Geek and Sundry

Did I ever tell you that I am a lazy lazy, lazy man? I mean, I have at least three book reviews that I should be writing. Two of them would earn me Bizarro Brigade points, and the other is for a book I got a review copy of from William Morrow. This is not a review of one of them. This is about a YouTube channel, and I'm writing it to get an entry in a contest to win something or other. I forget what, exactly.

I am talking about Geek & Sundry, who produce lots of geeky web content, most of which, I don't watch. I do however watch TableTop with Wil Wheaton, because I love tabletop games.  Also, I think his beard has evil, hypnotic powers. It's a great series where you get to see lots of geek celebrities playing games, and I've learned about a lot of games I want to try out.  Here's an embedded video of the episode about one of my favorite games:

Since this is a review blog, of sorts, I'll give Tabletop (and the rest of Geek & Sundry) five yo-yos.

The Miniature Wife

I was lucky enough to get a copy of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories by Manuel Gonzalez from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. With my love of bizarro fiction, I figured that a collection of more mainstream weird fiction would be right up my alley. I was right. It does have less gore and sex than a typical bizarro story collection, but I think bizarro fans might enjoy it, too.

This is a good bunch of stories, with some weird twists. The titular story, for instance, is about a man who works in miniaturization whose wife gets mysteriously miniaturized and starts a war against her husband. There are also stories about a hijacking that lasts for decades, a man who talks through his ears, and life in what seems to be a video game. Some of the stories also involve more traditional fantasy and horror creatures like zombies, werewolves, and unicorns.

There are a few minor things I didn't like about the stories. Too many of the stories take the form of mini-biographies or memoirs instead of the more usual types of fictional narrative, although since they are interesting biographies/memoirs, this isn't much of a complaint. However, some of them, most notably, "The Artist's Voice"--that's the one about the man who talks through his ears--do drag a little bit. Even so, this is a really nice bunch of stories

Stardust: The Gift Edition

I first read Stardust years ago in a cheap, paperback edition, and it is a great story. A few months ago, I was offered the opportunity to get a review copy of Stardust: The Gift Edition, which is a brand new hardcover edition of Neil Gaiman's classic tale. Naturally, I jumped on the opportunity as you can probably tell since I'm reviewing it.

For those who aren't familiar with the story, Stardust is a fairy tale for adults. The story starts off with the tale of Dunstan Thorn and how he fell in love with an imprisoned fairy princess and had a child named Tristran with her. Many years later, this child, now a young man, heads off into Fairy to find a fallen star after making a foolish promise to a young woman. While there, he has a bunch of adventures that would take far too long to explain in detail. It's a cool story that's well worth reading.

You may wonder what it is about the Gift Edition that's so special. Well, like I already said, it a hardcover. In fact, it's a very nice looking hardcover. The cover looks a lot like the sort of covers they had back before the invention of dust jackets. It's just the image of a falling star with the title and the author's name that has been (I assume) stamped on with some sort of goldish-looking foil. It's very classy, and if you want a nice looking copy to sit on your shelf, this is the one for you.

Besides that, it has some cool extras. There's a new introduction by Gaiman. There's an excerpt of an unfinished novel that Stardust was originally going to be a sort of prequel to. There are also some new illustrations by Charles Vess. All of this makes it a great book to by if you love Stardust, don't have the original heavily-illustrated DC comics version, and want an illustrated copy (or want to read the extras).

Sailor Twain

Mark Siegel's Sailor Twain has some nice artwork. It's not very often that you see a graphic novel, told entirely in charcoal. This makes for a nice change. There is one problem though; the story is very slow to get moving.

The book tells the story of a steamboat captain who finds a wounded mermaid in the Hudson. It takes four chapters before this actually happens. Then we spend about 200 pages where the captain falls in love with the mermaid at the expense of his marriage, the ships owner sleeps with every woman he can find, and we learn a lot about the mythology of mermaids thanks to a writer named C. G. Beaverton. After that we finally get a reasonably climactic conclusion.

Even the big chunk where nothing is really happening is kind of interesting. The parts detailing mermaid mythology were entertaining. The owner's budding relationship with C. G. Beaverton was cool. Even with that, this large hunk of story is kind of a drag.

It's not a bad book, but I do think it could have been better.

