Author: Gloria Naylor (yes, that Gloria Naylor)

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: God help me, but just bear with me for a moment. Back when I stumbled across the information about Johnny Gosch and the whole Franklin Scandal, I did a search and somehow ended up on the site of a woman called Eleanor White – I can no longer recall the exact link that got me there, but believe me, I got there. Anyway, Eleanor is a person who believes in gang stalking, meaning that organized groups of government entities and private citizens stalk her, breaking into her home, wearing out her clothes, breaking her furniture, leaving mounds of dirt on her kitchen floor, tapping her phone calls, harassing her at work, following her every move and using advanced technology to read her mind. The site had some unintentionally hilarious moments, like when White or someone else posted pictures of some very ratty long johns worn through at the crotch as proof that someone was breaking into their home and wearing out their clothes.

But ultimately, there was nothing funny about any of it because no matter whether or not you believe these people’s claims, the fact remains that they think this is happening to them and some are terrified. Regardless, the first link on the Alphabetical Site list White had on her site was to a review of Gloria Naylor’s 1996. So I had to get a copy. It took me a while to make myself read it. And I don’t even really want to discuss it here because I know that the end result will be a lot of e-mails if not comments from people who genuinely think they are victims of gang or multiple stalkers and will accuse me of being part of the vast conspiracy of people loosening the buttons on their coats, taking their new tires and replacing them with bald radials in order to make them miserable, or beaming thought rays into their brains to inspire suicide. But I read it and by my own messed up, self-imposed rules, discuss it I must.

Availability: Published in 2005 by Third World Press, it is still in print via the publisher’s website or you can get a used copy here:

Comments: I am a grad school dropout. I finished one semester and realized I was just not cut out for it. I was 26 and didn’t want anybody telling me what to read anymore because I just wanted to be left alone with my true crime, my conspiracy theories, my Loch Ness monster photo analyses and my Fay Weldons. I flat out didn’t have the mental discipline it took to get my Master’s, which was no surprise really because as an undergrad, I would stay up until the wee hours after studying to read the books I wanted to read, sometimes faking my way through classes because I couldn’t bring myself to read Beowulf or Mrs. Dalloway. But in that one semester of grad school, I took an African-American women’s writers class and studied Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor. We read The Women of Brewster Place and Mama Day, the latter being not a great novel, but not a bad one either. And the former, in addition to winning a National Book Award in 1983, was a favorite of Oprah, who starred as one of the characters in the mini-series based on the book.

I wonder if Oprah has read 1996. I wonder what she thinks about this book, about what has happened to Gloria Naylor. Something in me tells me she hasn’t read this book. Nor have most Naylor fans who may stumble across this discussion. I am using large quotes from this book in order to discuss it thoroughly and if it seems like I am ridiculing Naylor or anyone else who believes in mind control or gang stalking, I’m not. But if I don’t use her words and react to them with candor, it will be impossible to show why this book is so shocking and so odd.

Gloria Naylor purchased a dream home on St. Helena Island in South Carolina. She set out to spend her summers there, relaxing away from New York and gardening. All was idyllic except for Eunice Simon’s cats. Her neighbor’s cats routinely dug and defecated in her garden. Visiting with Simon did Naylor no good and relations between the two degenerated. Things came to a head when Naylor put out poison to kill tree rats and ended up killing one of Simon’s cats instead. Yes, as in every book I read these days, there is a dead cat in 1996. Things spiral completely out of control when Naylor loses it in a supermarket and snipes at Eunice, “You bitch.” Simon hears “Jew Bitch” and it’s katy bar the door.

At this point, the book slides completely into speculation on Naylor’s part, a retelling of what she thinks must have happened (and bear in mind, Eunice Simon is a pseudonym, as are most of the names in this book, so trying to research what happened to Naylor is impossible). According to Naylor, Simon’s brother is highly placed in the National Security Agency, and though he is tired of his oversensitive sister, he finds that Naylor has tenuous social ties to Black Muslims and begins to make her life hell on those grounds. Using the anti-Jew sentiment that Eunice misheard in the supermarket combined with anti-Semitism perceived as the aim behind Black Muslim groups, Dick Simon from the NSA not only launches an investigative campaign against Naylor, but he also calls in the local ADL to assist stalking and tailing her.

Naylor’s garden is killed off by stalkers. Her home is broken into. She is followed everywhere she goes. Her computer is hacked. Three students recruited by the NSA to torment her – she calls them The Boys – terrorize her at all hours. A friend who visits her is threatened. She returns to New York and the organized stalking continues. Every few minutes, cars stop and open and slam close their doors outside her apartment. Neighbors let the NSA set up a computer and satellite in their home so that thought rays can be beamed into Naylor’s brain. These thoughts they send her are meant to cause her to try to kill herself. When Naylor fights back against the thought rays via inner strength, the NSA ups the ante and begins to read her thoughts and respond to them in real time via typed words on a computer, a sort of intercranial instant message conversation. Untold amounts of money and man hours are spent on tailing and antagonizing Naylor, who accidentally killed a cat and spoke admiringly of the Million Man March.

Sigh…

I am not going to dither here as others have who have read this book, refusing to comment on the factual truth of the events as Naylor perceives them. Outside of sites on organized and gang stalking, you will find scholars weasel out of dealing with the horror of the content by stating the largely irrelevant: that whether or not you believe Naylor was a victim of organized citizen and government stalking, isn’t this an interesting look at race relations in America, a sober reminder of the potential for a tyrannical police state or a fascinating combination of narrative fiction and speculation? That’s some bullshit right there, folks.

I won’t waffle because it is a condescending move not to state facts plainly because I don’t want to look like I am calling a renowned writer crazy. Yes, race relations are still terrible in this country. Yes, the government is intrusive. And maybe Naylor set off a Jewish neighbor with some ties to the NSA and Naylor was investigated a bit rigorously as a result. But nothing else here that Naylor describes as a fictional narrative of true events is even plausible. There are those who think that the fallout of her dispute with her neighbor caused Naylor to become mentally ill. I have no idea. But this book is full of delusions.

When a person says they are stalked, I can believe them. When a person says they were investigated rigorously by the government, I can believe it. Believe me, I can believe it. We all have stories to tell in this post 1984, post 9/11 age. But when a person tells me that the government has been reading their mind with a computer and a type of satellite, typing in responses to their thoughts in an abusive argument, not only can I not believe it, but it brings into doubt even the rational, reasonable accusations the person made. Given the paranoiac belief that Jews are fueling the attacks against her, reliance that Naylor has genuine understanding of what happened to her is crucial to being able to tolerate this book as much more than an anti-Jewish polemic in which a misunderstood insult in a grocery store can launch the entire force of the Anti-Defamation League in a campaign of terror. But then again, I also think only a True Believer in the utter corruption and complete, almost God-like competence of our government will be able to believe the whole of 1996.

This is gonna be one of my longer discussions so read the rest under the jump.

Our government does terrible things and can never keep it a secret. The government tapped phones and monitored online usage of citizens after the invasion of Iraq and could not keep it secret. If our government had the power to read minds and implant thoughts, it would not be a classified secret for long and they would not invest the incredible man hours to use this technology on the handful of desperate people who think they are being abused in this manner. It took a team of people, if Naylor is to be believed, to organize the campaign against her, using private citizens in the ADL and members of the NSA, as well as students recruited and sent to the remote South Carolina island where she lived. Expensive and esoteric technology was installed in the homes of private citizens, agents were flown all over the country, homes were rented, and countless man hours spent harassing Naylor, and not, say, the mafia, suspected child molesters, drug traffickers or groups the government thinks are subversive, like the actual Nation of Islam. Naylor because she killed a cat and was suspected of uttering a Jewish slur trumped all of the true criminals and counter culture groups the NSA could have trailed.

The book also makes it clear that even with the added element of being unable to believe much of what Naylor says, it also seems as if Naylor was her own worst enemy talking to her neighbor with the cats. She initially approached her neighbor with cookies to discuss the cats. The second time she went over, she was not particularly polite.

