The State of Bizarro Report, vol. 1: What is Bizarro?

A certain other blogger has been making a lot of claims about Bizarro recently, most of which are highly exaggerated or outright falsehoods. In the interest of giving some positive clarity to the matter, as well as some actual history, I've decided to put together just a couple of blog posts about it. If any of the information I give here is inaccurate, PLEASE do not hesitate to contact me to correct the info.

That being said... where do we start?

A lot of people start with a seemingly simple question:

WHAT IS BIZARRO?

That's a good question, but it's not a simple question to answer, and that answer is inextricably tied to the origins and development of the Bizarro scene. The most basic attempt to give a guideline (and a guideline is far more important than a dictionary definition here) is this: Bizarro is the literary equivalent of the cult movie section of a local video store. This is a section full of lots of different, off-kilter, and genuinely strange movies by filmmakers like John Waters, David Lynch, Takashi Miike, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jan Svankmajer, David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin, Lloyd Kaufman, Terry Gilliam, and Yorgos Lanthimos.

That covers a lot of territory and some people find that confusing - everything from surreal art-house to low-budget shock films - but it's hard to make it any clearer in less than a thousand words of explanation. Recently, when I used that rule of thumb, the person asking responded that this guideline was "uselessly broad." And I responded, "Well if American Psycho, The Wolf Man, Dead Alive, Jacob's Ladder, Scream, Shaun of the Dead, Jaws, Videodrome, and Critters are all the same genre, how usefully narrow is that?"

EVERY genre is extremely broad, and until you understand the associated elements and the aesthetic you won't get it. All Bizarro could be classified in other genres, though not necessarily in a way that's sensible. Just like one person might argue that American Werewolf in London is a Comedy movie first and a Horror movie second, or that Bone Tomahawk is a Western first and Horror second, Bizarro is one particular metric that overlaps with a lot of other genres. And that metric is WEIRDNESS. If the appeal of something is that it is entertainingly weird, then it is Bizarro. Period. Regardless of whatever other elements are in play from any other genre or style. A lot of Bizarro is trangressive, or surreal, or absurd, or grotesque, or perverse, or incorporates horrific elements, but none of these have ever been required for a book to be considered Bizarro, only weirdness.

Is a category of weird books useful? If you don't think so, then Bizarro may not be for you. This is a category that didn't necessarily happen by design - just like Lynch didn't decide at the outset to be a cult filmmaker - but it is also not something that happened by accident. Bizarro coalesced when a tiny group of writers and small presses noticed there was a growing amount of hard-to-classify underground lit that shared some similarities. There were "Horror" authors whose work was far more weird than scary, and often darkly humorous. There were authors writing with elements of Sci-Fi that focused less on the science and more on the general weirdness of the world it allowed them to create. There were authors doing almost experimental literature that was too low-brow to be taken seriously in the academic scene and used genre elements that ghetto-ized it. And they looked around to more popular authors who were hard-to-classify like Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, Roald Dahl, or Joe Lansdale, and they decided that not only was there already a genre of weird in existence, but it needed a label so that people who were into weird stuff could find it more easily.

So three presses got together and decided to brand their releases as Bizarro. It was extremely small at first, mainly limited to authors already involved with Eraserhead, Raw Dog Screaming, or the now defunct Afterbirth Books. This was 2005, when "Bizarro" was picked as the genre tag for all these previously misclassified books. Those first Bizarro authors had already been writing Bizarro since the early 2000s or even the 90s, but they'd never had a name for it. They'd never had a convenient way to communicate to readers what their stuff was all about. Bizarro, as a label, changed that.

