Tag: fiction

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.

Senseless by Stona Fitch

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: Senseless

Author: Stona Fitch

Type of Book: Fiction

Why Did I Read This Book: I don’t recall exactly but I think it was recommended on the LiveJournal community for disturbing books. I know I had it on my Amazon Wishlist for a while and ordered it one day when an affordable copy became available.

Availability: This book is out of print, but you can find used copies online from independent sellers:

Comments: When I first read this book, I thought it would be an excellent choice for my odd books discussion site. While the violence in this book is at times hard to read, ultimately this was not an odd book. This is not torture porn – it is literary fiction and very good fiction at that. The book is gripping and I read it very quickly. Still, as horrible as the violence was, it did not affect me deeply is because this sort of violence is pedestrian these days, unless it’s happening to you. Extremity of human degradation, the lengths some people are willing to go in order to achieve their ends, and the sense that perhaps those who live lives worthy of shame should be held to pay for their actions are not ideas that are particularly unique or shocking any more. We seem to be offended, at least culturally, when violence is committed against us or those like us, but there is no denying how inured we have become to the idea of retributive violence.

The plot of this book is deceptively simple: An American business man, Elliot Gast, is kidnapped in Belgium by extremists opposed to the European Union. Initially he is treated quite well in captivity, given books to read, plenty of food, and though he is bored and anxious, he is not in fear of his life. Then the black cables are snaked through the ceiling, recording every corner of the room where Gast is kept, recording him for audiences on the Internet. His captors then begin to deprive Gast of his senses, beginning, horribly enough, with his sense of taste. The attacks against him are paced out and one by one, basic things like touch, sound and smell are taken from him via acts of indifferent violence.

The key word for this book is indifference. Though the world around him is aware of his kidnapping, though Gast works every angle in his mind to try and escape his captors, his time in captivity is one of indifference. Not on his part, to be certain – Elliot Gast is filled with pain, terror, desperation and ultimately defiance, but his captors see him as little more than a pawn that can help or harm their cause. Gast initially feels a sort of connection with a doctor and a woman in the group, but even if they felt appalled at his treatment and how broadcasting it on the Internet makes them look, their response is not aimed at freeing Gast, but rather, battling those within their organization. Gast’s experiences at the hands of the terrorist group show that he means nothing to them even when they seemingly are on his side in terms of the abuse he suffers. Being the the clutches of his tormentors turns Gast into a thing. Deprived of most of the senses that allow a man to interact with the world, isolated from all normal human sympathy and concern, Gast is only human in terms of how he continues to perceive himself. To those who have captured him, he is no more than an important doll that bleeds.

The really senseless part of this book was not when Gast lost his senses one by one, not the seeming senselessness of the violence (because this violence did have sense behind it – all too often we confuse savagery with senselessness). The senselessness comes from knowing that all of us, with our habits, thoughts, emotions and quirks, can become that doll that Gast became in the eyes of anyone who considers us The Other and that, I think, is where the power in this book lies. We can become an example. Our suffering, while intense to us, can be depersonalized into a generic message of fear and through our pain and fear, we can become just one more horrific distraction in cyberspace. Maybe there is a message in such violence but chances are, people powerful enough to change the course of political events aren’t going to be the people watching as you forcibly lose your sense of smell.

Suffering in this book is senseless, in that is has little meaning aside from others imprinting their personal agenda on another man’s body.

Of course, Gast’s suffering has meaning to the people who inflict it. One of his torturers tells him:

“To truly change a man, you must take away what is important to him. You must take a rich man’s fortune. You must take a passionate man’s wife. You are a man of the senses, Elliot Gast. So we are eliminating them. By this method we can leave you thoroughly changed. Through your example, we can change thousands.”

This, of course, is not borne out by the events of the book. People are outraged that Gast is being held and tortured but no one is able to find him. No one is able to help him. And no one is changed by watching his suffering aside from the temporary shock one feels when watching atrocity. Written in 2001, this book had no way of knowing we would all one day be able to watch beheadings online as easily as we watch the latest silly cat videos that are part of the current informational memes. Elliot Gast was changed but the rest of the world marched on.

Perhaps the change in Gast is all that is necessary, in the context of the book. Immediately following the above quote, Gast recalls engaging in culinary atrocity. Tiny birds were force-fed buttered grains then drowned in alcohol. The tiny birds were then roasted and eaten, bones intact.

The waiters then draped each of us with a large linen napkin, explaining that these would capture the precious scent of the roasted birds.

“Or to hide your face from God,” our host joked. I looked closely at the tiny bird in my hand, roasted to a golden finish. Dipping the ortolan into a brandy butter reduction, I raised it and saw suddenly the darkened eye of the bird, no bigger than a tiny bead, glistening now with a tear of butter… Perhaps I was paying now for my various excesses…

I wonder if I am wrong, trying to seek a larger meaning behind the permanent damage done to Gast. Perhaps his personal epiphany, connecting the terrible things that happen to him with the suffering he was willing to inflict on tiny birds, on other peoples’ economic well-being, in order to engage in epicurean delight, is enough.

