Raping the Gods by Brian Whitney

Book: Raping the Gods

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: This book is the paper equivalent of that asshole you knew in college who drunk-called you at 2:00 in the morning to tell you about how he beat up Chuck Norris, had sex with a Victoria’s Secret model and wrecked his Lamborghini after inhaling epic quantities of cocaine.

Type of Book: For fuck’s sake, this book best be fiction, but I worry that large chunks probably aren’t.

Availability: Published by Strawberry Books in 2015, you can get a copy here:
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Comments: Jesus, this book. This is another book I read out loud to Mr OTC at bedtime until he begged me to stop, and he didn’t beg me to stop because the book isn’t funny and compelling, but rather because he needed to get some sleep. Pretty much each paragraph in this book has a golden sentence, a laugh-out-loud portion that makes this book the sort that goes by quickly in one sitting.

Quick synopsis: Bryan Whitney (the character, not the author, a trend I’ve made note of lately wherein authors give characters their writing names) is a profligate and depraved writer. He is contacted by Dylan, a completely insane and utterly drugged reprobate, who wants Brian to write about him. You see, Dylan, a man of many unlikely stories, claims to have met God and raped Him.

Yeah.

Brian needs the money and agrees to do it, but, because Dylan is a lunatic, this is not going to be without some trouble. Dylan lives in Samoa with two female sex slaves, which makes it hard to travel, so Brian is going to have to fly out to Samoa. But before he can fly out there, Dylan makes difficult demands that Brian struggles to meet. Brian fields numerous phone calls and e-mails from Dylan, eventually flies to Samoa and meets the sex slaves who are very willing accessories to Dylan’s life, and more or less exists in the same “WTF” realm as the reader until the novel ends happily, in a way.

This is not an intricate plot, but the characters are interesting in a really fucked-up way and that helps. The reason to buy and read this book is to revel in how well Whitney writes the absurd and recreates the cadence of the speech of the damned. This is a hilarious book, and the absurd humor allows a more squeamish reader to stomach some of the more outre content. But hopefully no one squeamish is reading this site.

Brian Whitney, the character, is a writer struggling to make a living and has ghostwritten biographies of washed up porn actresses. He’s not the sort of dude who can handle a day job while writing because, much like me, he’s just not cut out for real jobs:

I had this part time job at one point working for AAA where I answered roadside assistance calls. I got fired for hanging up on people. I would do it in the middle of when I was talking so it looked like an accident. I did it whenever I couldn’t figure something out on the computer system they had. I hate looking like an idiot.

So inevitably those who cannot work day jobs end up running underutilized websites or ghost writing for porn actresses or assorted members of Motley Crüe. Dylan, a fan of one of the actresses, makes a strange demand of Brian: in order to be given the job of writing Dylan’s biography, Brian must arrive in Samoa with a photo of the porn star naked. Naked while wearing a moose hat.

The porn star in a moose hat isn’t the most depraved part of this story but it gives us a good idea of the sort of dude Brian is – he’s not a man who is often ethically challenged. He does try to wriggle out of it but Dylan won’t hear of it and overnights a supply of Rohypnol to Brian so that the writer can get the job done.

And because Brian is a reprobate, he does get the job done.

The photos themselves were a bit of a letdown. I was wasted and it was a total pain in the ass to take off all her clothes. It was harder than I thought it would be. I mean of course I was turned on a little, I gave her ass a few proprietary slaps here and there, but for the most part it was just clothes off, moose hat on, pose her body this way and that, take some photos, clothes back on.

I share this passage mainly because it was nice to know that Brian was not so well-versed in removing the clothes from an unconscious woman that stripping the porn star was, you know, easy. And what was Dylan’s response to receiving those photos? I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t respond. I can’t recall because this book really is a collection of drunken bullshit stories that half the time don’t even try to sound sane.

Pinkies by Shane Hinton

Book: Pinkies

Author: Shane Hinton

Type of Book: Fiction, short stories, flash fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Is Odd: Because it’s not immediately clear which Shane Hinton wrote this book.

Availability: Published by Burrow Press in 2015, you can get a copy here:

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Comments: Shane Hinton has a bit of Jon Konrath in him, or maybe Jon has a bit of Shane in him. Or maybe they both have a bit of someone I have yet to read in them both. But this collection shows that Hinton has an eye and ear for the absurd in daily life, though he ventures into the speculative more than Konrath does. And I only mention Konrath because I found myself chugging NyQuil Cough formula like it was soda the other day and ended up having a bad dream about that infant-mouse-covered snake on the front of this book. In my dream the snake had charmed the mice like a sort of reptilian Charles Manson and they were ready to do his bidding, except I also think the snake was female. A lot of it I’ve forgotten, which is probably a good thing. But I did have the nightmare. That much I do know.

Before I begin to discuss this book in earnest, I want to mention that there is some interesting meta going on in this collection, and meta I have seen in other books recently. I don’t think it’s happening enough to call it a trend, but this summer I managed to read three books wherein the characters were named for the authors. Hank Kirton named a couple of characters in his short story collection Bleak Holiday after himself. Brian Whitney’s Raping the Gods sports a protagonist named Brian Whitney, which may be because the book is autobiographical (and I am afraid to find out if it is indeed autobiographical). And every male protagonist in Pinkies is Shane Hinton. One story boasts dozens of Shane Hintons.

I can feel the desire to go on at extraordinary lengths rising up because I genuinely enjoyed this collection, so I’m going to limit myself to the stories I liked best. Every story works on some level – there wasn’t a clunker to be found – but I decided to limit myself to four of the sixteen stories in this slim volume. Let us all cross our fingers that such a measure keeps my verbosity more or less in check, but I think it’s safe to say this is going to be very long, because this is a good collection and because this is the first book review on Odd Things Considered and I feel self-indulgent with celebratory bookishness.

