by L. Andrew Cooper
Note: Originally published in Dark Discoveries 33 (Autumn 2015): 28 – 30.
Upon first entry into Bizarro World, I greeted supremacy of men, not in comics form, but as THE SORROW KING, who held before him SISYPHUS, doomed to Rolling Rock forever. ALBERT CAMUS met SIS-FUSS when almost feeling his
flattest, which he felt later when he got smeared beneath an ever-rolling boulder (Camus rolled to vehicular death in 1960—too soon?). Yet while this tale of youth and questionable self-slaughter holds up the Ka-moos and Cough-Kas, not to mention the RAGE of another KING, and it seems to stand in front of THE CURE, like the LOST SOUL of NOTHING in POPPY Z. BRITE, who may have once stood on a beach with Ka-moo and sucked on a BANANAFISH (bone… like a suck on a gun) made Goth-horror after J.D. SALINGER quit the rye. It got too crowded so I turned my heels around in the sand, stepped forward.
And ran into a WALL OF KISS.
Since I was naked and pressed against the wall my nipples got hard immediately. The wall, rough like sandpaper, spotted with filth at the level of my crotch, beckoned, and my tongue slid along it, lips puckering in circles. He was everything a woman might need, I realized, self-consciously, thinking I should step away, knowing *cock is irrelevant*. Overcoming my POLANSKI-danski REPULSION at the thought of being hurt again, I gave into my DJUNA BARNES and Fucked the WALL, sliding against it until I felt an ecstasy unlike anything ever before. The wall glared back at me, Stoic. I grimaced, reached for a hammer that I noticed beside me—
And the hook of a giant wire clothes-hanger appeared and yanked me downward, through a trap door, down a canal into the ABORTION ARCADE, where I realized (I realeyes 3-d) I want 2-d (I 1-ah) play! As the voice of MORRISSEY echoed, I recalled the case of PLANTS v. ZOMBIES and thought seriously about fucking my mother right there in the soil. Trouble is I wanted No Children [Novella One], and a queer feeling came all over me as I saw brains turn into trees.
The hall was again HIGH SCHOOL [Novella 2, The Roadkill Quarterback of Heavy Metal High], where the TEEN WOLVES roam. One drove over the grassy hallway at me with a TALKING CHAIN SAW, so I dove beyond a musical hell, into a Destroyed Room [Novella 3].
Whence I fled the ARCADE, and fell into the hands of the WARRIOR WOLF WOMEN OF THE WASTELAND. They did things to me, these McDONALDLANDIAN BITCHES.
Carrying me before a crowd of their own parasite-infested kind, they stripped me. Sex, sex, and sex: each fuck, even rape (her fault), brought each BEAST BITCH closer to low class fangs and whiskers. Beyond the WALLS, they could be free to deep-throat my EXTRA LIMBS. One did. My eyes fixed on the bare breasts and belly that stood out from her otherwise DIANE ARBUS beauty, and she guided my penis into her hungry vagina. Let us not speak of THE HAUNTED VAGINA [different book] sprung from the same source [author] as these WARRIORS.
In order to take revenge after my experience with the WOLF WOMEN, I learned HOW TO EAT FRIED FURRIES.
Not wolfing but squirreling and ferreting for food, I heard sweet poetry from a FLYING CIRCUS as a bung hole in space showered me with shit: “Let me skull-fuck you. / It won’t be that bad, honest. / I’ll pay you in blow!” Though tempted, I would have driven away in the Humvee of Blessed Destruction, but Squirrel Jesus prevented passage, so I settled in for a game of BlackLung the Coal Mining Clown.