Now, for a lot of authors whose work doesn't fit into traditional genres, Bizarro provides a haven and an opportunity to reach an audience that they may not have known existed before there was a rallying point, a short hand, a brand name. I didn't set out to write Bizarro. I know that I am not alone. I started out just writing stories that were too weird to get accepted by the Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, and Lit markets I'd been submitting them to. I was getting rejected because I was submitting to the wrong places, not realizing how bizarre my work was by core genre standards. When I found Bizarro, I found the appropriate market for my work. And I was way late in the game compared to progenitors like Carlton Mellick III, Kevin L. Donihe, John Edward Lawson, D. Harlan Wilson, or Gina Ranalli. But I came to Bizarro the same way they did: seeking an outlet for a voice too weird to make it in other markets. If I hadn't found Bizarro, I might have eventually given up on ever getting published. You can only take so many rejections before you feel like your work must suck. And it's very hard to tell, especially with form rejections, if the problem is the quality of your work or that you aren't writing what the markets are looking for. If no other market is looking for your work, YOU are probably Bizarro.

Now, when I first heard of Bizarro and started to look into what it was about circa 2009, I was immediately skeptical. I looked around and got the impression that it was the paperback equivalent of Troma films and IN-YOU-FACE Gwar videos dripping with green hog semen. But this was not accurate. There were those books, don't get me wrong, and I'm not shitting on authors who write those kinds of books, but at the time it seemed to me that my weird was different from their weird.

I started to explore some Bizarro books and I was pleasantly blown away. The genre was incredibly diverse, and even titles that screamed GONZO SLIME EXPLOITATION were actually books that defied my expectations. There was something going on in this scene much deeper than superficial shock humor. There was an undercurrent of weirdness that ran through this material, from one end of the spectrum to the other. There were weird children's books and weird romances. There were incredibly well written books with cuss words in the title. It was hard for me to process. But once I got it, I had found my home.

From the time I got involved in Bizarro in 2012, the scene has only grown more diverse, more vibrant, and more creative. If anyone tells you anything else they are selling something. There are still plenty of shockingly extreme titles to choose from, as well as fabulously weird magical realism, weird noir, pop culture absurdity, high-brow strangeness, and even absurd Bizarro erotica that you can't imagine anyone jilling off to. There are so many flavors of weird here, I can hardly believe it.

And in closing the section, I'd like to visually list just a few TOTALLY BODACIOUS AND RADICALLY IN YOUR FACE TITLES that came out in the last five years, showing definitively that the Bizarro scene is not dead, oh no it's not.

What it Means to Mow by G. Arthur Brown

The eyes of Balkan Sam, carrier lunatic, were duple. What this means for future generations is still uncertain, but binocular vision was a particular skill of his. A few people admired and wrote about that. But I’m not one of them. I just mowed his lawn.

I mowed his lawn enough times to really get good at it, and he paid me in lengths of velvet ripped from the robes of long dead chamberlains. Balkan Sam, he’s the left side of heaven, my dad used to inscribe on vans.

I think it was already August. I was mowing and not just for vanity’s sake, but to protect the innocent from the armadas of dangerous tick terror cells that were rumored to be spider-holed betwixt blades of too-long grass hidden in respectable lawns owned by crazy men like Balkan Sam.  Being a hot summer, he brought me a glass of poison lemonade. I didn’t drink it, of course, because I’m not a fucking moron. But I thanked him and I continued my mow.

Mowing is a manly art. Man against Nature in the most primal form you can find in contemporary society. It is man with a large mechanical tool telling nature how to behave, what to look like. The mower I use is a riding mower, but it’s not a tractor. It’s the kind that drives like a tank, the kind that can do a 360-degree rotation. I’m at war with these weeds. And Balkan Sam can see that, so he brings me a lemon-grenade, but I’m not a fucking moron and I know it’s poisonous, so I don’t pull the pin and throw it to blow up the tiny arachnid enemy, who may or may not be couched tentatively under a leaf of clover, waiting to suckle the capillaries of some unsuspecting dachshund who certainly doesn’t belong on Balkan Sam’s lawn, but who tends to end up there when his owner has had far too much mead at the Renaissance Faire. 

