THE AFTER-LIFE STORY OF PORK KNUCKLES MALONE by MP Johnson

There's been a subgenre floating around in fiction for a few decades now, possibly longer I guess, though I only heard the term Bizarro about six or seven years ago. I feel like I've read plenty of Bizarro from as far back as the 60s with some William S. Burroughs novels, but I think back then they were just called Weird Books. Essentially, this still holds true for today's Bizarro Fiction: it's weird, and that's the point. Whether or not a Bizarro author writes a book that makes sense is sometimes immeterial next to whether or not it entertains and/or illuminates. Unfortunately, for me, this is where I disconnect from the movement--most bizarro titles neither entertain me nor make me think much other than the author is just trying to be strange.

The After-Life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone follows the exploits of a farm boy, Daryl, and his dead pet pig, who quickly ceases to be a pig in the first few pages when he is slaughtered by the young boy's father and cooked up as a ham for dinner. Daryl refuses to part with his best friend, ultimately stealing the ham and running away to his aunt's apt in Green Bay, WI. This is just the first of his many stops on a strange soul-searching trip as he runs from location to location, prompting everyone around him to continually remark that they smell ham. The story also cuts to the POV of both the father, and later the pig (ham?) itself--and even the POV of a fly aplty named Zzz.

As the novel progresses the situations keep turning up the knob on the bizarre scale until we're way past 11... to the point that we're introduced to demons, other worlds, monsters, space, what have you. There's no real solid conclusion to the book other than to make it clear this adventure continues beyond the final pages, which works well because I think a reader's own imagination is the only thing that can outdo Johnson's final scenes.

With all this talk of traveling down the road of weirdness, you're probably wondering if there's really a story. Thankfully, MP Johnson is wise enough to provide some meat to his tale beyond just a dead pig, and ultimately at the heart of our journey is a strained father/son relationship trying to rectify itself. Perhaps this is what I liked best about the book, that Johnson took a pretty cliche story of a farm boy in love with with one of his father's livestock, which is killed, and gave us an entirely fresh way of exploring the fallout and rectification.

Is the book entertaining? I almost laugh as I say this but YES, it is very entertaining. Is it for everybody? Certainly Not. And to be honest, had it not gone so far into left field as it progressed, and contained endearing characters, I might have gotten a bit tired of the journey. But by the end I was dug in and enjoying the ride. As I read the last line I sort of felt like my head had been put in a blender.

Johnson's writing is good, with a nice sense of prose and style, and a pacing that never lets the story get mired down. That characters are interesting and the pathos is just right. In lesser hands, this type of story would suffer greatly, but Johnson knows his audience, and he knows how to use the language that speaks to them.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, even though I tend to lean away from bizarro fiction. So if you are a bizarro fan, you'll want to maybe add a bit to my final tally, but suffice to say I was nothing if not entertained and I recommend this to anyone looking for a short, strange trip.

3.5 OUT OF 5 Worms

VAMPIRE GUTS IN NUKE TOWN by Kevin Strange

Remember those Troma movies from the 80s? The ones that were done on the cheap, had weird monsters, were really gross, and full of gratuitous boob shots? They were not high art by any means, but we watched them over and over because....well, because of everything I just mentioned.

Such is the vibe of Vampire Guts in Nuke Town, a novel that prides itself on existing in grindhouse culture. It's equal parts violent, gross,and pornographic, all the while telling a pretty engaging story about a post-virus future where all humans have mutated in some way due to an atmosphere full of nuclear fallout. Most became vampires, and live in the shadows and underground tunnels. Some became Pogs, little frog men that can brave the sun and provide a unique experience for anyone willing to drink their blood. This blood drug is  Poog, and people take it because they think it might keep them immune from vampyrism, but really it just makes them high. And in the middle of all this is Guts, a man who's lost everything but know hows to fight back. With lots of guns. And well....with his guts....literally.

When we first meet Guts he's holed up in a seedy motel. A girl knocks on his door and asks for help. She's in the next room with her brother, who's sick. Guts knows this is not a good idea, because people don't just run around in the open air any more, and it could be a set up. But he chooses to help, and before long finds himself pulled through a hole in the motel floor, down into dark tunnels where vampire beasts, even bigger beasts, and even bigger weirder beasts try to kill him. Oh, and there's an office down there too, which is where the story gets a bit more interesting.