Psycho USA

Just what is it about psycho killers that people find fascinating? I don't know, but Harold Schechter's Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of is a great collection of obscure American killers. There are serial killers, mass murderers, Bluebeards, poisoners, and robbers and kidnappers who just sort of snapped and started carving people up.  This is some gruesome stuff.  It's the sort of thing that should appeal to fans of true crime and the more gruesome sorts of horror.

The only complaint I have is that not all of the killers seem like psychos. Ada Lebouf had a reasonable case for self defense, and even she was guilty, the case seemed more like a standard love triangle than a psycho killing. The rest, though all seem like total nutjobs.

This is a cool book.

Zombies and Shit

After reading Carlton Mellick III's Zombies and Shit, I think it's safe to say that I have a new favorite zombie novel. The book describes itself as "Battle Royale meets Return of the Living Dead," and unlike most comparisons on the back covers of books, this one is accurate.

A group of twenty people wake up to find that they've been dumped in the middle of a zombie-infested city and are now the unwilling contestants on a reality show called Zombie Survival. Each contestant is given a weapon and told that the only way out is to make it to a helicopter on the other side of the city. Unfortunately, there's only one seat on the helicopter, so only one person gets to return to civilization.

There are quite a lot of interesting characters. As with much of bizarro, there is a strong punk influence, and several of the characters are punks including the members of a punk street gang and a squad of "merc punks," who are professional zombie killers. Then there's a washed-up writer and his back-stabbing wife, an inventor, an underage prostitute, the former host of the  show, a Nazi, a genetically engineered killing machine, and a cybernetic Mr. T.

That's right, Mr. T is a character in this book, and I pity the fool who doesn't read it.

Little Death

I was lucky enough to get a copy of Thomas Kriebaum's Little Death from Library Thing's early reviewer program. It's a shortish graphic novel told in what is, I believe, called a "pantomime strip" format, i.e. with no dialogue.

The book contains fourteen multi-page stories and a few single panel ones. They all feature Little Death who is a toddler-sized skeleton dressed in a Blues Brothers-type suit. The stories center around him touching people and making them die. They are generally very funny, though I admit I'm still not sure exactly what the point was of number six.

If you're interested in lighthearted comics about a mini-grim reaper that are done in the style of older Mad Magazine comics, then this is the book for you. I enjoyed it, anyway.

Shadow Show

I always find that I have a little trouble when writing reviews of anthologies. If I write about each story, the review ends up being way too long. If I only talk about the stories that stood out the most to me, then I feel like I've slighted the writers I don't mention. If I don't go into detail on any of the stories, then I feel like I'm not doing my job, even if it is a job that I'm not getting paid for. In the case of Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, I think I'm going to fall somewhere between option 2 and option 3.

I suppose I should start off by saying that this is a really great collection. Usually when I read an anthology, there's at least one story where I wonder what the editors where thinking when they included it. Not this time, though. I enjoyed all the stories in this anthology.

Ray Bradbury was a genius. He was one of the best writers of the 20th century. I think that this book isn't great just because it's a collection of great stories inspired by Bradbury. It's also great because it shows how much Bradbury influenced the great writers who came after him, (and Harlan Ellison® who was a contemporary). It's also great to see that while Bradbury is most often thought of a science fiction writer, this book also includes stories by fantasy, horror, and more mainstream writers.


This book is a fitting to one of our best writers. Anyone who is a fan of Ray Bradbury should give it a try. Anyone who isn't a fan of Ray Bradbury, should pick up some of his books and become a fan.

Ugly Heaven

I'm really not sure what to say about Carlton Mellick III's Ugly Heaven.I certainly enjoyed the book. It was all weird and creepy and was probably the most disturbing version of heaven I've ever heard of.

This is a warped version of heaven, though. God is missing and presumed dead. Everybody looks weird. Shadows chase people around and latch onto them.You can still die in this heaven, and that death is presumably final. There are monsters and dangers everywhere.

The story about a couple of guys called Tree and Salmon who arrive in heaven together.  They meet lots of strange people and have adventures, but there's no real resolution to the story. It's still good, but the ending just feels like the end to a chapter not the end of a story.

The Faggiest Vampire

No, this isn't a review of Twilight. Those are the lamest vampires. A faggy vampire is something else entirely. In fact, The Faggiest Vampire is a bizarro children's book by Carlton Mellick III.

I know what you're thinking. I assume it's either "I's never read a book with the word Faggiest in the title to my children!" or "That Carlton Mellick III is obviously an evil homophobe!" To be honest, I'd probably agree with you on the first one, but, while I've never met CM3, and though he may very well be evil, I doubt he's a homophobe.