As I read this book, I was unsure if Gast was unreliable, or if I was missing a point because throughout the book, I seemed to understand things that Gast did not.

Although I regretted my role in this terrible game, I had to wonder what the response would be. What would it take to one-up Blackbeard? Ten online hostages? Live execution of innocents? Anything seemed horribly possible.

By the way, Blackbeard is the name Gast gives to his chief tormentor. Did Gast think the economic interests that were pushing the European Union would respond to this atrocity done him with anything other than words, possibly a trial of those who might end up arrested if it came to that? Did he genuinely think this sort of guerrilla violence would be answered, let alone countered? Why would a bank kidnap ten revolutionaries and torture them? Gast does not seem to understand that even though he has had his nostrils soldered, his tongue mutilated, that the terrorists still have little power. While in their hands, they seem like God to him, not the powerless entities they really are in the face of global banking and political systems.

However, Gast never loses site of himself even as he is made senseless. He refuses to cooperate in any manner, fighting as much as he can, refusing to do what his captors ask of him. In order to increase the theater of the torture, his captors want him to scream, to yell in pain, to fight overtly instead of rebel passively. At one point, Blackbeard tells Gast that his Internet pain show is making the terrorist group lots of money, 10% of which will be his if only he will cooperate and scream in pain. Gast, who is clueless in some respects, hopes it is true he will be permitted to leave if he does what is asked of him but doesn’t take such promises to heart. Instead, he hopes he can unmask Blackbeard in front of one of the cameras, revealing his face to the millions Blackbeard says are watching, making him a marked man. Instead of railing against his tormentors when he is left alone, he is resolute – all the ghouls who are watching will get is a man kicking a wall over and over and over. Moreover, it is hard to tell if Blackbeard is taunting Gast, asking him to participate in his own torture, or if Blackbeard genuinely thinks Gast is so craven he would think screaming in agony for a cut of the profits a good deal. In a book about senselessness, it is hard to know which character actually has any sense.

Throughout the book, Gast seems to have a connection with a woman he calls Nin (because her brown eyes remind him of Anaïs Nin, the erotic diarist), and though she seems to have a terrible time reconciling what her group is doing to Gast, Nin’s final actions are in a way the most senseless element in the book. But that is just a knee-jerk reaction. It is only senseless if one is accustomed to the idea that people who are kind always act uniformly and in ways that we can understand. Gast feels deceived, but only a Hollywood ending could have made this turn out any differently.

I wish for all in the world that I could quote the final paragraph in this book but to do so would give too much away and this complex book is one that should not be spoiled. The last line brings to mind Erasmus, whom it certainly comes from, but also Vonnegut, because Gast is changed and the world around him is not. Whether or not his suffering and permanent damage is worth the epiphany he experiences is not a question I am ready to answer. I suspect I will read this book again in a couple of years and see what I think then. If I do, I will also read again Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee and think hard about violence and the world. Increasingly I think the message of this book is that the world is there, but all that matters is your personal redemption. But who knows. In a few years I may think differently. This book is largely a character study, but it will make you contemplate violence, the world around you and how it is you could be the criminal in the eyes of another.

House of Houses by Kevin L. Donihe

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: House of Houses

Author: Kevin L. Donihe

Type of Book: Bizarro, fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It is bizarro. And pretty gross. But mostly the former.

Availability: Published by Eraserhead Press in 2008, it is still in print and you can get a copy here:

Comments: One of the main problems with being a reviewer when you were once a sort-of-writer yourself is that there will come a time when you will read a book in which a writer had an idea similar to something you wrote about and goes in a completely different direction with it. You will read the book and think, “No, that is not right at all. This would have been so much better if I had garnered the huevos to get my own riff on this idea published.” Then you give your head a shake, realize that maybe the ideas were not so similar after all (and in this case, the similarities are superficial at best) and do your best to judge the book on its own merits. Even after coming to my senses, I still had some issues with this book but ultimately, it was a book worth reading, even if I know deep in the core of my blackened, wannabe heart that I could have done it so much better.

The plot of House of Houses, like so many other bizarro books, is not easy to encapsulate, but here’s my attempt: A man who loves his house so much he wants to marry it wakes one day to find that every house on earth has collapsed. He goes in search of an explanation and meets some interesting people, including a Superhero named Tony, and eventually finds himself in House Heaven, where houses go when they die and people have a fairly disgusting role to play in the construction of new homes. I was made genuinely uncomfortable at times, reading the descriptions of the human work camp, and that’s no small feat with a reader as jaded as I am. Carlos eventually finds his beloved house, Helen, but it doesn’t end well. Like a lot of bizarro books, there is some content in this book that is relatively nauseating. This book, more than some other bizarro I have read recently, is a very good combination of the horrific, the foul, the surreal, and the fantastic. And for sensitive readers with aversions to scenes of extreme human degradation, this book walks a fine line between bizarro and extreme horror. There is often something surreal about the violence in bizarro books, but as outrageous as the plot line in this book, the violence and gore had a very real, human feel to it. So squeamish readers, be aware.

