I am proud to announce that Eraserhead Press has rereleased The Emerald Burrito of Oz by John Skipp and Marc Levinthal. This is one of my favorite releases of the year. Check it out here.

ZOMBIE MUNCHKINS! TURD-FLINGING FLATHEADS! EVIL CORPORATE CONSPIRACIES! DELICIOUS MEXICAN FOOD! OZ IS REAL! Magic is real! The gate is really in Kansas! And America is finally allowing Earth tourists to visit this weird-ass, mysterious land. But when Gene of Los Angeles heads off for summer vacation in the Emerald City, little does he know that a war is brewing…a war that could destroy both worlds! This loving Bizarro tribute to the great L. Frank Baum is an action-packed, whimsically ultraviolent adventure, featuring your favorite Oz characters as you’ve never seen ‘em before. Let super-hot warrior sweetheart Aurora Quixote Jones take you on a guided tour of surrealist laffs, joy, and mayhem, with more severed heads than Apocalypse Now and more fun than a barrel of piss-drunk winged monkeys!

A slag is what survivors are calling the slug-like maggots raining from the sky, burrowing inside people, and hollowing out their flesh and their sanity.

Slag Attack features four visceral, noir stories about the living, crawling apocalypse.

“The Devastated Insides of Hollow City” – Hack detective Shell joins in the insane search for a girl named Pearl, who just might hold the key to restoring order.

“Vincent Severity” – A woman is taken hostage by a very severe man in a sleazy El Camino.

“Corpse Mountain” – Two guys named Cobra and Commando chug gasoline and help build grotesque robots to save the world.

“All Alone at the End of the World” – Re-introduces Shell in a radically different light, building to a ferocious conclusion.

Buy from Amazon

Back  in February I wrote this post about the adventure that some of our authors were taking to the Sylvia Beach Hotel for a writing retreat.  One of the projects was The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island by Cameron Pierce and I am proud to announce that it is now available for sale.  I would like to extend a BIG THANK YOU to the fine people who pre-ordered this book and helped sponsor Cameron Pierce’s expenses during that retreat.

A demented fairy tale about a pickle, a pancake, and the apocalypse.

It is Gaston Glew’s sixteenth Sad Day – the sixteenth anniversary of the saddest day of his life: his day of birth – and his parents have just committed suicide. Fed up with the sadness of Pickled Planet, Gaston Glew builds a rocket ship and blasts off into outer space, hoping to escape his briny fate.

Meanwhile, on Pancake Island, Fanny Fod, the most beautiful pancake girl in the world, nurses a secret sadness as she guards the origin of all happiness: the mysterious Cuddlywumpus. When Gaston’s rocket ship crash-lands in the sea of maple syrup that surrounds Pancake Island, nothing will ever be the same for him, or for Fanny Fod.

Captain Pickle says: “Unchain yourself from this briny fate, oh pickled prisoner, and read Cameron Pierce’s The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island: A Tragedy for People Who Eat Food!”

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Eraserhead Press publishes cult horror under our imprint Deadite Press.  We are very excited about our two latest releases:

The sickest writer in horror takes on the Cthulhu Mythos!

In July, 1939, antiquarian and H.P. Lovecraft aficionado, Foster Morley, takes a scenic bus tour through the wilds of northern Massachusetts. He wants to go where Lovecraft went, and to see what Lovecraft saw, to further distill his understanding of history’s most impacting horror fantasist.

When he happens upon the curious, secluded waterfront prefect known as Innswich Point–not to be found on any map–he assumes the curiosity of the name is mere coincidence, but in less than twenty-four hours he’ll learn that he couldn’t be more mistaken.

Deeper and deeper, then, Morley delves into the queer town’s dark mystique. Has his imagination run rampant, or are there far too many similarities between this furtive fishing village and the fictional town of Lovecraft’s masterpiece, The Shadow Over Innsmouth? Could it be possible that Lovecraft himself actually visited this town before his death in 1937?

Join splatter king Edward Lee for a private tour of Innswich Point – a town founded on perversion, torture, and abominations from the sea.