In this book, being faggy is a good thing. The faggiest vampire is the one with the best mustache, which also makes him the coolest guy in town. Someone who equates being faggy with being cool is probably not a homophobe, though equating coolness with mustaches is probably a sign of being evil or at least insane.

Despite the use of the word faggiest in the title, and the frequent use of it and faggy in the story itself,  this is a good book. I would certainly rate it as one of my favorite children's books that I've read as an adult. It's a cool, fun, simple  story with a message on what it really means to be cool and on the futility of revenge.

The only reason I don't give it a full five yo-yos is because of the title.

By The Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends

Have you ever read a book where, when you were finished, you were pretty sure there was some kind of subtext (or some such thing) that went right over your head? I have, and that book is By The Time We Leave Here, We'll Be Friends by J. David Osborne

The book is set in a Soviet-era Siberian gulag. The main characters are all prisoners and guards.  There's drug use. There's a throat parasite. There are placentas wearing diapers.  There are tattoos. There is violence.

Heck, I'm not really sure how to explain it. I will say that even though I didn't really understand it, I did enjoy it.

The Drunken Comic Book Monkeys in Sciencey Tales of Science Fiction

I've met the Drunken Comic Book Monkeys twice, and each time I did, I bought a book from them. They run a local small press, and show up at the local HorrorFind convention and at some of the events at the York Emporium. This time, since I was at the Emporium's Sci-Fi Saturday, I picked up the Monkey's Sciencey Tales of Science Fiction, which is a sequel to their previous book, Scary Tales of Scariness.

Since I've only met them twice, I have no idea if the Drunken Comic Book Monkies are as drunken, clueless, and obnoxious in real life as there counterparts are in the stories that make up this book, but I doubt it. The plots of all the stories revolve around how Brian Chris, the aforementioned Monkeys, keep getting in and out of  trouble while being as obnoxious, idiotic, and drunken as possible. This leads to a lot of funny stuff.

They meet clones. They get shrunk. They battle robots. They go to the Earth's core and to the moon. They meet an invisible fan. They travel to an alternate reality. They find a time machine. They take part in parodies of The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Island of Doctor Moreau. They drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of chicken wings.

These are a bunch of absurd science fiction stories. While I wouldn't rank it with the works of Douglas Adams, it's a good choice for fans of science fiction and humor.

Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island

I've read several of Cameron Pierce's other books so far, and Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island is my least favorite of the bunch. It's not a bad book, it's just different from the other ones I've read.

This book is very much bizarro horror. A bunch of college students get stranded on an island that's inhabited by beautiful looking, green women. Unfortunately, these women turn into horrible monsters that get their sustenance by raping men. As you can imagine, this leads to a book that is bloody and full of disturbing sexual imagery.


Basically, ths book isn't for the faint of heart. It's still a good read.

DarkWalker

I loved John Urbancik's DarkWalker.This was a really cool, fun book that I had a hard time putting down. It's really a dark (or maybe urban) fantasy about a man who has the ability to see the creatures of the night--vampires, zombies, werewolves, etc.--and has some sort of supernatural protection from them, but he's only allowed to watch and can't interfere.  This causes some trouble when he falls in love and has to rescue his lover from an imp, which turns his protection into a sort of psychic signal advertising him as an all you can eat buffet for monsters.

There's all kinds of other stuff. There are lots of monsters of all sorts. There's a sexy vampire, who kidnaps the hero and tries to help him because she falls in love with him. There's a tough as nails vampire hunter who helps the hero because it gives him a chance to kill monsters. There's even a demon with a sinister agenda.

I wouldn't call it the most original thing ever, since books about people who are aware of a secret world of monsters that coexists with our own are a dime a dozen these days. Still, if you're a big fan of horror or fantasy, you should check this book out.

Doom Magnetic!

It's time to review a book that I think would make a good introduction to bizarro. Why do I think it would be a good introduction to bizarro? Because it's free (on the Kindle). I'm talking about DOOM MAGNETIC! by William Pauley III. It's the first book of his Doom Magnetic Trilogy, and I certainly expect to get the rest of the volumes, probably in the omnibus edition.

I'm not really sure how to explain it. It's a sort of bizarro/western/sci-fi story about a cowboy sort of guy who stole a purple television from the Japanese government, which apparently rules the world or something. There are assassins, monsters, weird villains, and a lot of strange stuff.