Sometimes bizarro harbors weaker writers whose extravagant imaginations make up for a lack of skill, and that isn’t necessarily a criticism. I feel some of the most admired writers, Tolkien for instance, could tell a unique story but were not so amazing technically. This is not the case with Donihe. His words are well-chosen, his plot familiar yet bizarre, and his treatment of characters absorbing and interesting. The transformation of Carlos, from hopeful lover to quest-taker to mentally defeated cog in a brutal machine, is what makes this book so superior to many of the books I have read recently, including mainstream novels. It is no small feat to make a character so sympathetic and understandable in the midst of the chaos Donihe creates. So the bulk of this discussion/review will be me recounting passages in which Donihe makes us understand the mind of a man who loves his home like a wife and who descends into incredible, frightening and violent situations.

Carlos’ reaction to the devastation of all the homes is not only a look into a mind where the non-human becomes anthropomorphized in the saddest way possible, but it is foreshadowing of what is to come for the humans in this novel.

I feel sad for these homes, but only because they are (were?) Helen’s brothers and sisters. I never knew them like I knew her, never got to experience their unique essences. Seeing them in this state is akin to seeing the corpses of human strangers at a mass funeral.

Carlos is mentally and emotionally tied to houses, beyond and above his romantic love for Helen, and Donihe makes that clear in an expected way.

We pass another person trying to build a replacement house out of what appears to be Twinkies, another from tiny twigs or maybe matchsticks. I’m glad the bus does not stop for them. What they’re doing is a mockery, and I hate it (and them).

A mockery is an interesting way to look at the situation of desperate, deranged people trying to make shelter. Of course to a man like Carlos such actions are a mockery of the real wood and brick houses he loves. (Also, I wonder if there is a bizarro trend in using Twinkies inappropriately. Not long ago it was the President wearing a suit made of Twinkies, now someone is using them to build a house.)

After a while in House Heaven, Carlos’ perspective begins to change. After a confrontation with Manhaus, the head honcho in Heaven, Carlos begins to understand that his love of houses is not necessarily returned, that many houses hate humans for their behavior inside their walls. Carlos uses the word “shack” in front of Manhaus only to learn that is is akin to a racial slur, a word that should never be used in front of any sort of dwelling. He eventually escapes from his dreadful job in House Heaven and as he surveys all that is around him, it is startling how quickly his perspective changes after his time in what is for him a living hell.

The cityscape is stunning, but I still hate it. I want to tear the whole place down with my hands, brick by brick, and then defecate on it. It doesn’t matter how many house souls I harm in the process. Even those who haven’t directly harassed me are guilty, even those who hold no grudge against humanity or even sympathize in private with our plight. Fuck them. Let everything in their lives burn.

Except for Helen, of course, whom he is desperate to find in House Heaven, and a plot line I won’t discuss too much because it’s too important a part of the book to spoil. Just know this insane element: Houses in House Heaven resemble creatures from the old show H.R. Puffinstuff. Yeah. Somehow, that was the most distasteful part of the book. Gah, that show affected my id when I was a child.

Carlos ends up back in the house building industry of House Heaven, and it is an emotionally wrenching, tiring job, converting human beings into bricks in a gruesome, mechanized process. He watches the worst sort of depravity until he goes numb.

Shit happens.
And shit continues to happen, but it concerns me less and less until I notice nothing outside myself. The lever is a part of me, totally indistinguishable from flesh. When others sleep, I pull. The foreman likes my performance. I’m his best employee, but, in truth, I don’t give a royal rat’s ass what he thinks. A lever thinks and cares about nothing, you see. It just opens a door, closes it, opens again.
I want to be more like a lever. That’s all I think about.
And so–with a little time and practice–a lever is what I become.

The ending closely mirrors my own story, which sits on my hard-drive, gathering ether-dust, so almost needless to say, I approve. There were some tricks in this book, like the way Donihe handles the fact that everyone can understand and read things in House Heaven – the language and print are actually in another language but the listener/reader is perceiving it in their native language. There were other small problems with the book, personal to me and not worth mentioning. Ultimately, the reason this book is good, better than than sum of some of its parts, is because of how Donihe handles Carlos, his love for Helen, his mental decline. Carlos could be the hero in any number of war stories: the GI who falls in love with a foreign girl, is taken captive, realizes his captors could not care less if he likes them because of entrenched feelings that have nothing to do with him. It’s a story that is not wholly new but in Donihe’s bizarro universe, it feels fresh.

Overall I liked this book and found Donihe’s writing style vivid, engaging, weird and meticulous. I definitely plan to check out more of his work in the future.

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Author: Steven Sherrill

Why Did I Read This Book: I frequently ask friends on other Internet haunts of mine to recommend books to me. This book was recommended by the resplendent Miss Erin James, with much enthusiasm on her part. Since she has good taste, I bought a copy that same day. I initially thought it would be a good book for I Read Odd Books, but it turned out not to be so odd after all, instead quirky and contemplative.