It’s like hunting. There is a part of the male mind that needs to sit in silence and fight nature, destroying something living, or at least cutting large bits of a living thing away and leaving them to shrivel and die in the sun. Plants have a whole different kind of existence than do animals. It’s hard to say when they are alive and when they are dead, when they are the parent and when they are the offspring. Balkan Sam comes out and cuts off one of my fingers. He wants to create a rhizome that will grow new hunter-mowers, and you can sell that kind of shit on eBay now.  I’m not a fucking moron, so I don’t care that he cut my finger off because that was my poison finger and I’m not a fucking moron. I’m an adventurer, riding into the thick of a very tiny jungle, as far as five gallons can take me.

Balkan Sam rushes back out, those two googly eyes just googling at me, and tries to fill the tank with poison gas. “Save it for the Texas chambers!” I shout over the sound of some of the best mowing the East Coast is likely to see this summer. It’s already August, I think. I should be done by Christmas. 

Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown

Artwork Max Ernst

Father's Day Spectacular Featuring Vince Kramer

Vince Kramer wrote a poem. Here it is!

I wrote a poem
It is the best poem ever
I am going to read it out loud to you

Hey look at me
I’m up on stage reading a poem
I’m a big fucking faggot

I wrote a poem once when I was little
I read it to my dad
He punched me in the face

In college my writing teacher made us write a poem
I wrote him a note that said
“Go fuck yourself”

But that was very wrong
Because I should’ve wrote
“Go kill yourself”

And maybe he would have

Anybody who likes poetry is gay
I mean, I’m gay
But you’re way gayer than I am

Oh look, the sky is blue
Now it’s not
You’re a faggot

Stephen King should be killed

-------

Vince Kramer is about seven feet tall and at least a thousand years old.  He has roamed the Earth since the Viking days, biting the people he encounters. If one is bitten by a Vince Kramer, he turns into a Vince Kramer. When two Vince Kramer's encounter one another, they fuck to the death, until the weaker dies of blood loss. He also suffers from alien
smile syndrome.






Copyright 2013 Vince Kramer

Kitten Invades Alaska!

Kitten was sighted in a Barnes & Noble in Fairbanks Alaska!  Special thanks to Sarah Shaw.

It won't be long until Kitten finds it way into coffee houses in Iowa (I mean, if they've got coffee there, I have no idea), preschools in Utah, churches in Missouri, houses of ill-repute in Wisconsin.  It's all the r(amp)age. 

Have we forgotten what R.A. Harris had to say about G. Arthur Brown's Kitten so soon?

"One part a nightmarish family saga, and one part a fantastic, surreal voyage of discovery for a kitten. It's a seriously fun mix of grotesque humour and sombre existential horror."

That it is, R.A. That it is. 

His Blind Friend Daniel by G. Arthur Brown

My blind friend Daniel claws his way in the corners, as if in search of food, but he is just vetting the tile work.  I shouldn’t leave it to him; he’s blind and vetting is what I’m paid to do.  But I’ve got a jelly donut.  I didn’t tell Daniel that I had anything good to eat and he’s not exactly a blood hound.  I take a big bite and my lips smack.

Daniel’s head shoots up.  “What was that?  Are you eating?”

“No, Daniel.  I’m blowing kisses to the ghosts,” I say as I dust the confectioner’s sugar from my chin, as if he might see it, finding me out.  “Place is full of them.”

“I can feel them, too.”  He slides his greasy, gray finger tips along the grout.   An ecstatic expression squirms on his face, his hard-boiled egg eyes locked firmly on me.  “I know I am inside a ghost when I feel suddenly cooled, like an AC unit just kicked on. But it is also like you’ve been immersed in gelatin of some type.  You get the fear, like you’re going to drown.  But it happens so fast that you don’t have time to panic.  Sometimes, if you are lucky, they leave you a little bit wet.” 

“I know I am inside a ghost,” I kid him, “when I am at the nursing home.”

He nods gravely, pensively.  “Their tiles need much work.”  He brings a filthy pinky to his nose and sniffs. “A dead person ate fenugreek here.”  He utters this in such a way that I have no doubt he is correct.