A SHATNERQUAKE interrupted my game after a FICTION BOMB dusted the ground with Trekkers and other UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTIONISTS. Their panic fervor left no time for settling, as behind them—lo!—came TJ HOOKER and, deranged, CAPTAIN KIRK and, ascendant, DENNY CRANE: the CRANE
drove an ambulance, backward; the KIRK, lithe, rode the ambulance’s roof, wielding a light saber and beaming devourer eyes at me; the HOOKER gripped the ambulance’s hood, clinging with fury. Although I couldn’t see him, I knew BRUCE CAMPBELL hid in the ambulance’s back. I would have died had THE SHATNER not arrived and, not suing me, acted, and as “blood and limbs flew about the room”—
(I died)
At my Funeral [story = The Funeral], which lasted SEVEN DAYS, I at last zipped my way out of the body bag but found the occasion terribly dull. I exited the HOME, searched for freedom amidst nothingness, and among The Porcupine Moshers of the Apocalypse [= novella], in a place reminiscent, oddly enough, of a LAND OF CONFUSION, I found a REAGAN puppet of violence and horror desiccating the irradiated earth. Sans hesitation, my blades erected from my spine and other skeletal selections, marking me, and neocon BRAIN MATTER SCATTERED among splatterpunks. I then jumped head-first into waters where waited the Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth [= story], spawned by mousy, dolphin-like curiosity raised to the power of FORTY-TWO. At last, I decided to find my way off this Crazy Shitting Planet [= novella] by sailing a BROBDINGNAGIAN fat HILTON-TRUMP on the shit-black sea to the end of a metaphor for THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM [= academic reference], which I never found, but I did find a neat WHALE, fat but in a good way, so it all worked out.
*
Bizarro fiction rolls together genre tropes and media references and usually externalizes the formal mix through images of human parts and taboos blended, torn, pierced, cooked, and otherwise violated in absurd or at least convention-defying ways. Horror and dark speculative fiction more generally provide slick, quick shock surfaces that you can skip along, like jolting from wave to wave on a jet ski as you read. Intellectual, philosophical references and content often appear outright, jumping up out of the water, and almost always lurk somewhere in the waves. In “postmodern” fashion, this literary stuff might merely belong to the surface as well. Likewise, the influence of superhero comics, B-movies, heavy metal, punk, Goth-rock, post-apocalyptic fantasy, fandom, furries, and other fringe/cult cultures may or may not be more important than existentialist and surrealist “classics” such as Franz Kafka and Albert Camus in letters, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel in film. All of the above move along Bizarro waters.
If Bizarro is so many things, is it really anything at all? Tough question. Wordplay, toilet humor, extreme violence, cannibalism, absurdity, and irrationality are common to Bizarro, South Park, and Shakespeare. Subgenres, perhaps in horror particularly, form like eddies in the ocean, only to become indistinguishable from larger bodies as history piles up. As I’ve said and written more than a few times, especially if you know the Marquis de Sade (of whom a meta-fictional character in Abortion Arcade says, “‘The Marquis can bite it’”), you can’t really come up with entirely new ways to violate people or taboos. All you can do is recombine elements with new whos, the authors and audiences, and new whens, technologies and other details distinct to a historical moment, real or imagined. Perhaps the reabsorption of the Bizarro eddy has already begun.
Looking through the table of contents of the 2012 collection The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade, I see many more mainstream names associated with the term than I remember seeing when I first heard it, names that were mainstream before “Bizarro” emerged.
I don’t mention works by most of these names in my paragraph about this book, the last paragraph of the first section. Such names include, for example, Joe R. Lansdale and Bentley Little, authors I’ve admired for years without ever thinking of associating them with “Bizarro” (although connections are clear to me now). I do mention Stephen Graham Jones’s “Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth,” which is a great story, but after its Bizarro title, its style moves in more traditional sci-fi/horror fashion, with relative minimalism in common with most Bizarro (but also with Ernest Hemingway). The collection, however, is edited by Cameron Pierce, a pioneer of the (self-acknowledged) Bizarro phenomenon, and published by Eraserhead Press, a major, perhaps the major, trailblazing publisher in the area, so Bizarro’s more distinct names are merging in this Best of book with broader phenomena less easily identified with the subgenre.