Suffice to say Guts has to fight his way through several more big baddies until he reaches his mega boss fight, but he must also try to unravel the mystery of what this new world means to him and why it's treating him like some kind of god. I won't give away the twist or the end, because if you like this kind of stuff you'll do yourself a favor to read it.

But therein lies the rub with Vampire Guts in Nuke Town--this is not for everyone. If you're a casual horror fan this might be a bit too much for you. Put it to you this way, there's enough violent graphic sex in this book that goes beyond about anything I've read before that I sort of think Mr. Strange needs some real therapy. Were it not for the fact the sex scenes are obviously dreamt up for shock value, I'd call the men in white coats to take him away. But I'm sure he knows that's a compliment. Case in point, I actually had to stop reading for a second after the scene where our hero orgasms into a girl's mouth as she is slowly decapitated by a man with a knife. I dunno...it certainly had an effect on me, and had I not grown up on Surf Nazis from Hell and similar films, I might have stopped reading.

But I'm glad I finished it. Kevin Strange knows his grindhouse mentality and the book achieves its goals. While his writing can be a bit wordy at times, it never lets up its pacing or insane imagery; it's easy to blow through this one laughing maniacally the whole time. Because if you can't find it in yourself to laugh at this one, you might miss the point.

Overall, this disturbing little book was a fun time and a gross-out experience I will recommend to people who think American Psycho is boring. (And if you are that type of person, be sure to check out the other books on Strange's imprint. With titles like Cannibal Fat Camp and Beer Run of The Dead, you can bet they're a blast. I, personally, would like to read more.) Get it here: http://www.strangehousebooks.com/

3.5 OUT OF 5 Worms.

EYES WIDE OPEN by Ted Dekker

This was a scary book! But first things first. I grabbed this as a freebie off Amazon's kindle store. What I didn't realize is that if you do that, it is broken up into 3 more sections that you have to then pay for at 3 dollars a piece. So you can get the whole ebook for 8 bucks, or each section for a total of 9 dollars. Hmmm. Just saying, I think that's kind of weird. Why charge more for the serialized version?

But moving on. I did buy it and loved it. This is the story of two people who accidentally wander into the psych ward of a hospital by mistake. The girl has no ID on her (long story about how she gets in that I won't spoil) and has to trade her dirty clothes for the resident uniforms and of course it's only minutes before the staff think she's a patient trying to escape. Needless to say they won't let her leave and her ordeal becomes both maddening and horrific.

Her friend who comes to save her merely finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, witnessing some freaky treatment of the patients by the doctors, and is--of course--admitted as a patient by a sadistic doctor who keeps him drugged.

At first I kept thinking....there's no way this would happen in real life. And despite how well the book was written, I had a hard time getting past the obvious plot holes, saying stuff like, why don't they just call their friends or families or employers?  But, as readers of the free kindle section will soon discover, there is WAY more going on than just an incompetent staff mistaking civilians for patients. We soon learn there is some supernatural stuff going on that makes it pretty hard for our protagonists to leave, and that this book much scarier than it leads you to believe in the first few chapters.

Thanks to that added element, I was able to really let go and enjoy it for what it is, and it started to really scare me. Not the supernatural/psychotic experiment parts of it, but the notion that someone in authority can so easily take away your identity and you're right to freedom, that we rely so much on pieces of paper to prove who we are in today's society. Okay, also the supernatural part too. You'll have to read it for yourself to see how dark it gets and how it ends, but be warned, it can make your skin crawl.

This one left me wanting to read a lot more of Dekker's work. I can't recommend it enough if you're looking for a good scare. (But just buy the 8 dollar version, yeah?)

4 OUT OF 5 Worms

WALKING SHADOW by Clifford Royal Johns

One of my guilty pleasures is good science fiction detective story, and Walking Shadow is one of better ones I've read recently. In a well-realized future Chicago, our protagonist Benny Kahn, who's more of a low level criminal than a hero, wakes up one morning to find he's paid a memory removal company to surgically take out something significant from his recent past. So thorough is the removal job that he wouldn't even know he'd had the surgery were it not for the bills he keeps getting from the removal company. What's worse, they say if he doesn't pay, they will report the erased memory (which they kept records of) to the police. Needless to say Benny is curious as to what he did or didn't do that would interest the police.