It is then that I notice that the jelly is not jelly at all. It is a green fenugreek custard.  I can taste it now. It was never even sweet.  “Do old people get pudding?” I ask.

“Yes, of course they do. You know that.” He runs his fingers along the edges of the sheets, tucking me in.  It’s comforting to hear his voice.  It is so dark and cold here.

“Tell me a story.”

“You know all the stories. You invented the stories.”

“Tell me one that I have forgotten.”

He clucks his tongue.  “Do you remember the story about your blind friend Daniel?”

I shake my head.

He clears his throat. I imagine what his face must look like while he composes himself. He begins, “Your blind friend Daniel claws his way in the corners, as if in search of food, but he is just vetting the tile work.”

Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown
Artwork Remedios Varo

THE TRUTH OR DARE CHAMPION by Justin Grimbol

Earl woke up to someone pounding on his door.

“Who is it?” he yelled.

The door opened. Light seeped into his room. Pussy Bear stuck her massive bear head into his room. She was drunk.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I’m bored,” she said.

“It’s five in the morning. You’re supposed to be bored. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“I don’t want to sleep. Come on, let’s hang out?”

“And do what?”

“We could play Truth or Dare.”

Pussy Bear loved to play Truth or Dare. She was a pro at truthing and daring. Once she dared a girl named Lila to stick a super powered flash light up her butt. It made both the girls ass cheeks glow. It was the best time ever. Earl was a nerd. He didn’t get to see cool stuff like that very often.

Truth or Dare could also get very awkward though. Pussy Bear loved to dare Earl to sit in her lap and touch her. She loved to make him uncomfortable.
 
Once, she dared Lila to kiss him. Lila refused. “He smells,” she said.

Earl looked like he was about to cry. This made Pussy Bear furious.

She started verbally abusing the girl. She called her a skank. She told her she was ugly. “You look like fucking Mrs. Potato Head!” Pussy Bear told her. Lila eventually ran out of the house crying.

It had been months since the incident with the Lila. Still, he was apprehensive about playing Truth or Dare. What if she got him all horny and they ended up boinking? He didn’t want to lose his virginity to a drunk Bear.

“Who else is awake?” Earl asked.

“Just me.”

“You can’t play Truth or Dare with only two people.”

“Sure you can.”

“It would be boring.”

Earl sighed. Pussy Bear was his first roommate. He thought it would easier to live with someone who was older. It wasn’t. He had been living with this big titted bear for almost a year and he hadn’t gotten used to it. She was belligerent and sex crazed and she never did the dishes. He heard that before she got the surgery she was just a normal woman and that she was pretty.  People told him that the surgery had changed her, that it didn’t just make her look like a bear, that it also made her act like one.

“Listen Pussy Bear, I’m eighteen now. I’m way too old to be playing Truth or Dare.”

“Age doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m old as hell and I still love playing Truth or Dare. It’s the best.”

“I just don’t want to play, OK? I got to get some sleep. I got to go to work tomorrow.”

“OK. I understand.”

Pussy Bear closed the door. Earl lay in bed and listened to her stomp around their apartment. He could hear her rifling through the refrigerator. He could hear her dropping food onto the floor and then drunkenly cleaning it up. Pussy Bear got hungry at night. Especially when she was feeling rejected.

At one point he heard Pussy Bear talking to herself. She was playing Truth or Dare. Alone.  “Truth or Dare?” she asked herself. “Truth,” She said. “Don’t chose truth. Only wimps chose truth. Truth is boring.” She said. “Fine I’ll chose dare. OK. I dare you to stay up all night, eat all the food in the refrigerator and then to take a nice long piss as you watch the sun rise.”

Earl laughed when he heard her say this. She was so determined. She was like the Rocky Balboa of Truth or Dare. Part of him wanted to join her. An even bigger part didn’t want to get molested by a giant bear.

He couldn’t sleep. His thoughts were racing. He kept thinking about Pussy Bear. All that fur. Those giant breasts. Her musky odor. Then he thought about Lila. He thought about her ass and how it shined like Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer.

