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.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 29: Squid Pulp Blues

It's day 29. The month is almost over. I think it's time for my final Jordan Krall review.

Squid Pulp Blues is a collection of three linked novellas (and a bonus short story in the Kindle version). The stories are all set in Thompson New Jersey.  They all involve criminals, and the characters from one story generally appear in the next. Being Jordan Krall stories, they involve squids. Also, I noticed links to both Fistful of Feet and King Scratch, which were published later (though I read them first).

The first story is "The Haberdasher." It's about a recent parolee who  meets up with some of his criminal friends, and ends up in trouble with another criminal nicknamed the Haberdasher. There's also stuff about squid based drugs and a woman who gets her feet cut off. Strange.

Number two is "The Longheads." This one is about two criminals who get chased around by an old enemy called Peachy Keen. There are also longheads, who are war veterans who have come back from some war with elongated heads and mental instability.

Number three is "The Apocalypse Donkey," which is about a comic book writer who gets into trouble with a criminal who accidentally gives him an envelope that was meant for someone else. There's also a meth head and a strange donkey.

The bonus story is called "Billy Roanoke." It seemed to be a very short, weird story about revenge.

Overall, the stories were weird and disgusting and made little sense. This makes it cool.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 28: Sea of the Patchwork Cats

 It's now day 28 of Bizarro Fiction month, and I've decided it's finally time to review a book by my favorite bizarro author:  Carlton Mellick III' Naturally, this means I was looking forward to Sea of the Patchwork Cats. His books tend to be strange and funny, and I like strange and funny.

"Everyone in the world committed suicide at the same time." That's the opening line of this book, and as far as opening lines go, I'd have to say it's a good one. It sets the whole strange, dream-like, and faintly depressing tone for the novella.

The protagonist of the story is the only person in the world who didn't commit suicide--because he was too drunk to pull it off. The man tries to find a place for himself in the newly empty world, but one night the house he's staying in floats out to sea, and he eventually arrives at a strange building shaped like two giant, nude, conjoined women. Then he meets some very strange women (the snake woman on the cover image below is one of them). There are also a lot of cats and a monster.

This book was pretty cool. I'm really not  much into cats, but that's OK because these cats are kind of creepy anyway. It's a very enjoyable enjoyable read.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 27: Ass Goblins of Auschwitz

This is day 27 of Bizarro Fiction Month. The month is almost over, but it's time for another review.

I think I can best describe Cameron Pierce's Ass Goblins of Auschwitz as a sort of bizarro/science fiction, coming-of-age/World-War-II-Escape story with Nazi ass monsters as the villains.

It's the story of a pair of conjoined twins who are prisoners 999 and 1001. They are kids from Kidland who have been kidnapped by the ass goblins and are forced to make bicycles and sex toys for the goblins from the remains of dead kids.  999 & 1001 eventually become test subjects for the ass goblin mad scientists, and are forced to grow up and fight back

This is a cool story, though obviously not for the easily offended or easily grossed out.There's cannibalism, Nazi ass monsters, gore, violence, and lots of asses. You should read it.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 26: Archelon Ranch

 Ah, bizarro and metafiction: two strange types of stories that get even stranger together.  At least that's the case in Garret Cook's Archelon Ranch, where several characters are aware that they are characters in a Garret Cook story, and spend a lot of time complaining about it. Cook himself even makes an appearance.

It's the story of Bernard, a young man who has been experimented on and has the power of Deep Objectivity, which apparently lets him the minds of other creatures and inanimate objects. It is also the story of Bernard's brother Clyde who is student of Authorial Intent and the Church of Narrativism. Clyde believes that Bernard is the Protagonist, who is destined to move this story along.

This story is strange in a good way. I might even call it kind of trippy. It's also a book that I had a hard time putting down.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 25: Wall of Kiss

It's day 25 of Bizarro Fiction Month, and it's time for another review. Today, I'm reviewing another book by Gina Ranalli.

Wall of Kiss had a premise that caught my attention. It's the story of an unnamed woman who falls in love with a wall. The woman in question is apparently insane, and not just for falling in love with a wall. She has sex with the wall, fights with it, yells at it, makes it food, goes on dates with it and calls it continually. If it wasn't for the fact that her lover is an inanimate object, the woman would be a stalker and an abuser.