Availability: Published in 2000 by Picador, it is still in print and you can get a copy here:

Comments:This novel, despite having the decidedly unsubtle Minotaur as its main character, is a novel of subtleties. It is a novel in which not a whole lot happens until the very end, but the small sections where the Minotaur is active – helping co-workers move, repairing his car, mending his clothes, performing chores at work, rubbing lotion all over the place where his bull upper body meet his human lower body – are the meat of the book. At times it seemed too slow, but for it to have sped up would not have worked at all, for the Minotaur plods through his life, seldom in a rush. The Minotaur, knowing that he will likely be alive many more centuries, does not need to rush about. The tedium of life, the sheer crushing weight of all the time he has been alive, has not made him nihilistic, but it has enveloped him in a sort of torpor from which only the hope of love can remove him.

The Minotaur in Sherrill’s book is indeed the figure from Greek legend, the half-bull, half-man that King Minos trapped in the labyrinth, bastard, half-breed child from his wife, Pasiphaë, the result of one of those many pranks and punishments the Pantheon meted out when their wills were crossed. But in Sherrill’s book, Theseus does not kill the Minotaur and the Minotaur emerges from the maze, forced to make his way in the real world. This book places him in North Carolina, living in a trailer in a rundown trailer court, driving a Vega that he has to repair daily, and working in the kitchen in a family-style restaurant. If you read this book expecting a magically realistic tour de force, you will be disappointed. If you read this book as a borderline Southern Gothic novel of manners, wherein social roles and customs are discussed in great detail, and you like that sort of book, then this will be right up your alley. Sherrill treats with respect the extreme lower-middle class, never making a mockery out of people who in other hands would become a loathsome Larry the Cable Guy routine.

For me, this novel operates on two levels. The first is how mundane the world is, which is a complete “Duh!” statement, I am aware. But when the world is so devoid of magic and mythos that the Minotaur is driving a Vega and working as a cook, and instead of inspiring fear he creates rather a sort of almost racial discomfort in those around him, the world is not a particularly interesting place. This is not to say the book is not interesting, but rather the world the book creates, a fine distinction but one I hope holds some clarity. The other idea the book conveyed to me heavily is that the Minotaur is used as an Other Everyman. So many novels deal with the travails of normal people in this world, but seldom those among us who are genuinely different. Freaks. Genuine outsiders. The Minotaur’s presence in this book is to show that the world really will grind down the extraordinary. While the Minotaur really does experience a mild deus ex machina at the end of the book, the Minotaur is not restored to his old glory as a menace that inspires fear. Rather, the triumph he carves for himself at the end of the book is little more than the potential love of a plump, hairy woman and a chance to work a grueling job as his own boss. The Minotaur may win, but even as we sense he may have a chance at a better time of it, we never lose fact that if he becomes his own man, so to speak, he will be a prince in a kingdom of Southern Culture on the Skids. His glory days are over. This world really is the best he can hope for.

I think the most interesting part of this book for me, aside from wondering how many years Sherrill himself must have toiled in kitchens in order to write the scenes in the restaurant, is thinking about how human the Minotaur is in how he reacts yet how it is that basic understanding of human behavior eludes him. For example, in a scene in the restaurant as he is waiting for his paycheck, the Minotaur tries to enter into conversation with some trite frat-types, using sexual vulgarity as a means to become one of the boys (in so much as he can speak – the Minotaur’s speech in this book consists of grunts and murmurs). It backfires, as we all know it will. And I wonder how it is that after centuries of living among men, the Minotaur both does not understand how the world of men works and why it is he longs to be a part of it. Of course, I suspect the answer is that as half-man, half-bull, he can understand humans only so much but he never stops longing to be a part of them. The scene where he sleeps over at his bosses’ home, an aging homosexual with an allegedly lurid past and a penchant for historical reenactments, is touching. It makes you think the Minotaur can eventually get this right, that he can eventually find a place among human beings where he can feel accepted.

But then in a scene I will not go into in too much detail lest I spoil the novel, the girl the Minotaur wants goes into a seizure during lovemaking, and his reaction to the situation is utterly baffling. There is no part of the human in the Minotaur that goes into his decision, yet the bull in him clearly is not in charge, either. Perhaps this action in comparison to the Minotaur’s emotional lethargy is what makes it hard to explain. At times, I could not determine what it was that Sherrill wanted me to know about the Minotaur or the world in which he lives.

I think that is why I found most satisfying the scenes in which much detail is given to the Minotaur’s routine. How he eats onions like apples. His grooming routines, which involve coating his long horns with clear nail polish. How he tinkers with his car. How he sleeps without the A/C and listens to his neighbors and sometimes watches them, a hopeful and hopeless voyeur.

All in all, this novel occupies an uneasy place in my mind, which may have been Sherrill’s goal. He created a being whose reactions I sort of understand and sort of don’t. He set the novel in a place in this world with which I am wholly familiar, a place I both love and loathe. I think people should read this book if only to tell me what the hell they think about it. Ultimately, I don’t know. I liked and disliked the book but it resonated enough with me that I am going to put it on my shelves and come back to it one day to see what I think then. It was a finely written book whose purpose may have been wasted on me but may become clear in a second read.

