Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Cool New Books, December 2017

I often grouch about books, or just give you a list of books I thought were cool.

Not today!

Today I will present you with a few books and explain why these books are really fun and special. Happy reading!

Paperbacks from Hell, Grady Hendrix

The 70s and 80s: a many-splendored time for literary horror. This coffee table book, lavishly illustrated and hilariously written, tells the tale of the rise and fall of pulp paperback horror fiction. Each chapter is devoted to a topic, such as "Giant Crabs" or "Splatterpunk" or "Books with Skeletons on the Cover." Every plot description or historical anecdote is a well-told gem.

To Be a Machine, Mark O'Connell

Fascinating examination of transhumanism. Interestingly, when you type "transhumanism," Google does not recognize it as a word. Take from that what you will.

Horrorstor, Grady Hendrix

I liked Paperbacks from Hell so much, I decided to see what the author would do with an actual horror novel. The answer: he did great with it! Concept: an Ikea-style store where the employees are trapped in the labyrinthine halls and rooms and it opens up a gateway into a deeper darker netherworld. Wonderful metaphor of consumerism and the disorienting, hypnotic Ikea layout. Also great explanation/examination of the panopticon. With cool illustrations of the store's furniture that increasingly come to resemble torture devices as it goes on. Super-fun and also great as a straightforward, Kafka-esque horror novel.

Hail to the Chin, Bruce Campbell

BRUCE! This is his third book and it's a wonderful look into the life of The Man Behind the Chin. Surprisingly, the renowned character actor doesn't talk about acting much. Mostly a fascinating look into life in his rural Oregon mountain town and the customs of its people and how he learned to adapt and assimilate there. Some neat adventures working as a director for the first time in Bulgaria, along with wonderful tales of Miami, where he filmed his seven-season hit Burn Notice. A worthy follow-up to his first memoir, If Chins Could Kill.

Carnivore, Leigh Clark

A wonderfully loopy 1997 pulp sci-fi book about an unfrozen t-rex egg in the arctic, which suddenly HATCHES! And the t-rex attacks! I was skeptical, as there were already not one, but two movies/books in the Jurassic Park franchise by the time this came out. So did the world really need another dino attack book? Yes. Yes, it did. This is a literary Sharknado. The writing is relatively competent, but the characters are insane, the plot zigs and zags all over the place, the science is delightfully nonsensical, and never once does it try to make any sense. This next-level literary masterpiece makes Brothers Karamazov look like a cave painting in comparison.



-Phony McFakename


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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.


Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Favorite Quotes: December 2017


“Where’s the cellar?”
“Under the house.”
“Gee, I never thought of looking there!”
-Drainiac


“Nine meals from anarchy.”
“What?”
“There’s this theory that if you take away food and water for nine meals, people will descend into anarchy. Every time.”
-The Mist (only good line in the entire series)

“Life feels like Pac-Man sometimes, I guess. It's the same game all over again. Same board. Same ghosts. Sometimes, you get a bunch of cherries but eventually and inevitably, those ghosts catch up with you.”
-This is Us

“Shuddering with aversion, Peter Hubbard was glad his mask spared him the effluvium of the cavernous death surrounding him. The redolence would strike at a man like a dynamite explosion.”

“To the others, the incinerating fire might be the foulest stink in the world, but to her the smoke of the roach entrails was a perfume, an incense of revenge and vengeance sweet to her nostrils.”
-Gregory Douglas, The Nest

“‘Happy’ is just a kick to the balls waiting to happen.”
-The Punisher

“You’re gonna regret this the rest of your life. Both seconds of it.”
-Demolition Man

“I made the big decision never to die, because it gives me the creeps.”
-Graveyard Disturbance


-Phony McFakename

* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Literateur: Carlton Mellick III

This guy is nuts. Really something amazing and special.
Carlton Mellick III is the premiere Bizarro author of this and any other time.

His books are varied and diverse, but mostly fall into these categories:
-Twisted science fiction
-Childrens' stories gone very wrong
-Way-way-way-over-the-top horror
-Post-modern literary experiments

His plots are ridiculous but delivered in an emotional, heartfelt, and straightforward manner.

Mellick isn't an author you hear about in casual conversation. He's a treat for those with flexible minds and strong stomachs. I feel privileged to have discovered and devoured his literary canon.

Now I must emphasize: most of his books are way too gross and obscene for the casual reader. Approach this gentleman's work with caution.

Heck, I wouldn't have read most of his books if I wasn't able to read them on my phone's Kindle app. When you're reading on your phone, no one knows your current book is Zombies and S**t. (His book covers are often quite risque, as well.)

I won't even type most of his book titles without asterisks! Wouldn't say them out loud, either. Blame my Mormonism. On that note - was disappointed by his treatment of my people in the otherwise sublime Bio Melt. He conflates Mormons with the fundamentalist polygamous cult offshoot groups. Which is like conflating all Muslims with ISIS. Not cool. I mean- he wrote it brilliantly and his satiric points were solid about the abuse and conformity and such. But I was bummed that he seemed to believe that's what Mormons are. If you're reading this, Mr. Mellick: we're weird, but not that kind of weird.

