|
Post by callipygias on Dec 22, 2009 18:09:18 GMT -5
A while ago I learned about "psycho noir," a new take on an old style, but yesterday I accidentally discovered a new genre called Bizarro Fiction. I searched for Inglourious Basterds at Amazon without realizing I was in the Book section and this came up: In a land where black snow falls in the shape of swastikas, there exists a nightmarish prison camp known as Auschwitz. It is run by a fascist, flatulent race of aliens called the Ass Goblins, who travel in apple-shaped spaceships to abduct children from the neighboring world of Kidland. Prisoners 999 and 1001 are conjoined twin brothers forced to endure the sadistic tortures of these ass-shaped monsters. To survive, they must eat kid skin and work all day constructing bicycles and sex dolls out of dead children.
While the Ass Goblins become drunk on cider made from fermented children, the twins plot their escape. But it won't be easy. They must overcome toilet toads, cockrats, ass dolls, and the surgical experiments that are slowly mutating them into goblin-child hybrids.
Forget everything you know about Auschwitz...you're about to be sh** slaughtered.Anyone here familiar with this kind of thing? It has the stench of Sloane. Like if the Sloane collective wrote a book it would be something like this. As disgusting and crazy and wild as it apparently is, I wouldn't be surprised if, like the crude pulp fiction of the early-mid 20th century, this genre magically becomes respectable 20 or 30 years after it's over, and from that perspective I think I might give it a try. Does anyone have any experience or suggestions?
|
|
|
Post by Emperor Cupcake on Dec 22, 2009 22:20:58 GMT -5
I had heard the term Bizarro Fiction, but had no inkling what it referred to. Ass Goblins of Auschwitz is the best book title ever, though.
|
|
|
Post by Weirdo Writer on Dec 23, 2009 0:09:33 GMT -5
Dubya. Tee. Eff.
|
|
|
Post by Continuing Legend on Dec 23, 2009 2:00:40 GMT -5
Holy crap, that's a THING? Like, for REAL?
I think I need to read this!
|
|
|
Post by mummifiedstalin on Dec 23, 2009 13:00:10 GMT -5
Bizzaro fiction is a name for just weird-ass stories. It became a "movement" when people decided to market it and collect stories and sell them under that name.
Look up a guy named Steve Aylett. He's the best in that "genre," imo.
|
|
|
Post by callipygias on Dec 28, 2009 3:15:24 GMT -5
I checked out Aylett, but from the descriptions and reviews he seems to belong more to the psycho noir crowd. It's kind of an assumption, since I've never knowingly read anything considered bizarro or psycho, but from what I read about them they seem pretty distinct (except in tone). I might try Aylett anyway. If nothing else, the awesome character names make me want to read about them: Download Jones, Kid Entropy, Brute Parker, Joe Solitary, Tony Endless, Jesse Downtime.
Maybe I'll find out how similar the two styles (genres? movements? whatever) are, because I received Disassembled Man (psycho noir) and Ass Goblins (bizarro) from Amazon yesterday. Probably a complete waste of money, but I guess I feel like experimenting a little.
|
|
|
Post by mummifiedstalin on Dec 28, 2009 8:48:58 GMT -5
I've never heard the term "psycho noir" before, but a quick google search says it's more like _Blue Velvet_ which has a much darker strain to it and is "realistic" at least in so far as it's more about extreme brutality than about just flat out surrealism at times...even Aylett's "crime" books are completely impossible. Aylett's early books were about a city called Beerlight where crime was considered an art form. I guess that could sound like "psycho-noir," but they veered more toward the hilarious and weird rather than anything about severely psychologically skewered people doing terrible things. It's more like someone trying to commit the perfect crime where every second breaks at least seven laws, and she has to visit a multi-dimensional gun salesman who can sell reality-shifting guns and plausibility bombs...all while arguing with a talking piranha who thinks the search for the perfect crime is really just an substitute for love of donuts or some other randomness. His later books like _Lint_ (the single most hilarious book I've ever read) is definitely just plain old bizarre/bizarro.
|
|
|
Post by callipygias on Dec 28, 2009 13:40:22 GMT -5
a multi-dimensional gun salesman who can sell reality-shifting guns and plausibility bombs...arguing with a talking piranha who thinks the search for the perfect crime is really just an substitute for love of donuts Sounds psycho/bizarro, alright. I also read a description that included a "mischievous apocalyptic donkey" (Squid Pulp Blues). Might try that one. Apparently there's a book about an attempted assassination of William Shatner (by Bruce Campbell cultists) that causes a "Shatnerquake." Every character ever played by William Shatner is sucked into our universe with the goal of hunting down and killing The Shat. I probably won't read this, but if they could get Shatner to make the audio book version it might qualify as a Wonder of the World. There's a Rescue 9-1-1 Shatner, Priceline Shatner, TJ Hooker Shatner, a light saber-wielding Star Trek Shatner, Shatner the singer. Wow.
|
|
|
Post by Emperor Cupcake on Dec 28, 2009 20:26:33 GMT -5
The fact that somebody actually writes and reads these kinds of things fills me with unmitigated glee. :-)
|
|
|
Post by callipygias on Dec 29, 2009 17:09:13 GMT -5
I'm surprised by how much I liked Ass Goblins of Auschwitz. I was originally excited at the prospect of trying Bizarro out, but once I actually spent $$ on a couple books I felt kind of... icky about it. I became half convinced it would simply be an amateurish, in-your-face gore-fest. Finding out Cameron Pierce lives (communally, I think) right here in Portland -- and that he looks like any other goofy downtown weirdo kid -- didn't help. But he actually had a very nice, even quiet style, believe it or not.
It's pretty impressive that he could write the story he did, full of horror after vomit-inducing horror, with such an easy, casual tone. He's even able to create touching little moments in the middle of this disgusting nightmare of a story without overdoing it: On an underground mountain made of dead children, "I lie down on the hilltop and rest my left cheek in the palm of a dead girl." And prisoner number 1,000, a skeletal mute who often lives between the conjoined ribs of prisoners 999 (the narrator, who has forgotten his own name) and 1,001 (Otto, his brother), is the sorriest, most tragic little fellow ever.
On the very rare occasion that he waxes a little poetic, it doesn't feel at all forced: No sunshine illuminates our organs as they ferment in barrels, and later, after the cider is drunk, no sunshine warms the ivy lacing through our bones. We endure it to pay off the debts of youth, but we will never reclaim those happy times. Our punishment goes without cause or redemption."
There may even be an occasional literary reference. Anyone who has read The Third Policeman will enjoy Pierce's... similar(?) use of the bicycle. And the opening sentence of chapter nineteen, "A siren screams across the ceiling," compared to the opening sentence of Gravity's Rainbow, "A screaming comes across the sky."
|
|