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: House of Leaves

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski

Type of Book: Fiction, horror, ergodic literature

Why I Consider This Book Odd: Well, because it is ergodic literature. Full stop.

Availability: You can get a copy here:

Comments: I’ve been away for a while, fellow odd bookers. I sometimes get hung up on a review or discussion and because I am not-quite-right, I cannot move on until I have addressed the issue. I think the problem is that in many ways discussing House of Leaves is not unlike discussing Finnegans Wake. There is an arrogance and hubris involved in thinking you can really get a handle on the entirety of either book. I’ve flirted with the House of Leaves before, but not until recently did I read the entire thing, from beginning to end in one go. By the time it was over my book was in tatters (and I was paranoid enough at the time that I wondered if the book construction was meant to echo the house’s obliteration), I had book fatigue and I barely remembered why I loved it so much in the first place. I left it, didn’t think about it, read some lighter fare and gradually let myself like the book again. Hence trying to review it and sensing that perhaps I understand it but wondering if I am full of shit.

This book. Oh dear lord. I have a wretched habit of bending the page when I find a passage meaningful to me. It’s a foul, filthy thing to do, and as a bibliophile, I hate myself for it, but I was never an underlining or highlighting sort of gal. The hell of it is, I went back to the dog-earred pages and read and read and half the time I had no idea what it was that grabbed me the first time. I comfort myself in my wasted effort that the book was in miserable condition by the time I was through – spine destroyed, pages loose, the front end page fallen out completely. I have no idea what I loved when I was reading it so it stands to reason that this is going to be less a review than a discussion of why I like this book and if it is messy and incoherent, it won’t be the first time and it won’t be the last. All I can say is that when a book is half footnotes, I don’t think it is a cop out to quote chunks of text that speak to me or explain my points.

In this discussion, I need to emphasize two things: 1) In my opinion, Johnny Truant’s story is the reason to read this book and it may seem weak not to address all the text concerning The Navidson Record. But it’s my party, and to be frank, all the details are the trees and Johnny is the forest and I think to analyze all of the endless references and throwaways that Danielewski uses in this book, you miss the humanity of it; and 2) I refuse to change my text color when I use the word “house” or refer to anything having to do with the Minotaur. Just not gonna do it. It seems forced, affected and precious when anyone other than Danielewski does it.

So, with that out of the way, a plot synopsis: An old, blind man by the name of Zampanò dies and in his apartment, Johnny Truant finds an in depth analysis of a documentary film called The Navidson Record. The book recounts Zampanò’s analysis of the film, interspersed with numerous foot notes from Zampanò, Truant and an editor. There is an unnerving catch, however: The film does not exist. Zampanò’s in depth analysis, including copious research, is of a film that does not exist and the resources he quotes do not exist. The analysis becomes so entrenched at times that the reader wonders if the real catch of the book is the “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” minutia that often goes into academic research. The level of introspection given by fictional research into every element of this fictional movie gives the book so much self-referential claustrophobia that the reader finds herself going mad as she reads it, which, of course, is the entire point.

The written analysis of The Navidson Record tells the story of a family that moves into a house in Virginia. The house is seemingly sentient and able to change itself on the inside without affecting the outside measurements of the house. It creepily rearranges itself internally, becoming larger than the outside proportions, finally creating a hallway that leads into a maze. A search party is sent into the maze with disastrous and appalling results, but at the end of the failed missions, the house collapsing then righting itself, The Navidson Record is a love story, wherein an icy and adulterous model, Karen, finds herself fighting to save her relationship with Will Navidson. Yes, I think it is a love story. I realize just about everyone who has read this book may disagree with my assessment, but the enduring themes of this book are, in fact, love. Maternal love fighting through mental illness, self-love fighting through emotional collapse, and romantic love enduring the unthinkable and impossible.

But for me, as I say above, the reason to read this book is to know the tale of Johnny Truant. Johnny tells the story of his life in footnotes to The Navidson Record, letters from his mother from the Whalestoe Institute, a home for the mentally ill, and a diary he kept during and after his immersion into The Navidson Record. Johnny is a drug abuser, and as the son of a mentally ill woman who died institutionalized, it is hard to say what causes Johnny to drift, then dive headfirst, into mental issues of his own, but Johnny is the heart of this book, the love story of Will and Karen and the peril they live through notwithstanding. Johnny’s story of his life, as he reveals it piecemeal, in a manner that makes it hard to know him if you skip a word, is the reason why I continued reading when I felt I just couldn’t take another damn five-page footnote.

Long story short: A boy who lost his mother, his father, his childhood, the integrity of his own skin, gets dunked into someone else’s madness and finds his own peace.