It's creepy and gory and disgusting and makes little sense. That makes it a good read.

Werewolves of Wisconsin

I got my latest LibraryThing early reviewer book yesterday, and since I finished it quickly, it's time to review Werewolves of Wisconsin and Other American Myths, Monsters and Ghosts by Andy Fish.

The first thing I have to point out is that, despite not being described as such in the product description at the time of this review, this book is a graphic novel. This doesn't bother me, but I've seen enough people complain about graphic novels they assumed were regular novels that I figure it's worth pointing out.

I would assume that you're familiar with the sort of stories from Tales from the Crypt and similar comics where some creepy guy narrates tales of horror. This is sort of like that, with Baron Samedi filling in for the Crypt Keeper. The main difference is that instead of narrating fictional tales, the Baron gives us bits of folklore and reported strange occurrences.

Normally I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, but I found most of the stories in this volume to be boring and generally unbelievable. Also, I really didn't care for the artwork. I suppose this might serve as a good introduction for people interested in Forteana, folklore, and "strange but true" stories, but those who are more familiar with the genre will find little that's new.

Enchanted

I love fantasy. That's why I was happy to pick up a copy of Alethea Kontis's Enchanted when she was doing a signing at my local bookstore last month. Since it's a fairly recent release, I figure I should try and write a review of it now that I read it.

This was a good book. It's one of the fairy tale-style fantasies, with the conceit that all (or almost all) of the great fairy tale adventures center around the members of the Woodcutter family. The book centers on the youngest Woodcutter, Sunday, who finds a talking frog in the woods and falls in love.

After that, you start getting fairy godmothers showing up, and there are balls and villains and heroes. At its heart, it's a story of family and love. I had a hard time putting this book down, and I hope there's going to be a sequel, because I really want to know what happened to the mysteriously vanished Jack Woodcutter. Yes, he's the Jack from all the fairy tales.

The Ballad of a Slow Poisoner

After taking a few weeks off from reviewing  bizarro fiction, due to a bit of burn out from all the reviews in April, it's time for a new bizarro review. This time it's The Ballad of a Slow Poisoner by Andre Goldfarb.

This was a cool book. The plot was strange and meandering. It's about a man named Millford Mutterwurst, whose elbows are flattening as a result of poisoning. He teams up with a blue blobby creature called Slub Glub and a transparent green monkey. They have some adventures.

This is the sort of book where I can't really explain the plot because the story is all over the place with all kinds of absurd things happening. I will say that it is a great, entertaining story with really cool illustrations. The only thing I don't like--and this may be because I've read too much low-quality, Tolkien-inspired fantasy--is the songs people break into. I just found them distracting. If it wasn't for them, I'd have given this five stars.

Bloodline

The first time I read one of James Rollins' Sigma Force stories was way back in 2007 when I read the Thriller anthology. Despite the fact that I didn't actually mention that story in the review, I really enjoyed it. A few years later, I received unrequested review copies of The Doomsday Key and The Devil Colony, and despite reading them, I never got around to writing reviews for them. They did inspire me to buy the rest of the series, though. Last week, I received a review copy of the latest Sigma Force novel, Bloodline: A Sigma Force Novel, and this time I'm going to review it.

For anyone who may not be familiar with the series, Sigma Force is a secret government organization that's part of  DARPA. It's a team of former soldiers, mostly ex-special forces, who also hold advanced scientific degrees. They battle against scientific threats to the world, mostly in the form of a criminal organization called the Guild. Most of the stories are tied to the historical record and cutting edge science. It's better than I make it sound.

In this story, the Guild has kidnapped the president's daughter, and agent Gray Pierce and former assassin Seichan, along with non-team members Tucker Wayne and his dog Kane, are sent to rescue her. The whole series of events is part of a centuries long plot by the Guild--which includes members of the president's family--to unlock the secrets of immortality.

This is a great adventure story. You should get it and the rest of the series.

The Dark Ones

The Dark Ones by Bryan Smith was one of the more disturbing supernatural horror novels I've read. It's about a group of teens who are essentially outsiders. They are the titular Dark Ones. One night they mess around in an old, abandoned house and accidentally unleash a demon. The demon possesses one of them and starts to turn the townspeople into sex-crazed killing machines.

Besides all this, there's the generally crappy lives of some of these kids. One of them has a mother who is quite literally insane. Another was a victim of sexual abuse as a child. A third get bullied by the jocks. In its way, that was even more disturbing than the demon stuff.