Benny decides to dig around, asking a seedy friend named Chen if he knows anything. Chen manages to get Benny a transcript of the removal job, which reveals that Benny wanted to remove the memory of ....nope, not gonna spoil it for you, other than to say things get really interesting. But even this reveal gets turned on its head a little later. As the novel progresses, peeling back layer after layer of clues and reveals, Benny learns that nothing is as it seems and no one is to be trusted. Friends turn out to be enemies, dead people are revealed to be alive, and Benny's own mind might be playing tricks on him. Poor Benny doesn't even come out of this with his psyche unsctathed.

Walking Shadow is a robust whodunnit and whydunnit that I found brilliant fun. Aside from a well developed city scape complete with flying cars (called buzzcars), a wealth of sci fi gadgetry, and a lexicon that rivals the best future noirs around, there is a wondeerfully crafted mystery that plays with the notion of reality like the best Philip Dick novels, or books like like Altered Carbon and Demolished Man.

Johns has a great sense of style and reading his prose was pure joy. The dialogue sizzled and was realistic and engaging at once, the violence was disturbing (I've grown accustomed to so called shock scenes in books, and a bit of video footage at the end of the book didn't shock me, but the way it was written still had me feeling uncomfortable) and the descriptive tension was high throughout.

Bottom line, this is a great book if you like movies like Bladerunner or Total Recall (the good one). I enjoyed it immensely and I will definitely seek out more work by Clifford Royal Johns.

4.5 OUT OF 5 Worms

HELL COMES TO HOLLYWOOD edited by Eric Miller

I had two worries going into this anthology. 1: that, like most anthologies, we'd get a heaping dose of first-time writers still honing their craft, and ultimately falling short of anything really good. 2: That every story would in some way involve the movies. Obviously it would to some degree, based on the cover image, but an anthology that is too narrow can get old fast. Also, as someone who doesn't live far from Hollywood, and knows first hand what a dirty place a large portion of it is (that might seem harsh, and yes there are plenty of nice homes behind gates, but to anyone who only knows Hollywood from what they see in TV shows and movies, unfortunately Tinsel Town is mostly just bars, drugs, run down apartments, and graffiti), I wanted some of these stories to really delve into the Hollywood I know today.

Well, suffice to say this anthology not only proved me wrong on all those counts, but did so brilliantly. We've got everything here from the obligatory story about actors and directors, but also mail room clerks, livery cab drivers, lawyers, party girls, and more. We've even got a Mythos tale.

What really struck me about this book was the caliber of writer it contained. Kudos to Eric Miller for pulling in real talent. And why shouldn't he have? Miller is the scripter of the syfy classic Ice Spiders, which I have seen and enjoyed immensely (I'll pretty much watch anything about giant bugs). Hell Comes To Hollywood is anything but a collection of green writers, but rather seasoned professionals entrenched in the entertainment business--successful screenwriters and producers and even film directors are involved here, even if they're not household names (even the guy who created the Ghoulies has a story in here, how cool is that!)

Without going through every story, I will say that every contribution is expertly written. This is the kind of book aspiring writers should read to learn about proper sentence structure, wordage, pacing, and character development.  Even though one or two of the stories might not have been my cup of tea, all of them were just so damn well written it blew my mind.

Of my favorites were Muse by Andrew Helm, a somewhat obvious tale of a strange woman who gives inspiration in exchange for...well, you get it; The Cutting Room by Jeff Seeman, an amazingly well done bit of novelty that unfolds like a matryoshka doll; Town Car by Joseph Dougherty, wherein a livery cab driver goes toe-to-mental-toe with the latest Paris Hilton wannabe; I'd Like to Thank by Jeff Strahm and Ray G. Ing, about an aging actress who will do anything to get her lifetime acheivement award, and Not Elves, by Brian Dominic Muer, that aforementioned Mythos tale that ends both Hollywood and the anthology.

These are all, however, very good stories and this anthology is a blast. I encourage everyone to read it, especially if you love those Tales From the Crypt reruns or if you're just looking to see how good short stories are done. I'll put this up there as one of the best anthologies I've read in years!

4 OUT OF 5 worms.

THE EPITAPH OF JONAS BARLOFF by Calvin Dean

YA novels are a funny thing these days. So much of them should not be read by kids. The Hunger Games still baffles me as something marketed toward youngsters--such a  gratuitous amount of violence and strong Political rhetoric. Both of which are fine, even appreciated, in an adult novel, but I kind of shudder to think what nightmares a 10-year-old has reading that kid of book. But I don't have kids, so I can't really speak from experience.