Hours passed. The sun rose. Birds began chirping.

Earl heard Pussy Bear walked outside. He heard her pissing. She pissed for what seemed like a small eternity. Earl loved the way it sounded. It was the sound of triumph. She had succeeded. She had played Truth or Dare by herself. And she had won.

-------

Justin Grimbol went to some college for a million years and he has a beard, but you should totally buy his books:  Drinking Until Morning and  The Crud Masters.


Copyright Justin Grimbol
Artwort Giorgio de Chirico

James Brown Saves Christmas by Andrew Wayne Adams

“Get up!”

“Get on up?”

“Get up!” shouts James Brown again, “it’s Christmas!”

“Holy shit!” I say, and jump out of bed, throwing off the covers and rising straight up like Nosferatu. “Christmas!”

We run downstairs, James Brown in the lead. His face is all sweaty. He screams, “Stay on the scene!”

And by “the scene,” he means: Christmas morning!

We each have one present under the tree. From each other. He opens his first, ripping away the paper to reveal: me!

“So good,” he shouts, “so good; I got you!”

I open mine next. It’s: James Brown! He doesn’t wait for me to finish unwrapping him before he gets up and dances, flinging off the last bit of paper himself as he does the Mashed Potato.

Dad comes in—we haven’t seen him in years—and unwraps his present (that he got for himself) to reveal: a snakeskin purse!

James Brown screams, “Papa’s got a brand new bag!”

Then Dad leaves again for several more years.

We both fall silent, looking inward. I sink to the floor. The Christmas tree wilts. From the fireplace comes, not Santa Claus, but carbon monoxide.

Then James Brown does the Twist, and he looks at me and screams, “Get up!”

“Get on up?”

“Get up!” he shouts, and I do, and we both run to the kitchen and fling open the cupboards and fridge and grab flour and sugar and eggs and butter and PCP and start to make Christmas cookies!

Once the dough is ready, James Brown rolls it flat by dancing on it. Sweat drips from his face and mixes with the dough.

I feel good.

We cut shapes from the dough. We bake the shapes. We decorate the baked shapes and put them on a plate. We make hundreds of cookies of every kind. I feel nice.

James Brown picks up a gingerbread man and says, “This is a man’s world!” Then he eats the gingerbread man.

We eat hundreds of cookies.

The overload of sugar and PCP turns James Brown into a monster. A vampire, to be specific. He grows fangs and dons a cape.

He attacks me. I grab a cookie shaped like a crucifix and try to ward him off. He hisses. I back him into a corner. He does the splits and wraps himself in his cape. I stand over him, holding him in place with the cookie.

A saxophonist sneaks up behind me and honks his instrument in my ear. It startles me, and while I’m distracted, James Brown bites me on the arm.

The saxophonist bows to James Brown, calls him “Master,” then turns into fog and disappears into the exhaust fan over the stove.

I look at the bite on my arm. I look at James Brown.

James Brown screams, “I got you!”

Indeed; and soon I will be like him: undead!

I cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I drop to my knees. James Brown drapes a cape over me.

I die.

James Brown puts me in the oven and rolls a large rock in front of it. I bake at room temperature for three days/months. Then:

“Get up...”

“Get on up?”

“Get up...” James Brown croons into my mind through vampiric telepathy; “it’s Easter!”

“Holy shit!” I say, and burst out of the oven, rising from my tomb like Nosferatu. “Easter!”

We run outside and hunt for eggs and drink the blood of humans. The humans call me “Master.” They are my flock. I feel good.

I knew that I would.

-------

Andrew Wayne Adams is a total jerk from somewhere in the Midwest or something.  He wrote a book called Janitor of Planet Anilingus.  He stole G. Arthur Brown's Kitten and he won't give it back. He now lives in Portland where he is happy and successful (and licking butts).

