evident what is happening.
This and other pictures like it give lie to some of the ideas I have learned from history. Many sources claim that until the time of American urbanization and complete industrialization, life was cheap and the lives of children even cheaper. These sources claim that couples had many children not only to use as a labor force, but also to ensure that at least a couple survived to adulthood. Childhood was an unsentimental time because parents could not get attached to their children. The pictures in Sleeping Beauty make it clear that even when money was tight, when photography resources were limited, and even when life seemed cheap, it was never really quite that way. People deeply mourned their dead, especially their children, and paid money to make sure that there was some evidence that a dead person existed beyond simply the memories of those who loved them. This comforts me. It tells me that human beings are often much the same no matter when they lived in history. These pictures show me that life was not so cheap even when I assumed it was.
The book is filled with pictures like this, heartbreaking looks into the ways that parents handled the deaths of their children, but not all the pictures are of families. Badmen in their coffins, murder victims, as well as photos of memorial picture presentation in jewelry or watches. Hopefully, one day this book will be released for a third printing, making it somewhat more affordable for people to get their hands on a copy. It is truly a beautiful, haunting book.
Welcome to I Read Odd Books
This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books
This is my inaugural post at my new blog, I Read Odd Books. Hopefully, a couple of times a week, I can provide reviews and scans of the odd books I have read. I hope some people find this site entertaining, as I believe there are many more bibliophiles out there like me, who love the outre, the insane, the bizarre and the disturbing elements in their books as much as I do.
So welcome. And come back soon. I’ll have my first odd book review up in a couple of days.