She was doing what she could, she told me, but her babies needed exercise. I suggested she put them on a leash and walk them up and down the Avenue of the Oaks.

So, this little town has a New York writer who comes only for the summer and her closest neighbor is expected to keep her cats in when they are accustomed to having outside access. As an outsider in a small, insular town, her reaction to the situation with people who lived there full-time and for much longer than she had would have rankled everyone, even folk like me who think pet cats are safest indoors. And as an outsider and a woman of color, her time in the South in a small town may have triggered some latent paranoia. And who’s to say some paranoia was not warranted? Small towns in the South can suck mightily even for those who have lived in them for generations. The late Steve Gilliard discussed the complete culture shock he experienced when he, a man of color and native New Yorker, visited South Carolina to see family. As a woman who has lived in the South my entire life, I can tell you that despite the fact that we have a black President, entrenched and at times violence racism is still all too real. If she got her neighbor’s hackles up, I can understand why Naylor may have had her’s up as well. In the beginning, it seems easy to explain what is happening to Naylor, but later nothing is simple.

Oh yeah, in this scene we also discover the cat Naylor dislikes the most is named Orwell. I am not making this up. Then she puts out poison for tree rats and accidentally fells the mighty Orwell. Had I been Eunice Simon, I would have been terribly angry at Naylor for “accidentally” killing my cat.

The death of Orwell the Cat triggers a series of break-ins, Naylor’s garden gets ruined, and her computer is hacked. Frankly, to someone not in the grips of paranoia, her computer compromise sounds more like hack-kiddies than a government probe.

I booted up again, went back to into my WordPerfect program, and after a short while there was another spoof box that was labeled “Trouble.” And the text in this window read, “Big Trouble. We’re Gonna Die.”

Naylor begins to wonder if the government was in fact responsible for the hack on her computer because the whole thing was very unprofessional. But instead of assuming that she was hacked because some hacker somewhere wanted to see if he or she could do it, she decides that perhaps private citizens who are in conjunction with the government are responsible, civilians she thinks have “the power to disrupt my life.”

In the first 50 pages or so, I clung to the idea that maybe this was not going to be as bad as I anticipated but the next passage of Naylor’s imaginings put to rest any hope that I was going to be able to finish this book without a heavy heart. She conveys the next scene from the observations of an NSA agent.

Looking around at the group gathered in Eunice Simon’s living room, he realizes it isn’t going to be easy. The room is packed with operatives from the ADL and NSA, and each is arguing for a piece of the action.

Yes. A room full of NSA agents and private citizens have assembled to argue over who gets to stalk, harass and terrorize a woman who killed a cat and has a tenuous connection with the Nation of Islam. If that seems reasonable to you, you may want to stop reading now.

It goes on:

Things will be a lot more efficient now. First of all, they now have the manpower for blanket surveillance. There is no place she can go or plan to go without their knowledge. There is no one she can talk to, fax, or e-mail without them knowing about it. They can follow her on trains, on planes and definitely in that red truck. She is a woman alone, for God’s sake. She has no organization behind her, has few friends and no help. If she tries to get help, they’ll know about it in plenty of time to divert it, or at least to plan their next strategy.

This passage is a litmus test. If you see how this could happen, chances are all of this discussion is an affront to you. If you wonder why it is that the US government and citizen groups would stalk one woman with this degree of manpower and organization when there are anti-government, overtly anti-Semitic and openly violent groups that pose a far greater threat to the fabric of this country than Naylor, then chances are you understand why this book gave me stomach cramps.

Once she returns to New York, Naylor seals the deal for anyone who was still on the fence as to whether or not she was completely delusional. After installing a tiny computer and satellite in Naylor’s neighbors’ home – her neighbors, in Naylor’s mind, are complicit in the campaign of terror – a man Naylor calls Agent Browne demonstrates how the whole set up works.

“Now,” Agent Browne says, “aim the dish toward my head and type any word into the computer.”

Paulo types in “hello.”

“You typed ‘hello,’” Agent Browne says. “Now, type in a whole sentence.” Paulo types. Agent Browne still has his back to Paulo. “You typed ‘Bring me the keys to the kingdom,” Browne says. “And how do I know? I heard it.” He taps his forehead. “I know what you’re probably thinking, and believe me, this is no magic trick. You have in your hands some of the most advanced technology in the world. We’ve known for a couple of decades that sound can be produced in someone’s head by radiating it with microwaves. It’s now been refined to work with this computer program. This program translates key strokes into bursts of microwaves that bypass the ears and hit the auditory section of the brain. You are, in effect, speaking directly to the brain. And the brain ‘hears’ you. For all the target knows, she’s just had a fleeting thought that originated within her.”

Naylor then goes on to say that the satellite has a 50 foot range and the vocabulary of the computer is 72,000 words. This is mad science here. None of this science is now nor has ever been a threat. The government may be working on it but aside from the research of paranoiacs, there is no proof. This is science fiction. It gets more fantastic as more science fiction gets added to the equation when simply beaming thoughts into Naylor’s head does not work. Dick Simon shows up with a newer infernal device.

“This is vastly different from what you’ve been using because it gives you feedback. You know what an EEG is–a machine that reads brain waves. Well, this is the mother of all EEGs because it translates the brain waves that make up thought. Every time you think a word or a sentence, you hear it inside your head, don’t you. This machine hears it as well as prints it out onto this screen.”

…

“It’s a world without secrets,” Paulo says.

“No more secrets,” Simon says. “We’ve unlocked the last frontier where secrets can be kept–within the human mind.”

“What’s the vocabulary range?” Paulo asks.

“One hundred thousand words in English. But we’ve programmed in many more languages than that. The best part of this for you is that once you’ve read her mind, you can respond with the microwave hearing device, and she’ll hear you the same way she’s been hearing you for weeks.”

“So, it’s like she’s holding a conversation with herself,” Hallum says.

This mind-reading, thought implanting device drives Naylor to a psychiatrist, who ends up being bullied by the stalking crew and believes Naylor’s tale of persecution. I wish he had come forward to back up her story but then again, perhaps the psychiatrist is as speculative as the idea that Eunice Simon has a brother in the NSA willing to do all of this because someone killed his sister’s cat and is claimed to have uttered an anti-Jewish slur.

And from there, Naylor uses the worst sort of evidence gathering to prove her case that her mind is being read. She cites the case of John St. Clair Akwei, a former NSA employee who claims that in 1990-1991 he was harassed electronically with the same devices Naylor claims were used on her. He sued and his claims were entered into evidence and this “evidence” has been used by those who need it to prove a vast conspiracy on the part of the government to stalk its citizens and read their minds.

When Naylor continues on in her evidence, using the name Barbara Hartwell as a source, I almost quit reading in despair. She is one of the most desperately mentally unsound people I have stumbled across online. And of course, Eleanor White, she of the site I mention above, is given as a source that there is such a thing as synthetic telepathy. And Cheryl Welsh… I can’t even go into detail here about why these sources are so questionable. It’s just too sad. Again, in the interest of self-preservation, I will not link to these people because I take seriously the comments I get here, and if I link to them, I will be over-run with comments and forced to respond to True Believers who think the government is reading their mind, putting dirt on their floors while they are out and drinking their milk straight from the carton. You can’t argue with a True Believer. You shouldn’t even try. Google these names if you like if it helps to put all of this into perspective.

Naylor herself recognizes the terrible problem involved in all of this “proof.”

Their problem was the same as mine and other victims of mind control technology: how do you get people to believe? Unfortunately, information on mind control is sandwiched between reports of underground tunnels where gray aliens work for the U.S. government and sightings of UFOs. Quack stuff… Most people who love their country don’t trust their government. Even if you got them to concede that the government has such technology, their next question would be, “How do you know that it’s happening to you?” Your only response would be, “I know it’s happening to me because it’s happening to me.”