Copyright Andrew Wayne Adams
Artwork by Leonora Carrington

The Story of Geordio's Rooster Flock by G. Arthur Brown

Geordio had a whole flock of roosters. This is not something you find all the time. You can find whole flocks of hens.  Mostly in the trees, which is where they sleep. Easier to find when they are sleeping. Craftier than you might think in the day time.  Seems crazy. Foxes and raccoons are out at night. 

“Fuck our eggs!”  squawked one rooster!
“We don’t even have any fucking eggs!” squawked two roosters!

Geordio, as I said, had a whole flock of roosters.  This was because he was a homophile.  He couldn’t relate to women, even chicken women.  He even got rid of a poinsettia that he thought might be a girl.

I totally told him it wasn’t a girl.  He still gave it to a homeless man, who was very happy about it, until he realized it wasn’t cannabis sativa. 

But the point is, you see a group of chickens, you assume that most are hens.  This was not the case when you came around Geordio’s place.  First of all, he just had them inside, like dogs or cats.  There were nearly twenty of them.  And the shit was caked into his carpet, which wasn’t good to begin with, so that I wouldn’t wear my nice shoes in his house for fear of fucking them up. 

I was at his place one night. 
“Fuck our eggs!” a rooster squawked.

And yeah, roosters can’t lay eggs, but they were laying something that was sort of like golf balls.  If you boiled them down, and then crushed up the residue and snorted it, it got you super fucking high.  We even gave some to that disappointed homeless guy.  He could fly after that.  I’m not sure if he could fly before that, but he did have large wings.  

Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown
Artwork Remedios Varo

Poo Party by Justin Grimbol

     “Why can’t I stop shitting?” he yelled.

Heavy tears rolled down his cheeks. He had been in the bathroom, sitting on this heartless toilet, for over an hour. He had flushed six times. The smell was monstrous. He couldn’t stop.

“Why did this happen now?”

His roommates were throwing a party and it was getting wild. He could hear them dancing and laughing. Tits were being pulled out, he was sure of it. People were getting naked, he could tell by the way they were cheering.

“Oh God have mercy on me!” he called out to the heavens.

God did not respond.

He kept pooping. It was as if his ass was the sky and the toilet was the ocean and this was the perfect storm.

 Soon the hooting and hollering turned into moaning. He could hear flesh smacking against flesh. He could hear sucking sounds. His cock got hard. As he cried and squeezed out long turds, he jerked his dong. He was desperate to be included in the party in some way.

The sex sounds became more intense. Eventually the moaning turned into screams. He could hear flesh tearing and bones breaking. He was just about to come when he saw a puddle of blood seep under the door. His boner became limp. His eyes widened.

Finally, the shitting had stopped. But he no longer wanted to leave the bathroom. He no longer wanted to join the party. He wanted to hide.

“Help!” he heard someone knocking on the door. “She’s killing everyone!”

He ran to the shower and shut the curtains.

He sat there, trembling.

Even after the screaming stopped and things became quiet and the sun had risen, he refused the leave the bathroom.

“Dear God, help me,” he begged as he lay in the tub, naked, in the fetal position.

The door shook and then got ripped off the hinges. A woman walked into bathroom. She was a seven foot tall woman with a firm, curvy body that was covered in blood. Tusks jutted out of her mouth. Her eyes were piss-stain yellow.

She didn’t notice him.  She sat on the toilet bowl and started to shit so loudly the entire house shook.

The smell was potent. It filled the boy in the tub. He became dizzy. His body shook. Horns sprouted from his head. His limbs stretched out and his muscles bulged. He screamed in pain as his teeth grew into long, cock-shaped daggers.

When he was done transforming he looked up and saw the lady-monster was standing over him. Her eyes were wide. She mounted him. The sun was up but the night wasn’t over yet. This girl was ready to party. 