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 Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: The Woman Who Walked into Doors

Author: Roddy Doyle

Type of book: Fiction

Why Did I Read This Book: This was a case of a title grabbing me when I was at Border’s Books and I bought it on a whim. I almost didn’t buy it because Mary Gordon had a blurb on the back and I responded very negatively to the book I read by her recently, but I’m glad I read it. Very glad.

Availability: Penguin Books is the publisher and you can get a copy here:

Comments:: I fell in love with this book. Absolutely in love. I will, bank account issues be damned, soon order all of Roddy Doyle’s work. There are moments like this in my life, when I read an author and it feels like the literary equivalent of falling into deep, romantic love, wherein you know in advance that even if the object of your affection may fail you in some regard in the future, the sum total of their wonderfulness and compatibility with you will overshadow such moments.

Paula Spencer is an alcoholic mother of four. She cleans homes and white-knuckles her way through her evenings, controlling the times in which she drinks but still drinking far too much. She is a widow, but before her worthless husband died in a robbery attempt gone bad, she threw him out of the family home, a violent catharsis that in the hands of a less honest writer would have been the prelude to saccharine moments in which Paula’s life resolves itself. Her relationship with her sisters would have improved, she would have been able to help her addict son, she would have gotten sober herself and done something more than clean houses.

But Doyle understands that life might have a moment wherein a paralyzed person is suddenly capable of action, but that a moment of clarity does not a changed life make. Doyle shows the arc of Paula’s life as she gradually loses more and more innocence, slowly becomes more and more broken. This novel, better than any novel I have read in recent memory, tells the story of how men defined the world of women, from their actions to their words, and how hard it is to overcome such intrusive beginnings.

This is a book wherein lines and sometimes entire sections resonated deeply with me. Paula’s life was one spent in a world where men acted inappropriately, where men did not protect girls and actively harmed them in some cases, where people blamed women for getting beat up, where even fathers who never physically harmed their children cannot be trusted emotionally. This book was mostly amazing because Doyle shows how a character can hold a multitude of feelings, opinions that can seem contradictory, yet ring very true nonetheless. Doyle’s ability to show the multitudes within Paula shows him as a keen observer of human nature and a fine writer, able to accurately convey complex emotions with the beauty of an accomplished story teller yet with complete honesty.

Because some of this review may contain spoilers, please look under the cut for my entire discussion.

Extinction Journals by Jeremy Robert Johnson

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Extinction Journals

Author: Jeremy Robert Johnson

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, novella

Why Did I Consider This Book Odd: Because I walked into it knowing it was about a man with a suit of cockroaches. Also bizarro.

Availability: Published by Swallowdown Press in 2006, you can get a copy here:

This novella is also available in the Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange), which has the works of other bizarros in it as well. I always recommend giving money as directly to the author as you can, but this could be a nice intro to bizarro for new readers. Gina Ranalli’s novella, Suicide Girls in the Afterlife, also reviewed here, is also in this edition.

Comments: I was discussing this book with Mr. Oddbooks and trying to explain it. Mr. Oddbooks is a prosaic sort of guy, whose reading tastes run towards tales of the open sea and computer manuals. “So why was the President wearing a suit made of Twinkies? Did he really think that they would protect him from the effects of nuclear war?”

I had to think about it. “I’m not sure. Maybe because they are so filled with preservatives? But that’s not what’s important…” And therein lies the awesomeness of bizarro when it is done correctly. Outrageous, surreal story-lines with insane details that once you are accustomed to reading such details, they don’t really even register. You get into a headspace where you have to say, “Well, why wouldn’t the President be wearing a suit made of Twinkies.”

I said in another bizarro review that you cannot go looking for plot holes in bizarro because you will find them. This is not a medium in which reason means much, surrealism and wonderment taking a far more important role. This was a fine example of bizarro, and a fascinating book regardless of genre.

To give a bare-bones plot description: A man who anticipates a nuclear holocaust designs a suit made of cockroaches in order to survive. His suit eats the President, who was, as I mentioned already, unwisely encased in a Twinkie suit. He meets God, or a God-like spirit who has come back for mankind only to find a few men left on Earth. He travels the remains of the world looking for safe food and water and meets a woman who has survived with the help of ants. Together they have to stop a formicary adversary who means to conquer what is left of the world.

The novella is filled with subtle humor. Take this passage when the protagonist, Dean, meets the God-like spirit, known as Yahmuhwesu. Yahmuhwesu is having trouble getting the Rapture to start and needs the help of… well, someone else:

“How much do you know about super-strings? Whorls? Vortex derivatives?”

“Oh god, nothing at all.”

“Okay, that doesn’t help. Is there someone else around here that I can talk to?”

I am almost certain that would happen to me at the end of the world. I suspect most of us sense we may not be wholly spiritually worthy to stand in the presence of the Divine but really, perhaps we need to work on our math skills instead of morality.

Dean is an odd man, a man who evidently saw a lot of the world before the bombs fell, with many experiences that make coping with a destroyed Earth a bit difficult.

…he realized he should have hooked up a gas mask instead of a portable breather unit.