And that’s a whole lot of problem, isn’t it? Because given that believers in mind control think this technology is being kept in neighbors’ homes, being used by arrogant college students recruited to stalk them, and is so available that it can be dredged up in order to be used against the innocuous likes of Gloria Naylor, Eleanor White, and Cheryl Welsh, then it is not too much to ask for someone somewhere to get one of these machines and demonstrate online to the world how it works, take it to sympathetic authorities like the psychiatrist that Naylor says believes her, and show the world instead of relying on speculation.

Let me pose my own question, and this is the hardest question to pose to those who believe they are victims of excessive government probes that include stalking, mind reading and similar: what makes you so special that the government or any person in the government wants you dead or wants to spend millions of dollars tormenting you? There is a damnably sad level of narcissism that permits a person to think they are the focus of such negative energy, expense and pointless aggravation. There is an even more damnable randomness to this – Eleanor White and Gloria Naylor have been subject to mind control but John Gotti and my third grade teacher have not. Why Naylor and not J.D. Salinger, Ingrid Newkirk, Spike Lee, or, frankly, me? The randomness to which citizens get selected for this sort of abuse is baffling.

Naylor herself knows that discussing this is almost futile and her pleas for understanding and almost bitter reconstructions of how she thinks people will react are heartbreaking. She is talking through Dick Simon in the following passage, wherein he speculates about how they will be doing Naylor a favor if they finally drive her to suicide rather than face the humiliation that will come from publishing a book about her ordeal:

They will be saving her from the public humiliation of having this book trashed in every review medium in the country. That is, if she even finds a publisher. They’ll shake their heads sadly over the fact that a writer of her caliber has gone bonkers. She’s seeing Jews coming out of the woodwork, government agents tapping her phone and hacking into her computer, cars mysteriously driving past her when she’s out in the street. Was she planning on fiction or science-fiction? Either way it would be doomed. In the best-case scenario for her, she would find a publisher to print her nonsense and it sells more than fifty copies, but there she would be the queen of the weirdoes (sic), crowned by the same people who brought you UFOs at Roswell, time travel and invisible CIA agents.

It is a mistake to think that because Naylor is an intelligent woman whose writing shows a deep integrity on her part that she cannot go insane. Just because she has the self-awareness to understand how unbelievable her story is, it does not mean she is not suffering from paranoid delusions. Many think that such delusions would render her a gibbering mess who could no longer write or have a normal life outside of the scope of her delusions and that is not the case. This happens to people and while it absorbs most of their life, it does not mean they cannot pay rent, buy groceries and otherwise seem normal. We just don’t expect it to happen to a woman whose first attempt at writing garnered her high accolades, a woman who has had fame outside the literary ghetto because Oprah liked her book. As Naylor says herself in 1996:

Paranoia is a slow poison, and a lethal one. It usually starts with small things and then grows to color almost everything in your life.

She is right and yet I hope she is wrong in the long run because Naylor is a talented novelist whose place in literary history does not need to be tainted or her words dismissed because she had a break with reality and wrote a book about it. I hope one day she leaves behind these delusions – she may have and we don’t know. But in a way, Dick Simon was right – the best case scenario has played out – few people know about this book and hopefully this cancerous paranoia will not be Naylor’s legacy.

Authors: Various, edited by Patrick Huyghe and Dennis Stacy

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s an edition (13th, interestingly enough) of articles from The Anomalist, a website that features a largely Fortean collection of weirdness. I discovered this particular edition during a search on Nick Redfern, who is both quite bald and a British examiner of the odd. I loved his book Three Men Seeking Monsters and felt his presence in this book would be an omen of the oddness within and I was proven correct.

Availability: Published by Anomalist Books in 2007, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Despite the fact that I clearly am a denizen of cyberspace, I am old enough and my eyes cranky enough to prefer not to read long, involved stories using a computer interface. This persnickety nature puts me at a disadvantage because I miss out on a lot of really interesting topics but it’s never fun when my eyeballs begin to spasm so I live with it. As someone who loves the weird as much as I do, it is almost shameful to admit I had no idea the The Anomalist website existed. Since I fancy myself a person who, if not an expert on the weird, is at least very familiar with most elements of oddness in the world, it was shocking and gratifying not only to find so much on the site I had never read before (my left eye is twitching, thanks for asking), but also to find a lot of content in this book wholly new to me. I really did order it blind, simply using Nick Redfern as sort of Fortean dowsing stick.

Sadly, Redfern’s article, “The Flying Saucer That Never Was,” was not a huge hit with me, though that is hardly Redfern’s fault. I often do not find the topic of UFOs to be particularly interesting, though that is certainly open for qualification. In his article, Redfern examines an old, evidently cheesy UFO movie and how director and actor Mikel Conrad’s claims of having seen a UFO and the film itself caused the US government to investigate closely Conrad’s claims. Though UFOs and much of the conspiracy around them doesn’t really capture my imagination, weird-wise (in that I can’t recall a single UFO case, like Roswell, causing me to fall off the deep end and read every book on the topic), the article was still amusing.

There were some definite winners in this collection. John Repion’s “Suspension of Disbelief” discussed the legend of a clown in a tub pulled by geese and how it supposedly caused the Yarmouth Bridge disaster of 1845. This research was right up my alley, investigating a small bit of history and determining if it is made of truth or fable. “The Black Flash of Cape Cod: True Heir of Spring-Heeled Jack” by Theo Paijams was entirely new to me. I had not before read of an entity similar to Springheeled Jack terrorizing New England as late as 1945. His research and speculation on who or what the creature may have been were interesting indeed, including the appendix to the article that outlined similar sightings across the United States. Loren Coleman, whose work in cryptozoology made him known to before reading him in this collection, penned “Between Worlds: The Three Nephites,” and while I like Coleman’s work in other places, this article was sort of doomed with me because I tend to find attempts to prove through history points of religious faith tiresome. Even so, it was still an interesting read.

There were some articles that left me largely as soon as I read them. “They Dine Among Us” by Cliff Willett, which was about the eating habits of fairies, did not have much resonance with me. Nor did “Bioanomalistics: A Proposal” by David Hricenak. That is not to say these articles were not interesting or well-written. It’s just that I think that with the paranormal and the Fortean, people tend to have specific areas of interest and topics that deviate too much or dwell on elements that are not relevant to one’s interests will not appeal. For instance, I love tales of Bigfoot and Yetis but sea serpents, not so much. Therefore, “Sargon’s Sea Serpent: The First Sighting in Cryptozoology” by Ulrich Magin just didn’t do it for me, and that reason lies with me, not with the author.

Only one article annoyed me. “In Touch With Other Worlds” by Mark Macy strayed into that area of the paranormal that I like to call “squick.” I label anything squick that in any manner can prey on human emotion in such a way to encourage belief in something that whether true or untrue will not wholly benefit them and may, in fact, lead them down a path of utter delusion. Evidently a man named George Meek invented a “science” called Instrumental Tran-Communication in order to talk to the dead and a device called a Spiricom aids in this end. Voices through white noise on the radio, spirit groups using improbable technology to talk to the dead – none of this is new, yet all of it is deeply horrible to me because not only does the science never make an ounce of sense, but it is so very, very easy to manipulate the sick and recently bereaved into believing all kinds of hokum. Even if there is no profit motive, luring people can be an ego trip so there is always a motive behind this sort of nonsense.

Then it descends into utter madness with a new approach to spirit photography wherein one examines in extremely magnified detail a photograph. According to this article, one can see people in these photographs. In one photo, the extreme closeup of what appears to be a woman’s lower face yields half the head of a different man, according to the author. There is no way to describe how ridiculous this is in words – you have to see these claims in order fully to understand how ludicrous they are. If I magnified a picture of one of my cats’ behinds I am certain you could, if you tried hard enough, find an image of the lost city of Atlantis, a play by Shakespeare or an image of Penn Jillette shitting blood at the ridiculousness of it all.

There is a fine line between wacky research and outright advocacy and no other article but Macy’s crossed that line. And to people more open to these sorts of things, maybe it would be interesting. Me? I’m closed and I hope any person facing or having faced terrible personal loss will not get sucked into this false science promising faith in the unknowable.

