Best of
Bizarro-Fiction

2014

Sweet Story


Carlton Mellick III - 2014
    Sally is an odd little girl. It's not because she dresses as if she's from the Edwardian era or spends most of her time playing with creepy talking dolls. It's because she chases rainbows as if they were butterflies. She believes that if she finds the end of the rainbow then magical things will happen to her--leprechauns will shower her with gold and fairies will grant her every wish. But when she actually does find the end of a rainbow one day, and is given the opportunity to wish for whatever she wants, Sally asks for something that she believes will bring joy to children all over the world. She wishes that it would rain candy forever. She had no idea that her innocent wish would lead to the extinction of all life on earth.Sweet Story is a children's book gone horribly wrong. What starts as a cute, charming tale of rainbows and wishes soon becomes a vicious, unrelenting tale of survival in an inhospitable world full of cannibals and rapists. The result is one of the darkest comedies you'll read all year, told with the wit and style you've come to expect from a Mellick novel.

Hungry Bug


Carlton Mellick III - 2014
    In a world where magic exists, spell-casting has become a serious addiction. It ruins lives, tears families apart, and eats away at the fabric of society. Those who cast too much are taken from our world, never to be heard from again. They are sent to a realm known as Hell's Bottom -- a sorcerer ghetto where everyday life is a harsh struggle for survival. Porcelain dolls crawl through the alleys like rats, arcane scientists abduct people from the streets to use in their ungodly experiments, and everyone lives in fear of the aristocratic race of spider people who prey on citizens like vampires.Told in a series of interconnected stories reminiscent of Frank Miller's "Sin City" and David Lapham's "Stray Bullets," Carlton Mellick III's "Hungry Bug" is an urban fairy tale that focuses on the real life problems that arise within a fantastic world of magic.

Pus Junkies


Shane McKenzie - 2014
    Zits cover his entire body; his skin is aflame with bright red, pus-filled sores. He has become an outcast in his school and the other kids call him Toad.But what they don't know is the pus leaking from Kip's acne is actually a powerful narcotic that produces strong psychedelic effects. Soon, everyone in school will want a taste of his hallucinogenic cream and this former-loser will become the most popular kid in school. But once you lick the Toad, there's no going back to normal drugs. His classmates just can't get enough. And as their addiction grows, they will stop at nothing to get it...In the spirit of Street Trash and Class of Nukem' High comes a novel about growing up, finding yourself, and tripping on bodily fluids. Shane McKenzie and Eraserhead Press present a bizarro high school drama drenched in Technicolor-splatter!

The Tick People


Carlton Mellick III - 2014
    It is a sad city, the saddest of cities, a place so utterly depressing that even their ales are brewed with the most sorrow-filled tears. They built it on the back of a colossal mountain-sized animal, where its woeful citizens live like human fleas within the hairy, pulsing landscape. And those tasked with keeping the city in a state of constant melancholy are the Stressmen-a team of professional sadness-makers who are perpetually striving to invent new ways of causing absolute misery. But for the Stressman known as Fernando Mendez, creating grief hasn't been so easy as of late. His ideas aren't effective anymore. His treatments are more likely to induce happiness than sadness. And if he wants to get back in the game, he's going to have to relearn the true meaning of despair.Like "James and the Giant Peach" combined with one of David Cronenberg's early body horror films, "The Tick People" is a charming children's fable that quickly devolves into a grotesque sexual nightmare.

Dungeons & Drag Queens


M.P. Johnson - 2014
    Will her bones be devoured by the gnawing nipple-mouths of slavwolves or crushed by the brutal Blada Femma? Worse yet, will she find love amongst the scum sailors and slopulating sky serpents? Will she win this glamorous game of thrones? The answer is clear in the most fierce and fabulous fantasy epic ever.

Fantastic Earth Destroyer Ultra Plus


Cameron Pierce - 2014
    His name is Tetsuo, and he'd like to tell you about the terrible things that brought ruin to his town. How he shot his brother, how the people of Itchy Zoo became puppets, how he fell in love for the first and last time, and how Satan watched it all go down.Written by Wonderland Book Award-winning author Cameron Piece and fully illustrated by Jim Agpalza, Fantastic Earth Destroyer Ultra Plus is a bizarro epic that's as beautiful as it is bleak.

Primordial: An Abstraction


D. Harlan Wilson - 2014
    and redeem his authority. This is only the beginning of terror. Life at the university isn’t what it used to be. Confronted by absurdity, redundancy, and pornogrpahy at every turn, the professor must struggle to follow the rules and be a good student even as he terrorizes the roommates, faculty, staff and administrators that threaten to undermine his rancorous will to power. Narrated in D. Harlan Wilson’s token “Hörnblower prose,” Primordial is an exercise in contemporary idiocy that rakes academia over the coals while plumbing the uncanny obscurities of existence and identity.