But he couldn’t submit himself to that level of suffering. Dean had a severe aversion to having his face enclosed in rubber; an extraordinarily rough time with a dominatrix in Iceland had forced him to swear off such devices.

While I could not really connect to Dean or any of the other characters in the book, that is okay. It’s hard to see how one could connect with an expert on cockroaches who travels a post-apocalyptic world on his back, carried by the hearty cockroaches he has sewn to his suit, roaches he eventually develops a wavelength with. But Dean’s thoughts are interesting and ultimately, his mind and his actions have enough universally human about them that we recognize our own feelings in some of what Dean does. After a battle with a deranged ant-expert, Dean thinks:

One day you fall asleep happy. Next to a river under a dark sky. Then you wake up and everything has changed. Including you. You changed so much that for the first time you actually risk your life.

For what?

Love. It’s as good a word as any. It will do.

And you’ve gone so crazy with this feeling, call it love, that you find yourself in an absurd situation, humming moaning at telepathic bugs and killing brainwashed entymologists.

I know.

It sounds silly.

But it feels important at the time.

And this passage pretty well sums this book up: Absurd, silly, yet ultimately important. There are overtones of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. There is a sense that Vonnegut could have written this. It mixes the sublime and the ridiculous superbly. I very much like this novella and recommend it. I look forward to reading more of Jeremy Robert Johnson in the future.

A is for Alien by Caitlín R. Kiernan

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: A is for Alien

Author: Caitlín R. Kiernan

Type of Book: Science fiction, short story collection, erotica

Why Did I Read This Book: Because CRK is one of my favorite writers of all time, full stop.

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

Comments: Caitlín R. Kiernan is a writer whom I have a hard time assigning to any specific genre, though she is a writer whose work generally has some form of slipstream in it, slipstream as defined by Bruce Sterling when he said, “…this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.” Kiernan’s prose always makes me feel strange and everything I have read from her is undeniably dark even when good prevails because there is still so much more bad out there waiting.

This collection is mostly science fiction and I am notably not a fan of the sci-fi genre, but I read this anyway because Kiernan wrote it. I’m glad I read it because only two of the stories were not to my tastes. Much “hard” science fiction eludes me for the same reason I never found A Clockwork Orange to my liking – I get too distracted by the verbiage, which is often beyond my ken, and the story gets away from me. So I am at a loss to determine if any work of hard science fiction is good or not, though I am not someone who condemns a genre just because I do not like it. Two of the stories in this collection said little to me, so I was tempted to skip reviewing it, but the point of this review site is for me to review literally everything I read that does not end up on I Read Odd Books. So no chickening out.

This collection contains eight stories, some hard science fiction, some science fiction combined with erotica, some transhumanist analyses, and plenty of dystopia to last even the most jaded of readers for a long time. I admit that I prefer CRK when she is writing works that tilt more in the vein of horror – Alabaster and Daughter of Hounds are both in my list of Top 25 Books of All Time. But her essential themes remain even when her genre differs, and that is what matters I think.

My impressions of all eight stories under the jump and beware – there may be spoilers.

Suicide Girls in the Afterlife by Gina Ranalli

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Suicide Girls in the Afterlife

Author: Gina Ranalli

Type of Book: Bizarro, fiction, novella

Why I Consider This Book Odd: Ultimately, this was not such an odd book, but it is classified as bizarro and is published by Afterbirth Books, an imprint of Eraserhead. Since I review all my bizarro reads over here, this is where I decided this book should go.

Availability: You can get it here:

But obtaining this novella via The Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange) would be an infinitely better purchase. In this volume you not only get this book, but also novellas and short stories from other bizarros. Check out the kit here:

Comments: I found this book to be a sweet and charming read, but it was not what I expected and I find myself mostly lukewarm towards it. The premises – that basically every act of self-neglect, from overeating to failure to procure proper health insurance is suicide, that Heaven and Hell are under construction, and that there are levels of worthiness in Heaven – are not that bizarre. I suspect every college freshman has had a similar conversation. The idea of Satan as a goth and Jesus as a hippie are also… trite. God, I hate using that word, but there’s nothing new in the concepts and, in fact, they are common enough tropes that to see them in a bizarro book is jarring.

Okay, that’s fine, in a sense. Even in bizarro, there does not necessarily need to be something new under the sun. Bizarros retell iconic stories filtered through their own whacked-out lenses and they work more often than not. But this story was not grounded in the insane enough to forgive the various issues I had.

For example, if a book is bizarre and original enough in concept, I don’t mind if I don’t connect with the characters. I loved Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Extinction Journals, which I will review here soon. It was like nothing I have read before and the insanity of the concept was such that aside from some very shallow connections, there was no way to relate to the characters. Conversely, in some of Andersen Prunty’s short stories, the elements of magical realism in some of the pieces are mild, and some of the stories are just odd vignettes, but as tame as they can be compared to the mind of, say, Carlton Mellick III, they have an undercurrent of connection that permits the reader to relate to the characters, a pathos that bridges the gap between high weirdness and basic humanity. Ranalli comes very close to pulling this connection off in Suicide Girls in the Afterlife but ultimately, I didn’t feel it.