The Epitaph of Jonas Barloff on the other hand is a YA horror novel that reads a lot like an old R.L Stine book, which scored points for me, having grown up on those old Goosebumps titles. Yes, there is plenty of darkness here that straddles certain adult tones, and it's impactful, but it is tame. This was more like an after school special mixed  with a good Arthur Conan Doyle story.

The death of a teenage boy, Daniel Townsend, in the opening chapters begins our story. Daniel is the star athlete in high school, but his father is dying from cancer, and he is determined to help his father survive. Rather than go play ball with is friends, Daniel takes a drive out to an old abandoned mansion on the edge of town in hopes of finding answers about a cure for his father. Sadly, Daniel is killed by another driver near the dilapidated estate soon after. Though Daniel's car (and body) are found, the other car leaves no trace of itself or why they wanted Daniel dead. Thus begins our mystery.

Daniel's former girlfriend, Angela, and friend, Marc, begin to uncover clues leading to a possible supernatural explanation of Daniel's death. Why was he at that strange house? Who's the old guy that lives there? And what does that person have to do with Daniel? Meanwhile, a local detective is also trying to solve a second series of strange crimes: a sudden spurt of grave robberies. Bodies are being exhumed at the graveyard near the house where Daniel was killed. Their skulls are taken in the middle of the night by a strange figure in a carriage. Marc and Angela soon stumble upon this act of grave robbing while snooping on the man in the house, and it's clear there is a connection. But what?

I'll hold off on revealing the rest for fear of spoiling the mystery, but suffice to say we get a heaping dose of things that go bump in the night as the mystery begins to unravel.

Author Calvin Dean writes like the best of them, with a superb sense of syntax and a choice for words that proves he's worked at his craft. Add to that some extensive research on Cancer treatments and Police procedure that shows he put some thought into this work and he deserves some pats on the back for his skill.

One issue I had trouble with in this book, however, was the dialogue. It's pretty whitewashed. I know this is a YA novel but we're dealing with high schoolers who can drive and have cellphones which puts them into the 2000s. Too much of their voice seemed pulled from old Leave it to Beaver episodes. I just can't see seventeen-year-olds saying Sir and Ma'am so much these days, or baking muffins for their neighbors. Not that they should have spoken like the teens on that show Skins, but you know, a bit more realism would have been better. Likewise, their parents speak like people from the Stepford Wives. Thankfully the majority of the dialogue drives the novel forward, so even if it's somewhat bland, it's easy enough to gloss over those moments and remain entrenched in the story.

The loose ends were all wrapped up nicely (I was a little confused as to why a couple items had to be so convoluted, but ultimately it doesn't deter from the overall climax, so take that as you will) and the reveal totally surprised me--I did not see it coming! Also, kudos for the epilogue, which ended on a nice dark note that will leave an impression in readers.

All in all The Epitaph of Jonas Barloff is a fun read for youngsters, with some mild violence that is certainly tamer than anything in the Hunger Games. If you can get past some stilted dialogue, this is a very good book. I recommend it.

3.5 OUT OF 5 Worms

MIDNIGHT RIOT by Ben Aaronovitch

I picked this one up at a Borders Liquidation sale and sat on it for a while. I wish I hadn't! This book is superb fun.

The plot reads like a grown up Harry Potter or a toned down Sandman Slim. You've got ghosts and demons and sorcerers and River Gods and a macabre Punch & Judy show and plenty of laughs and gore and detective work thrown in. Basically, in London there is a supernatural force about making people kill other people. It's up to two police officers (Grant and Nightingale) to figure out what's going on.

Grant is new to the biz, a rookie on the force, whereas Nightingale is the senior officer (who may as well be Dr. Who) that has to train him in the ways of London Magic.This being book one in the series (I believe) we get to see how Grant comes into the unique position of working for the paranormal police.

Grant spends half of the novel learning his moves, and the next half solving the murders. It makes for a nicely paced book that I was able to get through very fast. The cast of supernatural characters, such as the ghost that witnesses the first murder, and the North London and South London river gods (who have a Hetfield and McCoy relationship with each other) were a blast to read.

I really can find nothing that I didn't enjoy about this novel, other than maybe it seemed a little drawn out in places for the sake of word count. But it didn't hurt my enjoyment. I will definitely be reading the other titles in this series.

4 OUT OF 5 Worms!