This book is a quick and fun read. I think it's the best love story I've read.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 24: Hypno-Hog's Moonshine Monster Jamboree

It's day 24 of Bizarro Fiction month, and it's time to review Hypno-Hog's Moonshine Monster Jamboree.









While I did enjoy this,  I didn't enjoy it quite as much as Andrew Goldfarb's other stuff that I've read. This book does have a lot going for it. Goldfarb's illustrations, are wonderfully bizarre. The plot is silly and funny. The only are I felt a bit let down in was the characters; I felt they read too much like a cavalcade of hillbilly stereotypes.

The book begins with a rain of weird skull frogs. The frogs land on Herconium Slogg's pig farm, where he makes money by frying up pigs ears as a local delicacy. Naturally, Slogg fries up the frogs too, and they prove popular and tasty. More frogs end up landing in the local moonshine still, and apparently make for good moonshine ingredients. Unfortunately, the frogs have the side effect of turning anyone who ingests them into a freaky mutant, and eating too many will apparently turn you into a cannibal.

While this sounds like a recipe for a horror movie, it isn't. All of the mutations tend to be humorously bizarre, and even the cannibalism it comical, almost cartoonish. The whole book is just kind of silly and generally enjoyable. I think the best part was Goldfarb's illustrations.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 23: Fuckness

This is day 23 of Bizarro Fiction Month, and once again I review a book by Andersen Prunty:  Fuckness. This is a story that I found kind of disturbing, yet enthralling. At one point I half expected the protagonist to turn out to be one of those kids who goes on a shooting spree at school, because his life is just that bad and everyone is just horrible to him.

It's all about his sixteen year old called Wally Black. His life pretty much sucks. He's been held back in school for two years. Despite being the oldest kid in his class and fairly large, he is bullied pretty badly by pretty much everyone in his class. His teacher hates him and takes any opportunity to punish and belittle him. His parents are sadistic and abusive. One day after being badly beaten by a classmate and sent home from school early for it, Wally's parents punish him by beating him unconscious and affixing a pair of horns to his head.

From there, things get fairly gruesome and strange. Willy kills a lot of people in revenge for various slights and abuses. He meets quite a few strange people. The ending somehow feels both happy and sad.

While I enjoyed this book, I don't think it's the sort of thing everyone would enjoy.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 22: Fistful of Feet

This is day 22 of my Bizarro Fiction Month, and it's time for another review.

From what I've read of Jordan Krall's books, Fistful of Feet is my favorite. It's a bizarro western, and I have to admit to a fondness for weird sorts of westerns.This book once again shows Krall's odd fascination with squids, and there is plenty of cool weirdness weirdness.

The book is about a guy named Calamari, oops I mean Calamaro, who drags his wooden donkey into the town of Screwhorse. It's a town famous for its brothel, which specializes in various fetishes: burping, foot fetishes, and stuff like that. As seems to be standard in these sorts of tales, Calamaro quickly gets into trouble with some thugs who work for the local bad guy. This all leads to bunch of  violence.There are explosions and gore and strange Indians.

This was a great story. There's a lot of action. There's some romance. There are interesting characters. There's weirdness. There's sex. This was a really good book.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 21: A Life on Fire

THis is now day 21 of Bizarro Fiction month. Today, I review A Life On Fire by Chris Bowsman. This is the sort of book that I'm not entirely sure whether to call  bizarro or horror, but since this is bizarro month and not horror month, I'.m going to go with bizarro here.


It's about a guy named Gerald who's wife committed suicide a while back, and he's been completely unable to cope. He has a crappy job, and has begun to descend into alcoholism. Then he starts to slide into a weird and terrifying world populated by demons and stuff. Also his wife starts to communicate with him from beyond the grave.

This book is more serious than the sort of bizarro I usually like, but it does have some humor in it. This mostly comes in the form of a guy called Holman, who keeps inventing things that already exist, like roller skates. Then he ends up dieing and becomes even weirder.

This book was very sad, funny, and scary. I liked it.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 20: A Million Versions of Right

This is April 20th, which means it's also day 20 of Bizarro Fiction Month here on the blog.  Today I'm going to review Matthew Revert's A Million Versions of Right, which is one of the best collections of bizarro short fiction that I've read.  There are only six stories in it, but most of them are fairly long, and all of them were enjoyable.