The protagonist, Pogue, committed suicide by electrocuting herself. She gets to the Afterlife and finds herself in a hotel until Heaven and Hell are no longer under construction. She is assigned a floor and the closer the floor is to the basement, Hell, the lower you are in the Afterlife’s hierarchy (purgatory is sandwiched between floors like John Cusack’s office in Being John Malkovich). Pogue meets another young suicide named Katina and within minutes of landing in Pogue’s room, they are bored and start exploring the hotel. One is not allowed to go to floors above one’s assigned room so they go down, with the help of a robot named Jane 62, meet denizens of lower floors, visit Hell, meet Satan, visit Heaven, and meet Jesus.

The book ends with the sort of conclusion that makes me a little nuts – was it all a dream, was it all a relativist examination of the human condition? Did Pogue not really die and was just having an electric brainstorm wherein she recreated all facets of herself into characters in her hallucination? Probably the latter and I just don’t like endings like that. This is a personal issue, I realize, but I’ve endured far too many books where such endings were cheap tricks to end that which is difficult to conclude. Others may vary wildly on this one but I cannot recall a single book I have read short of The Wizard of Oz, wherein “It was all a dream!” did not leave me feeling cheated.

There are brief moments of bizarro grotesqueness, like the shit tornados that sweep through hell and the man who is… well, committing acts of pedophilic necrophilia. There are moments of bizarro brilliance, like the food permitted on Pogue’s floor is all pie – Opera Pie, Rock Pie, and it makes a cacophony as you eat it, if you can take the noise.

But overall, the book just isn’t that odd and the story too shallow to make up for the lack of oddness. Seriously, you cannot go looking for plot holes in bizarro because you will find them. Seemless plots are not needed here, thank you. It is best just to wallow in the strangeness, the newness of ideas, the grossness of the story, the craziness of the narrative and characters. But you can’t do that in Suicide Girls in the Afterlife because the story does not employ enough true slipstream to enable you to get into the bizarro headspace that permits you to overlook plot issues and characterization problems. In bizarro, characters come and go senselessly at times, subplots dead end and the plots loop wildly, often not making sense and you overlook it because sense is not the point. In a story that has the sort of order assigned to it that this book does, as well as a narrative that is so grounded in popular imagination that it is essentially a retelling of Judeo-Christian mythos, random characters and plot issues stand out.

For example, the Salvadore who meets Pogue to escort her to the hotel? No idea what he was or who he was meant to be. Another character informs Pogue that Salvadore does not meet suicides as a rule, that he mainly escorts the rich white people who make up the upper echelons of Heaven, living on the top floors of the hotel. With his pencil thin mustache, I am reminded of Salvador Dali but I am unsure what connection to make from that. The hotel is too regimented and makes too much sense for a any surrealism to be at play. And why did he meet Pogue if he generally meets those from upper floors? No idea. And the character who explained it? In a throwaway line we are told she is really a cross dressing man. Why is this important? No idea. Jane 62 explains that there is not a Jane 61. I guess her name is just supposed to be… wacky? Inexplicable? Salvadore explains that those who are already in Heaven and Hell are fine, but the newcomers must stay in the hotel until renovations are complete. So why are Jesus and Satan there? Presumably they had a place in the old Heaven and Hell and do not need new accommodations. These are the sorts of plot issues that one should not have to think about in bizarro literature.

To address the characterization issues I had, Pogue and Katina are two of the most unlikely suicides I have ever read in print. Both are inquisitive, engaged, almost perky in their excitement to roam and discover what is what in the afterlife hotel. Why did Pogue commit suicide? We are only told she had her reasons. If there is a veil in the afterlife that wipes away the spiritual angst and misery that causes suicide, we are not informed of it. They are both fun to read about, however, one of the graces in this book, and that they both seem like restless, happy girls, neither carrying the cosmic burdens that suicide implies, is a problem.

And therein lies the problems I had with this book: Either the bizarre needs to be so outre that a personal connection is not needed and the awe and wonder at the world created overshadows the mundane needs for proper plot, or the mildly weird needs to make a connection with us, which requires it to make sense as well as probe certain universality of feeling. This book is neither fish nor fowl. It does not offer a paradigm amazing enough to suspend disbelief and it does not offer an odd conduit to real emotion. It is too normal for one, too shallow for the other.

Add to it that I read it in under two hours, and I suspect I cannot really recommend this book to anyone. That is not to say that I will not read Ranalli in the future. Far from it. I have read descriptions of the plot of Mother Puncher and it sounds crazy and dystopian enough that I hope it skirts the ho hum qualities of this book. Ranalli’s work is quite readable. Her prose is sound and in some places, a thing of beauty. That I found this book lacking did not reflect on the quality of the prose itself – she had very few clunker sentences and in a way, the fact that she can write well made disliking this all the worse. But this story simply did not work for me, given it’s brevity, the lack of unique plot, the problems with the plot and the seemingly inappropriate characterization.