Now that I have my complaint out of the way, let me share the article that strangely enough had the most resonance for me. As an atheist American, it stands to reason that I have little interest in my spiritual being. Also, as a person prone to excessive complaining and genuine laziness, I avoid anything that causes me nausea or requires lots of fasting. Therefore it was surprising to me how much I liked and absorbed “Medieval Mysticism and Its Empirical Kinship to Ayahuasca” by Victoria Alexander. Meticulously researched, from both the historical records and Alexander’s own experience, it is a fascinating look at common threads between Catholic mysticism and users of a violent, purgative hallucinogen. It was utterly fascinating to me. My reluctance towards the mystical runs hard and deep, starting from an early age, but I love reading books about the lives of the saints and how some mortified their flesh with self-lashing or starved themselves into states of mental ecstasy. This combination of knowledge I already had with completely new ideas on the similarities of achieving a spiritual state in the presence of one’s god made this a fine article for me, indeed.

Alexander explained her own path for spirituality as she used ayahuasca with a shaman, and the very stringent routine she followed beforehand. Though I know I could never do such a thing, even the nausea, extreme caloric restriction and, frankly, the potential of bad hallucinations seemed worth the discomfort. (And my god, because I am a complete philistine, I could not help but remember the scene from the “Viva Los Muertos” episode of The Venture Brothers when Brock Samson and the Order of the Triad take ayahuasca to interesting results. There was also much barfing, which is always amusing to someone like me.)

All in all, eleven articles and only one I can say I had absolutely no use for. I suspect every lover of the strange, unusual, hidden or just plain whacked-out will find something to love in this collection. I recommend it and plan to buy more of these anthologies in the future.

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.

Author: James Shelby Downard

Type of Book: Conspiracy theory, occult symbology, Masons, utter insanity

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, the whole thing sets off my oddometer, but by the time the young Downard claims he saw Alexander Graham Bell involved in sex magick rituals on Jekyll Island, the odd credentials of this book were no longer in question.

Availability: Published by Feral House in 2006, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Oh god. This is one of those moments where in I suspect I am in way over my head. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I fear the Masons and loathe the Ku Klux Klan as much as any self-respecting conspiratologist should. I think there is a level of “street theater” in our economic and political processes, a sort of active public facade that, if the veneer were ever pulled away, would show us far more sinister than it would positive. I think the banking industry and the political system in America are all corrupt beyond belief and that those who operate behind the scenes in these systems are people whose interests in no way reflect the well-being of the American people.

That having been said, I need to make it clear I think that “mystical sex circuses,” “witchcraft sex magick orgies,” and “sexathons that aim at nothing more than racial blood mixing” are neither really part of the secrecy of the economic system behind the economic system, nor are they things that most people really need to worry about in the course of their everyday life. I also suspect that I don’t lean towards believing that

…the mythology of Revelations will be followed like Tinker-Toy instructions: a time of tribulation will come first, after which survivors will be made “one” via a post-tribulation “rapture” spawned by the technical sorcery of having their brain pleasure centers titillated magnetically so that all will cum together.

But then again, a lack of genuine belief in the mystical has always been my Achilles heel.

I suspect there may be rabid disagreement with my above assertions and I’m okay with that because I am relatively sure that a very young James Shelby Downard didn’t witness a man called Cock Robin blow Alexander Graham Bell on Jekyll Island. Knowing that James Shelby Downard likely didn’t exist and was, perhaps, the brain child of three different men doesn’t play as much into my declaration of “Pants!” at the notion of Bell, just, you know, having sex magick orgies in front of kids as you might think. This is The Parable of the Whackjobs, and none of this ever happened but was written to illustrate certain points, like mystical toponomy, symbolism of names and an uneasy sense that things are not entirely as they should be. Call me naive if you must.

But whatever you call me, you need to read this book because it is a hoot. Purportedly the autobiography of one James Shelby Downard, who was born in 1913 and died in 1998 before he could finish his tale. He is most famous for his essay, “King/Kill 33: Masonic Symbolism in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” I read that monster years ago but had no idea the full body of ideas Downard (or whomever) brought to the table.

This book reads like those Home Alone movies, you know the ones. A precocious kid with questionable parents keeps finding himself in violent situations wherein he bests his attackers. Imagine those movies except Kevin gets stalked and attacked by Freemasons and the Klan and you pretty much have the gist of this book. According to Downard, he was set up as a scapegoat (pharmakos) or symbolic whipping boy, presumably by his criminally negligent and downright weird parents, and spent his entire life standing up for the American Way by thwarting attack after attack after attack and witnessing unspeakable acts while besting the worst evil there is.

I’m not saying Downard doesn’t have interesting ideas. Some fascinating conclusions are drawn in this book and to be completely frank, at times, some of the scattershot in this book that hits the target is a little eerie. But in order to appreciate that you have to read the rest of the book for what it is: a fictional story, a parable, that through extremes tries to show things the author believes are buried from our sight. These are myths for the paranoid, bizarre, over-the-top fables meant to tell a larger story through unbelievable detail. Or Downard was really a plucky young man who foiled that Joe Pesci time and time again. Believe what you want, but it is undeniable that this book is interesting and a fun read.

You get pushed off the deep end fast in this book, starting the very second Adam Parfrey finishes his introduction. Here’s a small taste of the paranoia and weird associations Downard presents in his own introduction:

…I got a glimpse of frightful memories from the long-dead past and, perhaps more importantly, recognized the past for the corpus mysticum that it is. When my mystical past revealed how it had really occurred, it became a horrendous thing cloaked in iniquity, that old now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t that preserves the criminal mysteries of Masonic oz art (M oz art).

Get used to that, those interesting little connections in Downard’s head. He sees connections in ways that will change how you look at things, synchronous connects that, for some, lead to sinister conclusions.

Of course, there is mention of cats, burning them in fact. I bring this up only because I am beginning to despair of all the mentions of dead cats in all the books I read. If I traipse down the primrose path that Downard stomped, I would begin to think there is something connecting all these dead cats mentioned in every damn book I seem to pick up these days. For now I’m just chalking it up to bad luck.

The book begins with young Downard being secured spread-eagle in his bed on Christmas Eve. He was five. He was unpinned in the morning only to find switches and coal in his stocking. We move from there to a shootout with Masons wherein the tot escapes and blows stuff up. His mother made him dress like a girl. There’s the above-mentioned trip to Jekyll Island where he saw all kinds of things and was almost killed in some sort of magick theater ritual. He gets abandoned and lives like a dog until he is reunited with his mother. He is almost killed countless other times. He thwarts the Klan, he finds Million Dollar Gold Certificates the way I find cat hair on my chair. He is nailed to a tree by the Klan but only the size of his small anus prevents him from being sodomized. He liberates a white sex slave. He finds all kinds of bizarre “grave goods” from the tomb of a Mason only to have FDR offer to purchase them and when he gets the check for a million dollars, his parents talk him out of cashing it. His wife turned out to be a mind-controlled sex slave. He explains the symbolic meanings of dunce caps and bull whips. He finds all sorts of parallels between innocuous ideas, discussing usual ringers like Disney and Proctor & Gamble, but also making the average person aware of why it is we should be alarmed if we see a man curse a pig and then touch our water faucet. This is, like, maybe 5% of the insanity in this book. To discuss it in depth would require far more time than I have and more gin than I am willing to drink.

The best part of this book is how through it all, Downard never gets a clue. I mean, after the third time the Masons tried to kill me, after the Klan had nailed me to a tree, after I’d almost been choked to death by Cock Robin while everyone chanted, “Non Person, Non Person,” I’d be suspicious of anyone who asked me to fish around in an old family tomb. After I noticed the tomb had been booby-trapped, I probably wouldn’t have gone on in. Not Downard. If this man existed, we need to find his grave and take some of his bones to have him reconstituted when DNA technology catches up with my imagination. We need more Downards – clever, foolhardy, indestructible, paranoid yet open to adventure. An Army of Downards? Hell, America would be restored to her old glory in no time.