Pierce’s introduction to the book pushes the broadening along, defining Bizarro not just as taking cues from Kafka and others but actually including Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft, and even much earlier figures such as Charles Baudelaire, who, bizarrely, was said to have walked a lobster on a leash. Baudelaire, like Albert Camus (“Killing an Arab,” from the album Three Imaginary Boys) and J.D. Salinger (“Bananfishbones,” from the album The Top), provided song fodder for legendary Goth band The Cure (“How Beautiful You Are,” from the album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me). However, the giddy, hallucinatory oscillation between mad laughter and rage that characterizes these exchanges between “classic” literature and The Cure’s Gothic glory days are things of the past. Likewise, Bizarro-associated authors such as Nicole Cushing (of Fried Furries) have left Bizarro (at least for now) and adopted narrative styles that rely less on rapidly transgressive surfaces while still traumatizing readers with extremes.
Bizarro may end up looking more like a party in a tide-pool than in a sea bound for lasting distinction on horror textbook maps, but that pool has sharks at one end and Rock Lobsters at the other. Like Bizarro World itself, which in the Superman comics is a kind of inverted, cubical Earth, it is both elemental in its diverse capacity and fundamentally antipodal, or defined by opposition. It sends a derisive wake-up call to mainstream horror, indicting it for being too soft, too careful, and too correct. It also isn’t afraid to be smart and focus on smart characters, moving fast, explaining little, and never apologizing if it hurts your feelings. It opposes contemporary “literary” fiction, to which I feel all Bizarro works I’ve encountered—if not all Bizarro authors—would raise a middle finger. Why?
Because the literary fuckers may be edumacated but arent as smart as they are. Sure, some of what Ive read at least looks like it needs another edit compared to the “literary” stuff but who gives a shit? And SHATNERQUAKE may be funny action with dashes of splatter while SORROW KING is creepy and twisted and WARRIOR WOLF WOMEN walks lines between sexism and its critique and FRIED FURRIES uses extreme gross-out humor—wanna see my chewed up food, that other KING said, SWIFTly—and so on—so the surfaces may not be coherent in the way subgenre surfaces usually are—but if BIZARRO does have DEPTH it may be just that—smarts—it got SMARTS—and goddammit if smarts aint enough for an eddy or tidepool or fucking septic tank to be worth swimming in I dont know what is I mean give me a FUCKING break I QUIT.
Dr. L. Andrew Cooper went to Harvard and Princeton and cares a little fucking less each goddamned day. His book of short stories LEAPING AT THORNS might be Bizarro. He hadn’t thought of it before.
Bibliophilography
(Limited—Look This Shit Up To Find More Weird Shit)
Agranoff, David. “Punkupine Moshers of the Apocalypse.” The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. Cameron Pierce, ed.
Bizarro Central: The Cult Section of the Literary World. Web. 14. Sept. 2015.
Bizarro Starter Kit(s) (Orange, Blue, Purple, Red), The. Portland, OR: Eraserhead Press, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2015. Print.
Burk, Jeff. Shatnerquake. Portland, OR: Eraserhead Press, 2009. Print.
Cushing, Nicole. How to Eat Fried Furries. Portland, OR: Eraserhead Press, 2010. Print.
Hansen, Mykle. “Crazy Shitting Planet.” The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. Cameron Pierce, ed.
Jameson Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Print.
Jones, Stephen Graham. “Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth.” The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. Cameron Pierce, ed.
Klein, Mike. “A Beginner’s Guide to Bizarro Fiction.” Flavorwire.com 24. Aug. 2012. Web. 14 Sept. 2015
Mellick, Carlton, III. Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland. Portland, OR: Avant Punk (An Imprint of Eraserhead), 2009. E-book.
Pierce, Cameron. Abortion Arcade: Three Novellas. Portland, OR: Eraserhead Press, 2011. E-book.
—, ed. The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. Portland, OR: Eraserhead Press, 2012. E-book.
Prunty, Anderson. The Sorrow King. Dayton, OH: Grindhouse Press, 2011. E-book.
Ranalli, Gina. Wall of Kiss. Lynnwood, WA: Afterbirth Books, 2007. E-book.
Walter, Damien G. “Bizarro fiction: it’s terribly good.” The Guardian.com. 16 July 2010. Web. 14 Sept. 2015.
Wilson, D. Harlan. “At the Funeral.” The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. Cameron Pierce, ed.