Tag: bizarro

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New Release: Full Metal Octopus by Carlton Mellick III

Welcome to Grub Town, the most corrupt city in America. A place where gutter punk mermaids swim in sewage-filled canals, fairy prostitutes hang in birdcages on every street corner, and yakuza elves run everything behind the scenes.

Eliot is the most beautiful fairy in all of the city with his dazzling emerald green butterfly wings that make everyone who sees them fall instantly in lust with him. But it’s more of a curse than a blessing. Forced to hide his wings in public in order to avoid the constant sexual harassment, Eliot only finds solace when visiting his friends at the Snake Pit lamia strip club or getting tattooed by the dark and mysterious half-octopus woman named Oona.

Oona is the best tattooist in the city, but she is a frightening woman three times Eliot’s size with nine-foot tentacles that could choke a man to death in seconds. But despite this fact, Eliot is desperately in love with her. He’s so infatuated with the octomaid that he gets new tattoos from her each and every week just to be closer to her, addicted to having her artwork permanently embedded into his skin. But when Eliot accidentally murders the only heir to the elf yakuza crime family in Oona’s tattoo shop, they are forced to go on the run together, hoping to avoid the wrath of the most dangerous man in town. With everyone in the city out to get them, they can only rely on each other if they have any hope for survival.

Like if Quentin Tarantino played with Monster High dolls, Full Metal Octopus is a return to Mellick’s pulpy gritty bizarro style previously seen in The Cannibals of Candyland, Armadillo Fists, and Clownfellas.

For almost 20 years, Carlton Mellick III has been writing some of the strangest and most compelling novels the bizarro fiction genre has to offer. Described as one of the top 40 science-fiction writers under the age of 40 by The Guardian and “one of the most original novelists working today” by extreme horror legend Edward Lee, Mellick returns with an erotic urban fantasy crime novel about love and violence, sex and sexuality, oppression and overcoming impossible odds.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carlton Mellick III is the Wonderland Book Award-winning author of over 45 novels, including Quicksand House, Bio Melt, Cuddly Holocaust and Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland, among others. In 2013, he was named one of the top 20 science-fiction writers under the age of 40 by The Guardian UK.

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New Review of Zerostrata

http://flooddamage.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/zerostrata-review/
A review of Zerostrata by Anderson Prunty
by Michael A Rose

If Zerostrata was a tea, I would call it “bracing, with a hint of undeniable sweetness.” I would drink it on Wednesday mornings at work to make me feel on edge with anticipation of the day to come, and awaken me to the possibilities while simultaneously clearing my sinuses. But Anderson Prunty’s Zerostrata is not a tea – it’s a book – and a damn good one.

Zerostrata follows the story of Hansel Nothing as he returns to his childhood home in an effort to find himself and give his life some sense of meaning. He has no memory of where he’s been for the last decade or so. In a normal story, the plot would quickly become a tiresome cliche in which the focus is getting back lost memories, but in Prunty’s capable hands, the story stays firmly planted in the present – a present where a beautiful girl runs naked in the rain and a mysterious therapist named Doctor Blast prescribes a strange series of events that shake Hansel Normal’s world up completely.

One of the best things about reading Zerostrata is the juxtaposition of bizarro humor and strange events with a real sweetness. Sure, there are gang members who make the world’s most delicious salad from their own flesh, and liquid-like airspace complete with magically mobile trampolines to keep falling victims safe for their therapy, but at its core, Zerostrata seems to be a love story. Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense that once we find the right person, nothing else matters outside of that, no matter how difficult or mundane. There is a beautiful scene which I will not ruin for you involving raindrops toward the end of the book that contains a monologue I may ask Prunty for permission to use in my wedding vows some day. That’s the kind of experience this book gives a reader – being carried through the strangest of places, only to come out on the other side and find some sort of magic.

This is a quest story where the protagonist doesn’t know what the ultimate goal is, and as it is revealed to him, the reader sees it as well. That conceit alone makes this truly worth the read; highly recommended.

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New Review of Ass Goblins of Auschwitz


http://10kbullets.com/features/ass-goblins-of-auschwitz/
Ass Goblins of Auschwitz
Written by: Michael Den Boer on December 1st, 2009

Title: Ass Goblins of Auschwitz
Written By: Cameron Pierce
Published by: Eraserhead Press
87 pages, Copyright 2009.
ISBN 978-1933929934 (US – $9.95)

This book’s provocative title “Ass Goblins of Auschwitz”, immediately had me intrigued. The story which lies within more than lives up and in many ways exceeds this book’s subversive title. Right off the bat, the book incorporates into its plot two things that are bound to offend some readers. Nazi like ‘bad guys’ referred to in the book as ‘Ass Goblins’ and their prison camp Auschwitz, which also happens to be the name of the most notorious Nazi death during World War 2. Despite this book’s title and twist on two touchy subjects, the overall tone of the subject matter and the way in which it is approached are far from offensive.

So what is “Ass Goblins of Auschwitz” about? The story is told via a first person narrative in which one half of a conjoined twin leads us through a grotesque labyrinth of atrocities. The nemesis of the story, are disfigured entities referred to as ‘Ass Goblins’ and their leader ‘Adolf’ who is temporary away on a sex odyssey. The occupants of the ‘Ass Goblins’ prison camp Auschwitz, are children who have been taken away from the serenity of kid land and they are slowly being transformed via experiments into ‘Ass Goblins’. The ‘Ass Goblins’ are a vile race of beings that fly in apple-shaped space ships, they make apple cider from fermented children’s flesh and they make bicycles and sex toys out of the body parts of dead children. These are just a few of the despicable acts that are perpetrated by the ‘Ass Goblins’.

As vile as the ‘Ass Goblins’ are in this book, they are portrayed in such an absurd way that makes them all the more easier to digest. From the opening chapter up until the poetic melancholy coda, this book is a relentless journey. At the core of this book, is a story about the shift from childhood to adulthood and the loss of one’s innocence. Without a doubt the most enjoyable and strongest asset of this book is its author’s fluid, descriptive, prose and his limitless imagination.