So yeah, read this book. Home Alone combined with Masonic paranoia and more mystical esoterica than you can absorb in one reading. I highly recommend this fine lunacy.

So when Mr. Oddbooks discovered that Brave New Books has been operating in Austin for 4 years, I was annoyed that I had not heard of them, but I am also a hermit so it comes as little surprise. Dubious, I agreed to check the place out and am glad I did. In fact, I was so pleased that I may start trying to visit other small book stores around Texas and beyond. Or I may not. I’m a notorious flake. But you never know.

Brave New Books stocks titles that would appeal to those of us with interests in the fringe, lunatic or otherwise, as well as maintaining a nice little DVD section. The store also runs films in a back room, and hosts discussions on relatively diverse topics. On Saturday, July 24, there will be a discussion about the Templars and Christopher Columbus. Leaving my home two weekends in a row seems arduous to me because the only thing I hate worse than leaving my house is leaving my house, but I may well try to attend.

I asked the owner, Harlan Dietrich, to tell me what book in the store he felt I needed to read. Because he is not the indiscriminate conspiracy nut that I am, he recommended The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin. I had heard some buzz around this book but am sometimes mentally lazy, preferring to read easier, more salacious sorts of books (evidenced by the ones I selected on my own and by the bulk of what I review here) and likely would not have purchased it had he not recommended it.

I also purchased:
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black
The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction by Mark Dice
Apocalypse Waiting To Happen, The Plagues That Threaten Us All by Dr. John Coleman
Liquid Conspiracy: JFK, LSD, the CIA, Area 51 and UFOs by George Piccard
And, best of all, the last copy of 9-11 Descent into Tyranny: The New World Order’s Dark Plans to Turn Earth into a Prison Planet by local hero, Alex Jones, whom I sometimes mock, but love nonetheless.

And though I am linking to my Amazon account via some of the above links, I only do so when the book I purchased there is not on Brave New Books’ online ordering system or if I know I got the last copy and linking to it could cause the store some hassle. So you can shop there even if you don’t live in Austin – browse the site’s selection as well as their events section. It appears that this store, unlike some of the other independent book stores in town, is contributing to the community with free lectures and a space to watch films. Though I am laughably the worst person to be encouraging community involvement since my own community mainly involves simply the two levels in my own home, I think such engagement is to be lauded and supported. There was a lively political discussion taking place around the front desk while we were there, and the whole vibe of the place just suited me. I encourage you to shop there.

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.

Someone left a comment on the review that he died of a heroin overdose on June 17. A Google confirmed this as fact.

You know, I never felt bad taking him to task for being a self-absorbed artiste because I know he ultimately knew he was sort of a poseur as well. His memoir is dripping with jabs at himself, a careful balance of grandiosity and self-loathing. He is not a man who would want to be remembered fondly so much as he would just want to be remembered, period. In fact, one of the reasons people think he died accidentally rather than a suicide is because he would never have missed the chance to write a fabulous suicide note.

But a heroin overdose? God dammit. Just… No. No. He needed to die an old man, tottering around in a dusty, baroque mansion, in a velvet waist coat and shoes with buckles on them, hair dyed defiantly black, a slightly more fabulous Quentin Crisp. But he wasn’t just a dandy. He was a dandy in the underworld. So I guess an overdose isn’t so unexpected, really.

But mostly, I just hate the fact that he died in such a clichéd manner.

Dandy Warhols – Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth found on YouClubVideo

I will also never know if he is the person who left this delightfully insane comment on my review. I kind of think it was. I sort of hope it was.

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, though I endorse reading the former and lying and saying you’ve read the latter because why torture yourself and it’s not like anyone will ever know the truth. 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 forest and Johnny is the tree 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.

If you want a clear outline of this book, there are numerous places online to find such things. You will not find a clear outline here. All you will find is why I love Johnny Truant and how, using one of the most non-linear methods of storytelling ever, Danielewski created a memorable, sympathetic, complex character. A character you almost miss out on in all the analysis this book provokes. Yes, the references to Jonah in the whale in reference to Navidson in the maze juxtaposed with the fact that Truant’s mother died in the Whalestoe are interesting. Trying to piece together all the names in this book, like the weird link between Zampanò and Truant, revealed in the cipher code Truant’s mother creates to send him letters in the midst of her paranoia, can derail you as Johnny’s life unfolds. All those maddening details, little clues that lead nowhere but away from where you need to go.

Johnny is one of the most unreliable narrators ever, and owns his unreliability, admitting that he changed the text at times to allow him to put in a related footnote. But he also doesn’t do much editing, even when Zampanò makes mistakes.

Zampanò himself probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I’ve come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul.

There is no mistaking why this statement, with “of” instead of have (a chronic error in his writing) and punctuation misuse, is important. Johnny, solitary himself, with only a couple of friends and alienating sexual couplings, before long will become a mass of human errors and mistakes, both of which are already manifest in his writing.

Johnny, a tattoo artist, is scarred heavily on his arms, the result of a terrible childhood accident when boiling oil scalded him. Johnny shows, early as a child, how he will handle all the trauma that comes his way.

It’s kinda funny, but despite my current professional occupation, I don’t have any tattoos. Just the scars, the biggest ones of course being the ones you know about, this strange seething melt running from the inside of both elbows all the way up to the end of both wrists, where–I might as well tell you–a sizzling skillet of corn oil unloaded its lasting wrath on my efforts to keep it from the kitchen floor. “You tried to catch it all,” my mother had often said of that afternoon when I was only four.

Johnny will reach out to all the damage that comes his way, even if he doesn’t tell the entire truth about it. For example he tells people that his scars on his arms came from an incident with a Japanese Martial Arts Cult.

Johnny crafts lies into a manageable veil to shield him from the truth – he was damaged as a boy beyond all belief. His mother, losing her mind, tried to strangle him. His father died and he was forced into foster care where he was eventually beaten by a former Marine. His body is covered with scars, he sports a broken incisor.

…scars are much harder to read. Their complex inflections do not resemble the reductive ease any tattoo, no matter how extensive, colorful or elaborate the design. Scars are the paler pain of survival, received unwillingly and displayed in the language of injury.

That Johnny is covered in scars is both a comfort and a form of foreshadowing. All those scars show he has and probably will survive anything.

In discussing the obsession Johnny thinks overcame Zampanò, he gives a pretty good idea what is happening to him as he reads and annotates Zampanò’s manuscript:

As I strain now to see that the Navidson Record, beyond this strange filigree of imperfection, the murmer of Zampanò’s thoughts, endlessly searching, reaching, but never quite concluding, barely even pausing, a ruin of pieces, gestures and quests, a compulsion brought on by— well that’s precisely it, when I look past it all I only get an inkling of what tormented him. Though at last if the fire’s invisible, the pain’s not–mortal and guttural, torn out of him, day and night, week after week, month after month, until his throat’s stripped and he can barely speak and he rarely sleeps. He tries to escape his invention but never succeeds because for whatever reason, he is compelled, day and night, week after week, month after month, to continue building the very thing responsible for his own incarceration.

Though is that right?

I’m the one whose throat is stripped. I’m the one who hasn’t spoken in days. And if I sleep, I don’t know when anymore.

Zampanò is a blind man who created a labyrinth of words to occupy him, to feed his obsession. Johnny is the man lost in the maze. This passage also should give the reader two strong clues about Johnny. Despite being a person who uses “of” for “have,” his intellect is quite keen. More interesting, his passages can often mimic the tale he is reading, using endless comma clauses, repetition, words wandering into a maze. I am all too familiar with this disorganization of thought in the middle of a brainstorm, this need to tell the tale without stopping for metaphoric breath, struggling to be understood. Johnny is breaking down as we read his footnotes, documenting too clearly his decline.

