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.