37 Stories About 37 Women by Brian Whitney

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: 37 Stories About 37 Women

Author: Brian Whitney

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s one of those books that is more or less genre-less, and almost completely unmarketable in the modern book world. To be unmarketable is odd.

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

Comments: It’s been a while since I’ve read a book so poorly served by its cover design and blurbs. When I received this book from the publisher, I actually cringed when I saw the cover. It looks like the sort of cover one would expect to see on a cheesy “herotica” book aimed at middle-class, middle-aged women who dream of seducing the pool boy and looking 18 again.

The blurbs didn’t really make much of a difference before I read the book but, once I was finished, the blurbs bore no resemblance to the book I read. Almost all the blurbs seem to be from men so perhaps this is a Venus-Mars situation, but I tend to think not. I have no idea what the dudes who called this a “funny, sexy, nasty little book” and “equally erotic and literary” were reading, but it was hard to link those comments to this book.

With the cover and these descriptions, one could come to the conclusion that this collection is traditional erotica. Or even just sort of hot vignettes. That’s not the case. Susie Bright isn’t going to anthologize any of these stories. I would be surprised (though not shocked) if these stories aroused anyone’s libido. None of the book was particularly erotic to my sensibilities, though it describes sexual relationships. It is reasonably literary, and there are some moments of humor, and some of the stories are a bit nasty, but this collection is not sexy at all, all the stranger since Fanny Press is an erotica publisher. Rather, this is a series of very short stories that describe mostly failed relationships with mostly really fucked-up women who get involved with equally fucked-up men. It’s still very interesting, and a compelling read, but all of this needs to be said in the event any of my readers buy this book. Writers seldom get to choose their cover design or art, so the cover can’t be counted against Whitney even as it completely misdescribes his book.

And it’s a shame that the cover is so awful because this is a book worth reading. It’s a difficult sort of book. It’s not the sort of book wherein you will find some overwhelming truth about the human condition because these 37 stories represent extremity of human experience. If you are like me, you will have a very hard time remembering which story went with which name, a danger when one writes such short stories. Some of the stories are little more than character sketches. You’re not interacting with the stories or the characters long enough for them to really register with you deeply the first time you read it. This is a book you can tackle in less than two hours and, if you read it, I recommend reading it a second time a week or so later so that the stories can settle in a bit more.

However, that is not to say that these stories lack depth. Each one is a peephole, a narrow view into a larger story. You only see a small, distorted glimpse. It’s also strange to call this book a peephole into relationships because a peephole is what you use to make sure you have no unwelcome intrusions into your own privacy. This book’s narrow view at male-female interactions sometimes feels like an intrusion, a voyeuristic peeking through a keyhole.

The stories – the titles are all women’s names – are told in first, second and third person and from the perspective of the women, the men and some unknown outsiders. As I said, because these stories are so short and because there are almost 40 of them in a 103 page book, I would be very surprised if anyone can remember a specific girl’s story without referring to the book. Still, there are elements of some of these stories that will stay with you. Caddish men, crazy women, the tolls of drug abuse, uneasy one-night-stands, strange relationships. Even though the format doesn’t lend itself well to remembering specifics, these slices of other people’s lives are entertaining to read.

Whitney’s got a style that reminds me a bit of what would happen if you combined Raymond Carver with Charles Bukowski, with a healthy dash of Tucker Max. Creepy sexual couplings and emotional pain filtered through a distant, near-minimalism. Though this collection did not set me on fire, Whitney has a wonderful style that is distinctive, clean and extremely readable. Given the extraordinarily liberal approach many small presses have regarding editing, this was a near-pristine read, if I overlook the strange substitution of “or” for “of” that happens periodically throughout the book.

Whitney’s stories offer little in the way of hope or redemption, focusing on the behaviors one expects from the worst of assholes. Here’s a snippet from “Caitlin:”

…Bill always tries to get me to fuck the women he hangs out with. Except for Joanne, of course. But he’s always trying to get me to come to his rat trap apartment and screw whatever fairly disgusting chick is around. Caitlin is doable, but there is this one heinous chick named Robin who Bill is constantly trying to get me to have sex with.

Like my ultimate fantasy is beating off in the face of a middle-aged chick with a bad haircut while my pillhead buddy beats off watching me.

He also tries to get me to do this around five p.m. The classic “blowing your load too early” kind of dudeal.

This story begins frat-boyishly enough. Bill is a scumbag sociopath and wants the narrator to screw Caitlin while he and another man named Seth watch. Caitlin is far more attractive than Robin, but the narrator deals with the moral dimension of this offer thusly:

…I was supposed to be going to meet my girlfriend right at that very moment and even though Caitlin is attractive, my girlfriend is actually much more so and it didn’t really seem worth it to risk losing everything just to bang Caitlin. In Biddeford. With Seth. At six p.m. When I would be stuck there all night. In a fucking ranch house. With Bill watching me.

He bows out and Caitlin seems relieved. But Bill is a sociopath and this story ends with a punch in the gut.

This went on for fifteen minutes.

“Fucking say it! ‘I want to fuck Brian and his Jew friend Seth.'”

For fifteen minutes. I was in the front of the car with Caitlin, touching her leg. Seth was in the back laughing his ass off. After fifteen minutes Bill grabbed the back of her neck.

“Say it. ‘I want to fuck Brian and his Jew friend Seth.'”

She said it. She said it over and over and over.