Johnny Falls in love with a stripper he called Thumper. She is most notable for having a tattoo above her privates that boasts “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Despite his drunken, unfortunate couplings with other woman, Johnny falls hard for Thumper and while the reader initially does not see her appeal, it isn’t important. Johnny does. When his life falls apart and he decides to leave his job and apartment, he stops back by the tattoo shop where he works in order to say goodbye and to leave a gift for Thumper. He had earlier had appraised a necklace his mother had left him, worth $4200. Despite sorely needing the money, Johnny makes another choice (and the f substitutions for s come from Johnny’s reaction to an archaic English quote used earlier):

Maybe in some half-hearted attempt to tie up some loofe ends, I then dropped by The Fhop a couple of days later to say goodbye to everyone. Man, I muft look bad becaufe the woman who replaced me almoft screamed when she saw me walk through the door. Thumper wafn’t around but my boff promifed to give her the envelope I handed him.

“If I find out you didn’t give it to her,” I said with a smile full of rotting teeth. “I’m going to burn your life down.”

We both laughed but I could tell he was glad to fee me go.

I had no doubt Thumper would get my gift.

Then Johnny’s tale is no longer told in footnotes but in a journal that is appended to The Navidson Record. The journal is not always in chronological order. Johnny loses his apartment, lives in a hotel but can no longer afford it and ends up on the street, with his journal and a book by Dante. His external life has finally become a reflection of the internal. From his entry on October 27, 1998.

Wherever I walk people turn from me.

I’m unclean.

Johnny lives on the street but he is not completely down. When a troubled woman he slept with, Kyrie, sees him on the street, her unhinged, rich and violent boyfriend, known as Gdansk Man, tries to beat him up. From his entry on October 29:

…yelled something at me, for me to stop, which I did, waiting patiently for him to park the car, get out, walk over, wind up and hit me–he hit me twice–all of it experienced in slo-mo too, my eyebrow ringing with pain, my eye swelling with bruise, my nose compacting, capillaries bursting, flooding my face with dark blood.

He should have paid attention. He should have looked closely at that blood. Seen the color. Registered the different hue. Even the smell was off. He should have taken heed.

But he didn’t.

Needless to say, things do not end well for Gdansk Man. It’s hard to hurt a man as broken as Johnny, who has so little to lose, but the trivially violent among us who never have a problem kicking a man who’s down never notice when blood is bad. Also, I do not know exactly when Johnny stopped using “of” and began using “have” because I didn’t notice it until I typed out this passage. What the hell does it mean or signify? I have no idea except for the fact that perhaps when a man sinks to the bottom, his thoughts come clearer to him, even when he is in the grips of madness.

And then when you, the reader, are exhausted, the book takes a left turn down a dark road. Johnny discovers pictures he took and journal entries he made that he has no memory of, remnants of a psychotic road trip he took to find the house in Virginia. He travels to find the Navidson house, but he is clearly looking for more. Of course, as there is in all the books I have read recently, there is a dead cat. A cat with its head splattered on the pavement and another cat looking on, pensive, possibly grieving. One day I may undertake an analysis of why all the odd books I read seem to involve so many dead cats but for now, all I can say is enough. I’m currently reading 1996 by Gloria Naylor and not ten pages in there is a fucking dead cat. Enough all ready, okay. Anyway, some of the madness Los Angeleno Johnny expresses from his entry on May 1, 1998, in one of his bullet points:

Near the campus of William & Mary, surrounded by postcards thick with purple mountain majesty, and they are purple, I hyperventilate. It takes me a good half hour to recover. I feel sick, very sick. I can’t help thinking there’s a tumor eating away the lining of my stomach. It must be the size of a bowling ball. Then I realize I’ve forgotten to eat. It’s been over a day since I’ve last had any food. Maybe longer.

It is here that I realized that I love Johnny Truant because he is cut from the same crazy I am. Self-neglect leading to hypochondria. Possibly hallucinations. I get this man. The scars, the inability to sleep, the obsessive interests. Fuck, that I maintain this damned site, that I am in any way bothering to soldier through this review when the need for coherence has, in fact, delayed me from working on other reviews for weeks, points to an unhealthy, obsessive nature.

He goes on:

Everywhere I’ve gone, there’ve been hints of Zampanò’s history, by which I mean Navidson’s, without any real evidence to confirm any of it. I’ve combed through all the streets and fields from Distputanta to Five Forks to as far east as the Isle of Wight, and though I frequently feel close, to something important, in the end I come away with nothing.

As I read Johnny’s investigative notes, I found myself surging with hope that he would find the house. Then I remembered that the house in The Navidson Record even within the context of the book did not exist. Then I remembered Johnny himself knew the house did not exist, that Zampanò’s record was the fantastic musings of an incomprehensible mind. And yet he searched and I hoped he would find that which was making him mad.

Then Johnny steps into the realm of the utterly mad. He steps into the Realm of Nine. From May 4, 1998:

In Kent. Nine Years. What an ugly coincidence. Even glanced at my watch. 9. Fucking nine pm.
5+4+1+9+9+8+9 = 45 (or -9 yrs = 36)
4+5 = 9 (or 3+6 = 9)
Either way , it doesn’t matter.
I say it with a German accent:
Nine.

Math of the damned. It can only get worse and it does. Johnny finds the Whalestoe facility. The old mental hospital is abandoned, so he goes inside and finds his mother’s old room. From the entry on July 1, 1998:

Empty. And her bed in the corner. Even if the mattress was gone and the springs now resembled the rusted remains of a shipwreck half-buried in the sands of some half-forgotten shore.

Horror shouldn’t have buried me.
It didn’t.

I sat down and waited for her to find me.

She never did.

Navidson was a photographer haunted by the image he took of a dying, motherless child. Truant is a motherless child haunted by the legend of the photographer. Everything in this book can come full circle if you let it.

From the entry on the same day, Johnny finally finds the place where his childhood home used to stand, a lumberyard now in its place:

There would be no healing here.

I stood by the circular saws and clutched my belly. I had no idea where I was in relation to what had once existed. Maybe this had been my kitchen. Why not? The stainless steel restaurant sink there to side. The old stove over there. And here where I was standing was right where I’d been sitting, age four, at my mother’s feet, my arms flinging up, instinctually, maybe even joyfully, prepared to catch the sun. Catch the rain…

Supposedly I’d been laughing. So that accounts for the joy part. Supposedly she’d been laughing too. And then something made my mother jerk around, a slight mistake really but with what a consequence, her arm accidentally knocking a pan full of sizzling Mazola, while I, in what has to be one of the strangest reactions ever, opened my arms to play the bold, old catcher of it all, the pan bouncing harmlessly on the floor but the oil covering my forearms and transforming them into the Oceanus whirls.

This is not the first time the reader hears of how small Johnny opened his arms to catch the oil, laughing. Like all legends that shape our lives, it is a story he likely tells again and again because it means everything about him. How he was loved. How his mother meant no harm. How even the best memory is tinged with pain. How none of us leave childhood unscarred.

He goes on:

Please bless these arms. Which I found myself looking at again, carefully studying the eddies there, all those strange currents and textures, wondering what history all of it could tell, and in what kind of detail, completely unaware of the stupid redneck yelling in my ear, yelling above the engines and shrieking saws, wanting to know what the fuck I was doing there, why was I clutching my belly and taking off my shirt like that, “Are you listening to me, asshole? I said who in the hell do you think you are?”, didn’t I know I was standing on private property–and not even ending his tirade there, wanting to know if it was my desire to have him break me in half, as if that’s really the question my bare-chested silence was asking. Even now I can’t remember taking off my shirt, only looking down at my arms.

I remember that.

God, will there be no peace for him, a sense that he will arrive at an end of a journey with some comfort and elucidation? I heaved a sigh of relief at his next entries.

From September 2, 1998:

Seattle. Staying with an old friend. A pediatrician. My appearance frightened both him and his wife and she’s a doctor too. I’m underweight. Too many unexplained tremors and tics. He insists I stay with them for a couple of weeks.

September 20, 1998:

I’m much improved. My friends have been taking care of me full time. I exercise twice a day. They’ve got me on some pretty serious health food… Once a day I attend a counseling session at their hospital. I’m really opening up. Doc has also put me on a recently discovered drug, one bright yellow tablet in the morning, one bright yellow tablet in the evening. It’s so bright it almost seems to shine. I feel like I’m thinking much more clearly now… It also allows me to sleep.