The book opens with the titular "A Million Versions of Right." This is the story of a young man who discovers that when he ejaculates, he will occasionally release a miniature tiler instead of the expected sperm. The first time this happens he ends up having most of his body covered in tile before being rescued by his father. The whole experience tends to warp his sex life very badly.

The next story is "The Bricolage Scrotum," which is about scrotums. A school principal has hired two local boys to pulp his scrotum in front of his students because he hates scrotums. The boys manage to destroy their own scrotums while practicing. Also there's a scrotum advocacy group that wants to stop the exhibition.

Then We have "The Great Headphone Wank," which is about a man who has a job insulting walls. He is given a pair of headphones that only produce the sounds of masturbation. Weirdness ensues.

"Meeting Max" was the next story, and was one that I though was a bit slow paced, but I still enjoyed it a lot. It's about a guy who lives in the barber district and is obsessed with barbers. A bald guy is going around knocking over comb jars and smashing windows, and our hero tries to track him down Then lots of even weirder stuff happens.

Then come "Power Blink," which is mostly about band-aids.

The final story is "The Bookmark That Wouldn't Work," which is the fictional history of bookmarks, and the story of one woman with reading problems who gets a bookmark that won't work.

I like this collection a lot, and highly recommend it.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 19: Dinner Bell For The Dream Worms

 For day 19 of Bizarro Fiction Month, I'm reviewing  Jason Wuchenich's Dinner Bell for the Dream Worms. It's a collection of two short novellas (or possibly long short stories, I'm not sure where the cutoff between the two is). It's also the most disgusting thing I've read in a while, or possibly ever.

The First story is "Stinky Incubus." It's about an incubus who can only manifest when he farts, which makes him stinky. Also, he eats fecal matter. It's very gross. It's also a touching love story. As long as you aren't the sort to puke easily, this is a good story.

The second story is "Skank Clusters." It's not quite as gross as the first story, but is still kind of disturbing. In the future, a company has invented a fruit called Skank Clusters, which are little clusters of skanks.  Unfortunately, it turns out that they're rather addictive, and eating them will turn you into a skank.

Both of these stories were cool, even though one was very gross. This is definitely worth reading as long as you don't mind being nauseated.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 18: They Had Goat Heads

It's day 18 of Bizarro Fiction Month, and since I'm doing the short fiction collections this week, I've decided to post a collection by D. Harlan Wilson today.

Quite frankly, I'm not really sure what to say about They Had Goat Heads.  This is a book of short stories that, I think,  is a bit more literary than the sort of stuff I usually read or review. Sure, being a bizarro book, it's a very weird sort of literary, but even so, I generally prefer my stories with a lot more action and/or humor. Not that this is bad, it is actually very good. It's just that it's the sort of good that I don't think I'm particularly good at commenting on, but since I'm trying to review every bizarro book I read, I'm going to comment anyway.

If you want to try bizarro, but want to avoid the over-the-top violence, juvenile humor, and general ickiness that is prevalent in bizarro, then this is probably the book for you. If you're looking for bizarro with real literary merit, then this is the book for you. If you're looking for a good collection of short stories, then, once again, this is the book for you.

You should probably just go ahead and give it a try.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 17: Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy

I'm finally up to day 17 of Bizarro fiction month, and today I turn to a book by Bradley Sands for review.

I love bizarro. I love short story collections. Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy is a short story collection. Does that mean I loved Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy? Obviously Don't love it just because it's a bizarro short story collection.

Technically speaking, a lot of what's in here isn't really short stories. Much of it is too short for that. It's the sort of stuff that people generally consider flash fiction, though Sands himself calls it prose poetry. Whatever you want to call it, it's good stuff.

My favorite was probably the first, "Seth Shultz," which seems to be the story that inspired the title. It's about a man in a bear costume who attends an orgy. "Scenes From The Life Of A Greeting Card Designer" was another one I really enjoyed.

This was cool. Also, while I normally think that it's tacky for an author to chastise people for giving their book a bad review, the response to this negative Amazon Review is hilarious.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 16: The Overwhelming Urge

It's now Day 16 of Bizarro Fiction Month. I've passed the halfway mark, and have decided that much of this week will be dedicated to a type of book I find hard to review: short story collections.

The Overwhelming Urge, by Andersen Prunty,  is  a collection of flash fiction, except for "Discovering the Shape of My Skull," which seems to be long enough to count as a short story. Anyway, writing a review of a flash fiction collection is hard for me, because I don't really know what to say about it.

