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."