------

Justin Grimbol went to Green Mountain College for thirty years. He majored in Partying and Dry Humping. He is the author of DRINKING UNTIL MORNING and THE CRUD MASTERS. 
Copyright 2013 Justin Grimbol

Juniper's Window by Mr. Nihil (including Potato Baby)

Juniper ran her finger along the rounded edges of her phone, absorbing the cool of the plastic into her being.  This sensual black plastic warmed her nethers, dampening her panties.  She began this affair about a year and a half ago, at work.  At first, she spent her breaks with the phone, but at this point, Juniper no longer cares about her job, and simply caresses the phone at her desk persistently throughout the day.

I know where Juniper works, and about 6 months ago, I started going to her office on my lunch breaks.  Juniper doesn’t know me, I just saw her one day while I was at that office- her lips slightly parted, her cheeks and bosom flushed, her finger on the phone.  Since she doesn’t know me, and because I have no business at her office, I stand outside of her window and watch her for about 35 minutes, Monday through Friday.  My lunch break is an hour long, but it takes about 10 minutes to reach the office, and 9 minutes to get back to my place that I work, as I always hit a red light en route to Juniper, and a green one on the return trip.

Since I’ve started watching her, Juniper has been spending less and less time actually working, and more and more time in some sort of sexual bliss with her phone’s plastic shell- I know this because I follow most of her co-workers on Facebook.  Many of them don’t have locked profiles.  So involved is she with her phone that I didn’t think she ever noticed me peering around her window frame in the afternoon, but today, just for a moment, her eyes flickered upward, and our gazes met.  I’m just sure of it.

Mr. Nihil did the illustrious cover art for my first book Kitten, part of the New Bizarro Author Series of 2012, released by Eraserhead Press.  Mr. Nihil has a lot of comics, flash fiction, flash animation and other stuff at http://nihil-and-rat.com.

J.W. Wargo's Avoiding Mortimer Book Trailer

Kitten by G. Arthur Brown (New Bizarro Author Series 2012)

My first book is out now from Eraserhead Press.
You can buy it at Amazon, Amazon UK, Waterstones, Amazon Canada, Book Depository, and other places, I'm sure. But if you live in the US, UK, Canada or Elsewhere, these links should be convenient for you.
 
Here's a link of me reading awkwardly from the book!

Here's what some people have to say about this book:

"If you want to read a fun book, get Kitten. It's crazy! It's hilarious! It's AWESOME! It's one of the Bizarro-est Bizarro books EVER!...  It flows well, and the wittiness peppered throughout constantly stimulates the pleasure-center of your brain!... I'm going to have to give Kitten the Kramer Award in Literature, which I made up right now. Well done, G. Arthur Brown (more like Great Author All-Around.) Thank you for doing this to us. I applaud you." -- Vince Kramer, Gigantic Death Worm

"One part a nightmarish family saga, and one part a fantastic, surreal voyage of discovery for a kitten. It's a seriously fun mix of grotesque humour and sombre existential horror." -- R.A. Harris

"This is bizarro written with sincerity. It's funny in a quirky, heartfelt way. It's complicated. It's got depth... I'd call it slow-burning bizarro." -- S.T. Cartledge, House Hunter

Being part of the 2012 New Bizarro Author Series is a special honor, not only because all the books are fantastic first books from talented, promising authors, but because we are the first class to go international. Links to my fellows can be found on the right-hand side of my blog. Buy all these books now from Amazon!  They all qualify for the 4-for-3 deal, meaning if you buy them all, you get two other qualifying books!  It's totally awesome.

Late, but Great, News

So, Eraserhead is publishing my short novel Kitten as part of the 2012 New Bizarro Author Series. I'll be flying out to Portland, OR (at great expense, due to holiday travel rates!) on the 15th for Bizzaro Con, at which I'll be doing a 'reading' from my new novel. I'll post the link to my book on Amazon (and other sites) when it becomes available, which should be on or shortly after the 15th of November. And to all the other authors of last years NBAS, I apologize for never finishing my intended reviews. Other than the Placenta of Love review I posted on the blog, I did a review for Vince Kramer's Gigantic Death Worm at Amazon. And that's it. But I read all the books, and most of them are pretty darn good. Anyway, hurray for me!