This is a gory and disturbing book that really isn't for the faint of heart. For the rest of us, it's a worth reading.

21st Century Dead

When you're putting together a zombie anthology, there are really two choices you can make. The first option is to have the anthology be full of Romero-inspired flesh eaters, which pleases the hard-core zombie fans, but can make for a boring and repetitive anthology. The other option is to include stories with zombie-like undead creatures , which generally annoys the hard-core zombie fans, but usually makes for a better anthology.

21st Century Dead: A Zombie Anthology, edited by Christopher Golden, goes for the second option, which I think was the right choice. There are about three (or maybe four) stories in the anthology that I wouldn't classify as having actual zombies in them. The rest do have zombies in them, though they aren't all flesh eaters and they aren't always central to the story. I generally enjoyed the stories in the collection. To break things down, there was one story I hated, one story I loved, one story I kind of disliked, and sixteen stories that I liked to one degree or another.

The story I hated was "The Dead of Dromore," by Ken Bruen. I actively disliked the characters in this one, who are a band of mercenaries paid to go into a zombie-infested town to rescue a survivor, and who would rather murder all of the other survivors than rescue them for free. Disliking the characters isn't usually enough to get me to dislike the story itself, but the style was. It has way to many sentence fragments and  short sentences for my taste. Plus there's a lot of weird formatting where single sentences are broken up to be spread across several paragraphs, looking something like this:

Helped there by a combination of

The CIA

Mossad

And the Chinese

Spreading a single sentence over four paragraphs is just annoying. If I thought it was just a product of my copy being an ARC, I could overlook it, but I suspect that it is intentional.

The story I loved was "Ghost Dog & Pup," by Thomas E Sniegoski, which was one of the less zombie-centric stories. There are zombies in it, but they don't really show up until nearly the end and aren't the focus. At its heart, I would call this one a boy and his dog/ghost story.  I suspect the reason I enjoyed it so much is because, being a dog lover,  I've always been a sucker for boy and his dog stories.

The story I kind of disliked was "Tic Boom, A Love Story," by Kurt Sutter. In this case, the story was interesting, but as with the story I hated, the  style annoyed me. Kurt Sutter is the creator of Sons of Anarchy, and this is his first piece of published prose. As such, it isn't surprising that his story reads more like a screenplay than a short story. It doesn't make the story bad, but it did distract me a bit too much.

Since this review is getting a bit long, I'll just briefly go over the other stories that stood out to me. I really enjoyed Brian Keene's "Couch Potato" and Jonathan Maberry's "Jack And Jill," which isn't surprising as those are two writers I really enjoy. Despite finding his politics abhorrent, and his tale not being an actual zombie story, Orson Scott Card's ""Carousel" was a good story. Chelsea Cain's "Why Mothers Let Their Babies Watch Television" was pretty funny. "Tender As Teeth," by Stephanie Crawford and Diane Swierczynski, was interesting because it was about a person who'd been cured of zombieism.

Despite having a couple of stories I didn't like, this was a good anthology that I recommend for the zombie lover.

All You Can Eat

I was lucky enough to be added to Deadite Press's reviewers list, and received a review copy of Shane McKenzie's All You Can Eat from them. It was a cool book.

You can look at it as a sort of zombie novel. They aren't the shambling, undead sort of zombies. These are waddling, grotesquely obese living zombies.  This is caused by a Chinese restaurant whose owner added a secret ingredient to the buffet to make people like his food. The problem is, he added too much, and now anyone who eats his food becomes obsessed with it to the exclusion of all else. If they can't get at his buffet, his patrons will eat anything else they can get their hands on, including other people.

This was a great, fun, gory story that horror fans will enjoy. The only thing that I expect to see complaints about--and I always see somebody complaining about this stuff on Amazon--is the length. As with much of what Deadite publishes, this is a novella. At least that's what I assume it would be classified at as the actual story only runs for about 110 pages.  As far as I'm concerned, anyone who would complain about that is a moron.

The Killing Moon

I love fantasy novels, but these days I don't really read that many of them any more. This is because most epic fantasy has been taken over by these large ever expanding series where you have to read a dozen books (and wait a decade or so if it's an ongoing series) before you finally get he whole story.

You don't have to worry about that with The Killing Moon. This is essentially a stand-alone epic fantasy. Yeah, it's part of the series, but this doesn't have one of those annoying cliff-hanger ending where you need to pick up book two to find out what happens next.