I could just say that I like this book, but that's not much of a review. Most of the stories are so short that any discussion of what I liked about them would probably be longer than the story I was reviewing. The best I can say is that these stories are all really short, and range from kind of strange to really f-ing weird.

I did enjoy this, and if you aren't the sort of person to be bothered by the fact that this review is longer than many of the stories in the collection, I think you should give this a chance.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 15: Slime Night!

Ah, young love! It has inspired great works such as Romeo and Juliet, and it's inspired pieces of crap like Twilight. It is also the subject of  Slime Night!, by William Pauley III, which is  my review for day 15 of Bizarro Fiction Month.

This is a very short and strange tale of young love (or lust). It is the tale of two high school students who are in love with the class slut. They are the only two guys in the school, and possible the town, that she hasn't had sex with yet. They decide to play a strange game of competitive pinball for her "love," not that she knows anything about the game. The pinball machines the use are called Slime Night! and have an odd feature called "gushers," which when triggered cause the pinball machine to become covered in slime. That's pretty much the only really bizarro thing about the story. The rest of it can be attributed to standard adolescent male stupidity, and remember, I am speaking as a former adolescent male.

It's a good story, and well worth the low price for the ebook edition.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 14: Muscle Memory

I'm now at day 14, of Bizarro Fiction Month and I've decided to review the other New Bizarro Authors Series book that I have scheduled.

Steve Lowe's Muscle Memory is a bizarro version of the fairly standard body swap story. I know I've seen the basic concept done before about one billion times.  This story puts an interesting bit of a bizarro spin on it.

In this version, the population  an entire town has its bodies switched with whatever being they were closest to when the switching occurred. There are a lot of husbands and wives switching places, a cat and a dog, and a man and a sheep (resulting in the inevitable bestiality jokes). There's even a scene with a husband who swapped bodies with a babysitter he was cheating on his wife with, and who is now being chased by both his angry wife and the girl's father.

The story is entertaining and funny, but way to short; I think I managed to finish it in about an hour. It just felt like the ending was really not much of an ending at all, and that there must be more story. While the ebook is very reasonably priced, this feels more like half a story than a whole story, so I really can't recommend it as highly as I'd like.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 13: Shatnerquake

Well it's day 13 of Bizarro Fiction Month, and I have a very important question to ask:  Who doesn't like William Shatner? OK, I expect there are a few people who don't, but that was really a rhetorical question, because I'm about to review Shatnerquake by Jeff Burk.  This book is all about Shatner.

William Shatner goes to a Shatner convention, and some followers of Bruce Campbell set off a fiction bomb that somehow causes all of the characters played by Shatner to become real. The only goal of these characters is to kill the real Shatner. What follows is a lot of gore and humor and then some more more gore.

You get to see Shatner fighting Kirk and Shatner fighting animated Kirk. We see the Priceline Negotiator in action. We see Rescue 911 Shatner describing the various gruesome accidents that happen.There were just so many different versions of Shatner that I just wish more time had been spent with them.

That's really my only complaint; this book very short, even for a bizarro book. I really think it could have been expanded a bit and actually been improved. Even so, I really enjoyed this book. I thought it was funny, and I love funny books.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 12: Night of the Assholes

The original Night of the Living Dead is one of my favorite horror movies, so when I heard of Kevin L. Donihe's bizarro parody,  Night of the Assholes, I knew I'd have to read it, so it is going to be my review for day 12 of Bizarro Fiction Month.

Basically this book is a zombie novel. Only instead of people who are bitten by zombies and turning into zombies, people who are assholes to assholes turn into assholes.  All of this is done while more or less following the plot of Night of the Living Dead.

It all starts of with Barbara and her brother taking a trip. In this version, Barbara's brother is a Hare Krishna, and they're going to the mall instead of the cemetery.  AS you would expect, the brother is soon turned into an asshole, and Barbara runs. She ends up in the old farmhouse and soon meets Todd, the black guy who begins to board up every door and window in the place. They soon meet the various other characters from the movie: the young couple and the  (non-supernatural) asshole couple whose daughter has been turned. If you've seen the movie, you more or less know much of what is going to happen.

The book has a lot of funny moments. My favorite has to be when Barbara fist goes upstairs in the farmhouse and finds a note that reads, "THERE SHOULD BE A BLOODY SKELETON HERE. SORRY." I really loved the heck out of this book.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 11: The Beard

 It's now day 11 of Bizarro Fiction Month, snd I've decided tat today is a good day to review another Andersen Prunty book, specifically,  The Beard.