Click here to buy from Amazon

**

And brand new from Robert Devereaux, author of Santa Steps Out and Deadweight:

It’s prom night in the Demented States of America. A place where schools are built with secret passageways, rebellious teens get zippers installed in their mouths and genitals, and once a year, on that special night, one couple is slaughtered and the bits of their bodies are kept as souvenirs. But something’s gone terribly wrong at Corundum High, where the secret killer is claiming a far higher body count than usual . . .

Slaughterhouse High is Robert Devereaux’s slicing satire of sex, death, and public education.

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Eraserhead Press is proud to kick-off our new imprint for comics, Shark vs Badger Comics, with a collection by the weird and wonderful Andrew Goldfarb.

Goldfarb’s acclaimed comic series, A Hundred Horrible Sorrows of Ogner Stump, is a magical and weird journey into the horrors of everyday life. Join Ogner Stump and his amorphous companion Slub Glub as they encounter demonic hot rods, voodoo tentacles, swamp witches, psychopathic surgeons, nightmarish landlords, door-to-door coffin salesmen, and the Green Fairy.

From ritual human sacrifice to the moon’s anus, they find despair, misery, and wonder in nearly everything. There is a moral lesson to be learned in each story. There must be. Andrew Goldfarb’s surreal vision is one of shadowy desperadoes and haunted love affairs, all set within a darkly antique universe. Sure to delight fans of Terry Gilliam, Harvey Pekar, and Frank Zappa.

“This is what a comic drawn by Dali would look like!” – GARY HORNBERGER, Razorcake

“Genuinely creepy. Like early David Lynch, like ‘Eraserhead.’ Goldfarb needs help.” – SHANNON WHEELER, Too Much Coffee Man

Click here to buy and learn more.



An article about Bizarro Fiction appeared today in the UK’s premier liberal newspaper, The Guardian:

BIZARRO FICTION: It’s Terribly Good

by Damien Walter

Have you discovered the genre that can be stupid and intelligent at the same time?

Strangely compelling ... detail from the cover of Shatnerquake

Jeff Burk’s Shatnerquake is the story of William Shatner. Yes: Wiliam Shatner. All of the characters he has ever played are suddenly sucked into our world on a mission to hunt down and destroy the real William Shatner. As one Amazon reviewer insightfully states, if you have ever wondered what would happen if William Shatner came face to face with the incarnation of every character he ever played, then “this is the book for you”. It is also, undeniably, Shatnertastic.

Shatnerquake is a comparatively mild example of the Bizarro fiction genre. Bizarro fiction defines itself as the literary equivalent of the cult film section in a video store, taking inspiration from films such as Repo Man and Eraserhead. It aims to satisfy the demands of readers who are looking for weird, in the same way other readers go looking for action or romance. Starting a decade ago with the work of indie publishers Raw Dog Screaming Press, Afterbirth Books and Eraserhead Press, the genre now has over a dozen small publishers, its own convention and an increasing cult status among readers and writers who know weird when they see it.

Click to read the full article

My Fake War by Andersen Prunty

The absurd tale of an unlikely soldier forced to fight a war that, quite possibly, does not exist.

Saul Dressing is a flabby middle-aged librarian who just wants to be left alone to listen to jazz, watch porn, and cultivate his toenails. All of this changes when a soldier in a camouflage sweat suit shows up to draft him into the army of the United States of Everything. His mission is simple: go to a foreign country no one has ever heard of and incite the opposition to strike first. All alone in the middle of a desert with no enemy in sight, Saul must come to terms with the absurdity of his situation. Thus begins a surreal journey into the politics of war, consumerism, and giant robots.

It’s Rambo meets Waiting for Godot in this subversive satire of American values and the scope of the human imagination.

Andrew Goldfarb is a fierce multimedia visionary who expresses himself through writing, painting, comics and his one man band The Slow Poisoner.  All his work is interconnected and takes place in the same dark, swampy, weird world and he plays the traveling snake oil salesman voodoo priest that brings his own brand of  magic with him in a vintage trunk, his guitar shaped like a dying swan, his secret language of eyebrows, his velvet paintings, and his own genuine miracle tonic. I have published two of his books The Ballad of a Slow Poisoner and Slub Glub in the Weird World of the Weeping Willows and his comics have appeared in issues of The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction.  He played one of my favorite shows of all time last year at the Eraserhead Press 10 Year Anniversary Party and he’ll be performing again at this year’s BizarroCon on Thursday Nov. 11th at McMenamin’s Edgefield in the wine cellar.