September 27, 1998:

I’m healthy and strong. I can run two miles in under twelve minutes. I can sleep nine hours straight. I’ve forgotten my mother. I’m back on track. And yet even though I’m now on my way back to LA to start a new life–the guns in my trunk long since gone, replaced with a year’s supply of that miraculous yellow shine–when I said goodbye to my friends this morning I felt awful and soaked in sorrow… Good people. Very good people. Even as I started the car they were still asking me to stay.

September 29, 1998:

Are you fucking kidding me? Did you really think any of that was true? September 2 thru September 28? I just made that up. Right out of thin air. Wrote it in two hours. I don’t have any friends who are doctors, let alone two friends who are doctors. You must have guessed that. At least the lack of expletives should have clued you in. A sure sign that something was amiss.

And if you bought that Yellow-Tablet-Of-Shine stuff, well then you’re fucking worse off than I am.

Though here’s the sadder side of all this, I wasn’t trying to trick you. I was trying to trick myself, to believe, even for two lousy hours, that I really was lucky enough to have two such friends, and doctors too, who could help me, give me a hand, feed me tofu, make me exercise, administer a miracle drug, cure my nightmares. Not like Lude with all his pills and parties and con-talk street-smack…

Right now I’m in Los Gatos, California. Los Gatos Lodge, in fact. I managed a couple of hours of sleep until a nightmare left me on the floor, twitching like an imbecile. Sick with sweat.

Fucking Johnny. Yes, despite the fact that this journal is not presented sequentially, that I had read October 1998 first and knew Johnny was freezing and hungry in dive hotels, then homeless, then in a fight with Gdansk Man and more, I put that out of my head. I wanted him to have two friends who saved him. I wanted this to be over for him. How did I manage this feat of self-deception that occurred in only a few pages? Not sure. Perhaps it was reader’s fatigue. You sure as shit get it when you read this book. Nonetheless it was heartbreaking when it became clear that there was no deus ex machina for Johnny. Also, since this is the second time Johnny admits to making shit up, it calls into question a whole lot. Like, was he fake responding to a faked record of a non-existent film? What happened here? What, even within the context of the book, is the reader expected to believe? I realized I had to ignore the notion of any narrative truth and just soldier on.

Nevertheless, you get the sense that after he discovered his journal and the photographs from his journey, things begin to change a bit for him. He pawns his guns and makes plans to meet with Thumper, his dream woman. They both are tight on time but they talk.

I could read the signs well enough to know she wanted a kiss. She’d always been fluent in that language of affection but I could also see that over the years, years of the same grammar, she’d lost the chance to understand others. It surprised me to discover I cared enough about her to act now on that knowledge, especially considering how lonely I was. I gave her an almost paternal hug and kissed her on the cheek. Above us airplanes roared for the sky. She told me to keep in touch and I told her to take care and then as I walked away, I waved and with that bid adieu to The Happiest Place on Earth.

We then skip to August 28, 1999. Not the end of the book by a country mile but at last, I have a sense that Johnny will be okay. He jumps trains and lives as a drifter, broke often, sleeping rough. He lands in Flagstaff, Arizona with little money in his pocket but still buys himself soup. He finds a bar with no cover charge and dollar beers and settles in, buys beers for the band, spending his last dollars to do so. Then the band plays a song with the words, “I live at the end of a Five and a Half Minute Hallway,” which is a clear reference to The Navidson Record. Once they are finished playing, Johnny approaches the band and they discuss, somewhat reluctantly, their knowledge of The Navidson Record, telling Johnny they had found the annotated document online. One gives him a copy of his own manuscripts and Truant wrestles with telling them who he is but decides not to. He leaves the bar, falls asleep under a tree and sleeps well until a large dog comes to wake him.

Flagstaff appears deserted and the bar’s closed and the band’s gone, but I can hear a train rattling off in the distance. It will be here soon, homeless climbing off for a meal, coffee for a dime, soup for three quarters and I have some change left. Something warm sounds good, something hot. But I don’t need to leave yet. Not yet. There’s time now. Plenty of time. And somehow I know it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be alright. It’s going to be alright.

Johnny’s quest has led him somewhere, to a place where others read his words and understand him. People even wonder now where he is, know about him. He is a person in the minds of other people, making him real, just as his mother’s words remembered by him keep her real.

Have you ever heard the song Jezebel by Acid Bath? There’s a line that goes, “She screams bloody murder as they chop off her fingers, ‘So this is how it feels to die. But it’s okay. Everything’s okay.’” Then Dax Riggs murmurs, “It’s okay, it’s okay” and you feel calm after listening to the jarring song because in the context of the extreme violence and dissolution, everything is okay. The worst has happened. Just bleeding and extreme pain, but everything’s okay. That is how the revelation that Johnny is going the be “alright” resonated with me. He isn’t technically okay. He’s homeless, he’s broke, but within the context of his life, he’s just fine. And that’s all I can ask from Johnny, I think. No greater revelation other than that he made it out the other side.

It was tempting to attempt to discuss the letters Johnny received from his mother while she was at Whalestoe, because they are in themselves a fascinating part of the book, in my mind outshining all of The Navidson Record in their comment on the human condition. Instead of turn this already too long discussion into a way-too long discussion, I will one day read Whalestoe Letters, Danielewski’s book that compiles all of the letters.

God, I don’t plan to reread this any time soon. Organizing this discussion has been a nightmare, taking me a couple of weeks to crank out because it was hard to organize it, which happens when you discuss ergodic literature. But I genuinely think that this is a book that every reader, even those not enthralled by odd books, should read. Everyone finds something in it that captures them, that niggles at their mind, that does not let go. For me it was Johnny. For you it may be something else, some small thing that I never caught and no one else did, which is not impossible despite the level of analysis that many have put into this monster. Read it.

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.

“The Fisherman” by Brian Rosenberger was a middling story. A fisherman discovers the real reasons his rival manages to catch so many fish. It was entertaining enough, there was some gore and some might find it extreme, but largely the story was not inventive or interesting enough to really feel strongly about it. Also, I am unsure why I find the “bad man assumes the habits of worse man in a sort of gotcha ending” trope so tiresome, but I do.

Randy Chandler’s “Fungoid” wasn’t too bad, actually. Sort of foul, somewhat interesting, I didn’t feel cheated at the end and in a collection this mediocre, you take what you can get. A man down on his luck cleaning homes in a doomed neighborhood finds himself victim of a natural horror. There’s something old school about this story that I have a hard time putting my finger on. It has a sort of 1950s horror mag feel about it that made me nostalgic for the time when I first discovered Stephen King (and maybe it reminded me a little of poor Jordy Verrill).

“Tenant’s Rights” by Sean Logan was a story about a demented roommate whose egoist roommate is edging him out of his rented room, and how he does his best to sabotage the attempt. The characters were caricatures – slimy boyfriend, crazy roommate, senile grandparents, dopey girlfriend. This story was not particularly clever, and the gross-out was not worth reading through what one has to read to get to it. The lack of subtlety in this one was stark. Itch powder in the crotch goes horribly wrong. Sigh…

Ramsey Campbell’s “Again” was one of three highlights in the book. A creepy, demented woman lures a helpful man into a situation he almost cannot get out of, a vague description but since this story was quite good, I don’t want to give away the essential plot. Unlike some of the other stories where crotches dissolve and women have things shoved up their vaginas, this story was genuinely uncomfortable. Campbell set a scene that made my skin crawl in a story that blended the grotesque and the gross and wove it into a gripping narrative. As I read the story, I almost hoped it would not be as well-crafted as it was because it is almost a ringer to love Campbell in this collection. But the man is a pro and a well-loved pro for a reason.

Tim Curran’s “Maggots” was the second shining star in this collection. Again, the difference boils down into merging the horrific details with a fine story, setting scene and creating characters as opposed to slinging words around some foul scenarios and calling it a story. A French soldier survives Napoleon’s failed invasion in Russia via cannibalism and picks up an obsession he cannot shake. This is one of the best stories involving a realistic ghoul that I have ever read. The mental anguish the protagonist experiences, the visceral nature of his obsession – it was a perfect marriage of extreme horror and fine writing.