I've always liked the sort of stories where people go an a journey as part of some sort of quest. The Beard is a bizarro version of one of these quest novels. It's not an epic fantasy sort of quest; it's the sort where a couple of people travel through an altered version of America, and you get the sense that there's some sort of underlying allegory. In some ways, It reminded me of Neil Gaiman's American Gods or some  L. Frank Baum's later Oz books.

The Beard is  the story of David Glum, whose grandfather was kidnapped by a heard of elephants when David was seven. As an adult, David is a failed writer who returns to his parents' home to try and grow a beard, but then his mother seemingly dies, and David and his father set off on a quest to return the Brilliance, which had previously been stolen by the kidnapped grandfather, to a group of otherworldly people called the Nefarions.

Once the story got going and the adventures started, it was a great read. Unfortunately, the opening chapters where David is trying to sell his book, and subsequently moping around his parensts' house, are kind of boring. If it wasn't for those, I would probably give this book five yo-yos, as it is, it's still worthy of four.

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 10: King Scratch

It's Day 10 of Bizarro Fiction Month, and I've decided it's time to go back and review another of the books by one of my repeat authors, Jordan Krall.

Have you ever read a book, and when you finished it you had absolutely no idea what the heck it was about? I have, and that book is Jordan Krall's King Scratch. OK, I didn't have absolutely no idea. It was about a man whose ex-wife hired another guy to kill him. The problem is that all the other stuff that happened made no sense as far as I could see.

I would have to say that the whole plot seems to revolve around squids, Abraham Lincoln, moonshine, and pancakes. I'm not really sure how it all fits together, but I found it weird and enjoyable, if confusing.

What I find really odd though, is that despite the fact that I found the book extremely confusing, I still enjoyed it. I don't think that this is unexpected, considering that one of the "appendices" includes the line, "I've read this book five, maybe six times and I still don't understand the ending."

Bizarro Fiction Month Day 9: Mother Puncher

I'm up to day eight of my Bizarro Fiction Month, and I have one more author's book to review who will be reviewed here again: Gina Ranalli's  Mother Puncher. I actually reviewed her Suicide Girls in the Afterlife back on day one as part of the Bizarro Starter Kit (orange)  review. I'll be coming back to her later in the month when I review Wall of Kiss.

I think most people know that overpopulation is a fairly serious problem. In Mother Puncher Gina Ranalli has a created a bizarre future world where the government has tried to solve the problem by taking over the health insurance industry, and has passing new laws that any child not born in a hospital can't get insurance. If a child is born in the hospital, the parents are allowed to be punched in the face by the mother puncher. Since the fathers usually run off and hide, it's mostly the mothers that get punched, hence the name mother puncher.

This is the story of the mother puncher called Ed Means, who is an ex-boxer. Ed isn't actually a bad guy. While Ed does believe that bringing a baby into an overpopulated world is wrong, he doesn't really like punching mothers, and tries to avoid doing any real damage. He really doesn't like the way most fathers run off and hide to avoid their punishment. Really, the only reason he hasn't quit is because he's afraid someone who does like hitting women will take over.

Despite having a job that most people would find abhorrent, Ed comes across as a likable guy, and when bad stuff starts happening to him--because of stalker fans, psychotic rivals, and protesters--you rally can't help but feel sorry for the guy.

Bizarro Fiction Month: Day 8 The Egg Said Nothing

It's Day 8 of Bizarro Fiction Month, and it's also Easter. If you're like me, the first thing you think of when you think of Easter is Easter eggs. Sure, if I had a copy of Jesus Freaks, I'd totally be doing that today. Since I don't, I'm going with an egg theme, specifically, The Egg Said Nothing by Caris O'Malley.

I've only read four of the various years' New Bizarro Author series books so far, but of the four I read, this one is my favorite (and note to self: try to get this year's batch before the year is over). I'm not entirely sure why, but it is. Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for a good time travel story.

It's the story of a guy named Manny, who lays an egg. Then he gets some harassing phone calls about it, and gets into a fight with a sinister man with a shovel. Eventually he ends up at a diner, where he falls in love with the waitress. Then things start getting even weirder.

This book has humor, action, and romance. These are all good things for a book to have.This is a great, fun read.