Today, there’s a great interview up at the Philadelphia Indie Music Examiner with Goldfarb:

“The Slow Poisoner, with his black garments, dark Mediterranean-like looks, and devilish expressions, writes and plays songs surrounded by old-timey American imagery, the occult, the 50’s horror set, science fiction, esoterica, carnivalesque oddities, original mythological tidbits, rituals, swamplands, magic, and the altogether weird, among a host of other things. On his album “Roadside Altar,” for example, he sings at length about spells in the song The Hex, about headless roosters in Run Rooster Run, and about all manner of things that go bump in the night in the electro hobgoblin number Flaming Creatures (of Rock & Roll).”

Click here to read the full interview.

You can hear Andrew Goldfarb’s music at his website The Slow Poisoner, and connect with him through myspace, facebook, and twitter.  You can also check out his comics at Ogner Stump.

Hope you enjoy!

Happy Earth Day everyone.  On the topic of the environment, I encourage you to hop on your bike today and ride down to your local library to check out the following books:

Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen
Trapped in a remote Alaskan forest, pinned under his own SUV, gnawed upon by nature’s finest predators, Marv Pushkin — Corporate Warrior, Positive Thinker, Esquire subscriber — waits impatiently for an ambulance and explains in detail the many reasons why this unfolding tragedy is everyone’s fault but his own.

Teeth and Tongue Landscape by Carlton Mellick III
In a world made out of meat, a socially-obsessive monophobic man finds himself to be the last human being on the face of the planet. Desperate for social interaction, he explores the landscape of flesh and blood, teeth and tongue, trying to befriend any strange creature or community that he comes across.

Extinction Journals by Jeremy Robert Johnson
You can survive a nuclear blast. All you need is some luck, and maybe a customized business suit coated in cockroaches. The uncanny voyage of a man across a newly nuclear America where he must confront the problems associated with loneliness, radiation, love, and an ever-evolving cockroach suit with a mind of its own.

Randy Henderson interviewed me for Fantasy Magazine today, here’s an excerpt:

Bizarro Fiction 101:Not Just Weird for Weird’s Sake

Bizarro Fiction is a fairly new genre, most often referred to as literature’s equivalent of the Cult section in your video store. One of the founders and core producers of Bizarro fiction is Eraserhead Press, lead by publisher Rose O’Keefe. So I asked Rose a few questions to help clarify just what Bizarro Fiction is (and isn’t). You can also learn more about Bizarro at Bizarro Central.

Q: What are the most common misconceptions folks seem to have about Bizarro fiction?
A: There are a lot of misconceptions, but the only one I want to focus on right now is the reason why bizarro was created. Most people believe bizarro was created so that a bunch of outsider writers would have a genre to call home. This isn’t the case. Bizarro might have a strong community of writers who are as tight as family, but the genre was formed based solely on reader demand. There are a lot of people out there who view “weird stuff” as a genre. They actively go out looking for books and movies that are weird in the same way that some people seek out books/movies that are scary or romantic. This is our target audience. It is a bigger audience than people realize and it is an audience that has been mostly ignored. With the little niche genre of bizarro, we are just trying to fill a void that we see in the publishing world.

Q: If Bizarro Fiction was a movie monster, which would it be, and why?
A: Megalon. Because he was a giant cockroach with drills for hands who shot lightning bolts from a horn on his head. How bizarro is that?

Q: How did Bizarro get started?
A: For the past ten years, three small press companies—Raw Dog Screaming Press, Afterbirth Books, and my own Eraserhead Press—have specialized in publishing weird cult fiction books. There wasn’t a label for what we were publishing when we started. It clearly wasn’t horror, science-fiction, fantasy, or even experimental fiction. The only real way to describe it would be: weird. That’s the only reason people were buying our books. They bought them because they were looking for something weird and unusual to read.

Click here to read the rest of the interview over at Fantasy Magazine.