The story is interesting. It's set in a city with a priesthood that can siphon power from dreams to use in magic. In the process they often kill people, but that's usually reserved for the dying or those deemed corrupt.

The problem is that there is corruption in the leader of the priesthood and in the city's Prince. This leads to a nasty monster called a Reaper killing people.

I really liked this book. Even though I've been trying to avoid getting into any new series, I expect I'll pick up the sequel at some point.

Long Island Noir

Well, after a month-long hiatus, I'm back with another review. This time it's not bizarro fiction (though there will be more of them coming soon). This time I'm reading a collection of noir short stories.

I think I should start off by saying that this isn't the sort of book I'd normally read, so even though I'm reviewing it, I'm not going to give it a star rating. The only reason I'm reviewing it is because I got it through LibraryThing's early reviewers program and therefore have to review it. If you're wondering why I requested a book in a genre I don't really read, it's because there's a short story by Nick Mamatas in it, and I enjoyed his novels.

As to Long Island Noir (Akashic Noir), I can say that I didn't enjoy reading this book very much. As it is a book of noir fiction, and therefore full of dark and often depressing stories, that's really not unexpected. I can say that I thought all the stories were well written, and if you enjoy noir, then you'll probably enjoy this book.

Bizaro Fiction Month Bonus: All Monster Action!

Originally, there were only going to be thirty reviews for Bizarro Fiction Month, well plus the extra mini reviews from day one. Then about midway through the month, I got emailed a review copy of a new book. When I read it, I loved it so much, I knew I'd have to make a bonus post so I could include it. The book in question is Cody Goodfellow's All-Monster Action!

Seriously, this book was freaking awesome. the bulk of the book is about kaiju, which--for those unfamiliar with the term--is the name for those giant monsters that destroy Tokyo in Japanese monster movies. This longer story was preceded by four short stories, and I might as well talk about them first.

First up was a little World War II story called "Doorway to the Sky." It's about a group of soldiers who are stationed on an Island in the Pacific. Also on the Island is a group of natives who are members of a cargo cult. The natives make their own radio that somehow summons a very strange visitor. This story was great.

The second story was "Venus of Santa Cruz." This is basically about a male cop who starts to have sex with a giant, female-shaped fungus. It's a very strange story, and was also pretty good.

The third story is "Wage of the Dinosaurs." This story is about an unhappy young man who works in a dispensary that helps unpleasant, rich, old  women relive their memories. One day, he gets fed up and hocks a loogie into the mix for an extremely unpleasant woman. This makes things go chaotic. This was a great story.

The final short was "The Care & Feeding of Sea Monkies." This was about a man who decided he wanted to get it on with a species of gigantic krill. This was a good story too.

The main story, "All Monster Action!," is, as I said,  about kaiju. This story is divided into three parts, and It's set in a world much like our own, only where scientists have figured out how to create kaiju. One of these scientists is the evil Dr. Otaku, who, in part one,  creates a monster for North Korea and sends it to attack the USA. America has its own kaiju defender, Steve, who tries to fight it off. In part two, Steve's replacement, IKE, leads an assault on Dr. Otaku's island lair. In the final part, the Earth's cities have become rampaging kaiju intent on destroying the planet, and flying saucers are attacking.

This story was just awesome. What a great story.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 30: Slag Attack

I've made it to day thirty of bizarro fiction month. It's time to review my final Andersen Prunty book for the month: Slag Attack. This is a collection of four linked short stories. They're all set in a world where the Earth has been taken over by these nasty, man-eating slug/maggot creatures called slags.

The first story is "The Devastated Insides of Hollow City." It's about a bounty hunter named Shell who has come to Hollow City to find the city's Queen Pearl, who has disappeared. His search for her takes him to some strange and gruesome places.

Next is "Vincent Severity," which is really more of a horror story than anything. It's set several months before the first story, and begins just as the first slag attacks start. It's about a woman named Amber who is kidnapped by a lunatic named Vincent.

Story three is "Corpse Mountain," and also probably my favorite. It's about a guy who lives in a junkyard and his two stupid minions. They're trying to build robots to help fight off the slags.

The final story is "All Alone at the Edge of the World." It's about a guy named Darren, who is living alone in a house by the sea in the last days of the slag attacks. The slags have grown humongous. Soon, Darren encounters Shell and Pearl from the first story, who are leading a small resistance group. Of course, things are not quite what they seem.

Great collection.