Stefan Pearson’s story, “Going Green” missed the mark. A loathsome man creates “green” energy using the undead. The story was okay, but it was predictable, a cat gets killed (a completely personal note, but animal death in a story has to be really justified for me or I get annoyed and we already knew the protagonist in this piece was a complete bag o’ shite before the cat killing), the smell of human rot is a punchline (lol dead woman with so many air fresheners around her neck she looks like Mr. T – I actually groaned when I read that line) and the protagonist was utterly one-dimensional.

“Coquettrice” by Angel Leigh McCoy… I can’t even tell you my opinion because this story resonated with me so poorly that to remember any of it would have required a complete, word for word, second reading. Skimming through it, it was as if I had never before read it. And I refuse to read it a second time. It could be amazing and I blanked (which seldom happens when I read anything amazing but never say never), or it could be an enormous waste of time. I can’t tell you. I simply don’t remember and do not want to invest any more time.

“The Fear in the Waiting” by C.J. Henderson was another that did not have the power after a three week respite to cause me to recall much more than it was a Lovecraft homage. Again, could have been great, could have been terrible – I simply do not remember and skimming does not jog my memory. I suspect that having zero memory of something after you read it when you are known as a relatively careful reader is a clue.

“The Worm” by John Bruni was the best of the midding stories, approaching quite good. The content is horrific, but none of it matches the sheer horror of being in one’s 30s and living with one’s alcoholic mother. The incestuous part of the story was… nauseating? Grotesque? Call it what you want but the characterization and use of the taboo gave this story real tension. The foulness was just a nice bonus.

“Sepsis” by Graham Masterson was not too bad, either. Again with the dead cats, but this one was a little easier on my cat-woman psyche. A man and a woman become so enmeshed with one another that they find a way to remain together forever. I think this one suffered a bit from too much story – had some of the story outside the two lovers been trimmed down (the attempted intervention by the coach comes to mind), this story would have benefited, but given the company this story keeps, that’s a minor criticism indeed. The gore was extreme, especially at the end, but there was enough unsettling action – the way the lovers interact – that this story could stand alone without the gore, but Masterson used such details deftly.

“What You Wish For” by Garry Bushell was predictable. Nasty harridan who hits upon a gold mine gets hoist by her own petard. The only thing extreme about this story was how predictable it is. It wasn’t a fabulous story and the gore was restrained – nothing to be ashamed of, but nothing to write home about either.

“The Devil Lives in New Jersey” by C.F. Kilgore also mined a predictable trope – police chief down on his luck moves to a small town only to find the case that haunted him moved with him. This story set my teeth on edge for a number of reasons. First, it suffered from the syndrome that plagues many secondary Stephen King characters. King is one of the finest writers today, genre be damned, but some of the dialogue and characteristics he gives to women grate. Kilgore’s teen girl giggles, she uses the word “Sweetie” when addressing her boyfriend, she gags when she is confronted by merely the idea of something gross, she gets sexually demeaned (evidently she swallows a lot of semen and her boyfriend feels okay bringing this up in the middle of raising the devil, as you do) and of course, she ends up dead with foreign objects shoved up her vagina. Then there is the whole topic of Satanism. It feels like this was written in 1985 because the story reads like a Satanic Panic description of devil worship. Because the protagonist is an expert on Satanism, when his son decides he wants to go to a supposed gateway to Hell, he pilfers a book from his father’s collection and has in a bag black candles, chalices, a small sword – you know, all the things that you’d expect to see in a Hammer movie. It annoys me that this story annoyed me so much (yeah, that’s a mangled sentence) because the story itself was interesting once you got past the initial predictability. The depth of the gore was balanced by a pretty decent story that only kicks in about half-way through. Overall, the piece suffered from its flaws too much to be a good story.

“Rat King” by Jeffrey King continued in the trend of mining predictable veins: Concentration camp guard gets what is coming to him with bonus homosexuality, which seems to be the trend whenever Nazis are used in fiction. But overall, this story was entertaining and while the horror of it didn’t really work out on paper for me, this is not a math equation and if you can look at the human rat king in the story with the spirit intended, it is pretty disgusting and repellent. But the pathos needed for me to give a crap about any of the characters was missing.

“The Caterpillar” by C. Dennis Moore was another of the top stories in this collection. It’s a tale of supernatural body horror that still remains grounded enough for the reader to experience the horror in a visceral manner. The characterization was top notch and the plot had an emotional level in it that is often missing in horror stories. I was unfamiliar with Moore until I read this story and intend to visit his site to see what else he has out there to read.

“‘Poor Brother Ed’ or The Man Who Visited” by Ralph Greco, Jr is the story I quit reading on the second page. I’m unsure if I had fatigue from the entire collection, or if it was the fact that five, possibly six characters were tossed at me casually in the first ten paragraphs. I twice tried to make myself read it but the onslaught of countrified characters made me stop both times. I can stomach such tactics in novels because I know I will be able to sort it out as the novel unfolds, but that is not a luxury one has in a short story. When I am reading and realize that even though the character is called Ed in the title but is Joshua in the story and I am having difficulty knowing if Mama Lee and Mama Bell are the same person, it’s time to throw in the towel.

So here you are: Three good stories, four decent enough, two stories so unremarkable I cannot recall them three weeks out, five stories that were overall not very good, and one so bad I could not even finish it. This is not a collection I would recommend, though as I said, I definitely plan to see what else C. Dennis Moore has to say. The only reason I don’t wholly regret reading this collection is because I sense a very good writer has now come across my radar.

Author: Andrew Goldfarb (Gah, I cannot find a site for him – if anyone knows his blog or site [no Facebook, please] let me know and I’ll link it asap!)

Type of Book: Bizarro, novella, fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, a monkey, something called a Slub Glub and a guy named Millford travel the world, to the sun and back and solve a mystery in a hot air balloon. And they break into song periodically.

Availability: Published by Eraserhead Press (my god, I think I type the name of this publishing house more than I type my own name), you can get a copy here:

Comments: I’ve been reading a lot of bizarro and I realize that this is my third bizarro review in a row. I’m gonna mix it up, I promise. But until next time, I have to say that this was the sweetest, most charming, happiest book I have read in a long time. It was a fairy tale combined with a really positive acid hallucination combined with a hokey 1950s musical. I could not have loved this book more had it baked me brownies when I was finished reading it.

Each chapter was quite short, the storyline was amazing and loony and to give even the smallest plot encapsulation risks ruining the book, but I will try anyway: Millford Mutterworst suspects he is being poisoned and his ever increasingly flat elbows prove him right. A series of unlikely events lead him to take flight in an air balloon with a squid-like creature called the Slub Glub and a monkey. He travels to the sun, to South America, the Slub Glub almost gets eaten by an alligator, and the monkey via quick thought and action save their collective asses a couple of times. His alarmed fiancee, Edweena Toadsweater, takes off after him in a boat, where she saves a ventriloquist’s dummy from drowning, but not the ventriloquist, sad to say. There is a climax aboard a boat captained by Millford’s mother and it all works out in the end.

Oh yeah, they break into song periodically. It’s awesome, having a book serve as a musical, and as someone who hates musicals, this is no small statement from me. The songs are captivatingly silly.

Oh yeah part two, Millford is also married to the sea. Literally. His parents betrothed him to the large body of water when he was young. That’s why Edweena is merely his fiancee.

Oh, what a wonderful, absurd little book this was. This is a short review, possibly the shortest I will ever write, but as I said, there is no way to discuss it in depth without ruining it. I think if you are having a bad day and need some light, lovely, absurdism to cheer you up, this is the book to read. Eighty chapters, most a page long, ridiculous songs, amusing illustrations – you can read it in a sitting and then keep it on hand to lift your mood on that inevitable cloudy day when your boss yells at you, you get a flat tire, and you realize your tea tastes funny for a reason.