The following breakdown of his books isn't comprehensive. After reading The Baby Jesus Butt Plug, I decided I would go ahead and skip his other blatant blasphemy books (Electric Jesus Corpse, Satan Burger, etc.) Not my jam, and I also didn't care for Fishyfleshed, which took Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man concept of Jesus actually being a crazy person...and didn't really do much new with it.

Part of that is also that his postmodern literary books are my least favorite. I would have liked his metal-worm-zombie-infection novel Steel Breakfast Era a whole lot more if it had been told in a straightforward style. I like a clear, well-told story, especially when the plot details are as crazy as Mellick's. (Ugly Heaven, Adolf in Wonderland, and Sunset with a Beard are also too pomo for moi.)

Everybody's got an opinion, so take mine with a container of salt. But despite my differences with the author, I've been more impressed by his work than anything I've read in years. And I read a lot. He's an inspiration and a mind-melter.

This list is in order of awesomeness and recommendability.

Clownfellas: Tales of the Bozo Crime Family by Carlton Mellick III

One of the most amazing, creative, and funny books I've ever read. This is a very well-written, fast-paced, entertaining organized crime epic that just happens to be about clowns. You get explosive pies, cotton candy cigarettes, homicidal jugglers on unicycles, guns with bullets that explode into giant pieces of popcorn on impact. And that's just a few of the things you'll find in the first story. And there are six stories in here. All interconnected and building on each other nicely. I was totally blindsided by this book, just shocked senseless at its quality and imagination level. And now I'm over-hyping it to you. Okay. Calm down. Don't get too excited. Temper your expectations, so you can read it and be totally blown away, too!

Sweet Story

From the back cover: "A children's book gone horribly wrong." Indeed. The first half is a whimsical (and whimsically-written) story about a nice girl who reaches the end of a rainbow and gets a wish. She wishes for it to rain candy forever, so that all children, rich and poor, can have all the candy they want! Well, it happens. Jawbreakers fly down like bullets and crush skulls and murder and mutilate and disfigure everyone. Candy piles up everywhere, destroying the environment. The lack of rain causes drought and famine, destroying every body of water worldwide as evaporated water never comes back down. Desperate people turn to cannibalism and things get worse and worse. But Mellick gives it a strong emotional core with a surprisingly poignant and resonant ending.

Quicksand House

Short summary (since we need analogies to make sense of reality): a surreal Flowers in the Attic crossed with a survival horror video game. A lot of crazy, twisted details. A boy and his older sister live in a large house and have never seen their parents. They go looking for their parents in this strange house with creatures and danger around every corner. Not too sick. Really a rather haunting fairy tale about children making sense of their world. I think about it often.

The Big Meat

So after you defeat Godzilla... how do you handle the cleanup? That's where this starts, and it's a wonderfully gross adventure as the cleanup crew makes their way through the enormous caverns inside a defeated giant monster, trying to transport and dispose of this biohazard piece by piece. Oh, and people keep stealing parts of the monster to manufacture drugs that are causing mutations. An awfully big adventure.

The Terrible Thing That Happens

A really delightful (and short) reality-bending thriller where a food-less future has a still-standing grocery store where people and food magically appear for a narrow time window each night. Only until a mass shooting takes place there, which closes this tear in reality and traps you there if you don't get out in time. The "terrible thing" of the shooting created such a strong psychic imprint on the place, it keeps repeating, and our future folks have no other way to acquire food or supplies. Lots of other dark, weird surprises along the way. I think about this one often, too.

Every Time We Meet at Dairy Queen, Your Whole F**king Face Explodes

That title alone merits a few moments' consideration. Mellick could have cut several words from it and made the same point. But he made it that long. (And according to his Afterword, the original title for the book was several pages long.) It's a tale of young love where the young girl in the relationship has a face that explodes when she gets too excited. Though the title is misleading- her face explodes everywhere, not just at Dairy Queen.

Zombies and S**t

Easy summary: Hunger Games with punks playing the game and Return of the Living Dead-style brain-eating zombies on the loose in the game arena. One scene made me cringe from supreme disgust and I can't recommend it because of that scene alone (unless you skim it, and you'll see it coming, ewww). But this is better and more epic, funny, and entertaining than any zombie movie, comic, or book from the past couple decades.

Spider Bunny

A creepy children's cereal commercial becomes sentient and tries to suck kids into the screen. For starters. Memorably eerie and funny.

Armadillo Fists

Having read Clownfellas first, this feels like a warm-up for that book. Yes, it's about a woman with armadillos for fists, but it's mostly an organized crime epic. The armadillo-fisted woman is connected to the criminals and after an unfortunate accident, ends up fighting her way through the crime bosses in order of toughness. It's told in a non-linear fashion, which is usually super-annoying, but really works well here. The story peels back its layers like onions and complicates and deepens each character as events unfold. And it ends on a surprisingly tender note.


Punk Land

A brilliant tale of the afterlife for punks. Compelling, funny, with great satire on the punk genre and culture. It's a sequel to Satan Burger, which I broke down and read because I liked this one so much. That one was kinda a stream of consciousness literary mess. Satan runs a fast food restaurant that damns its customers. Not as fun as it sounds. But this one, with its hyper vision of punk afterlife and fun twists and turns and wry music commentary? Worth it.

Ultra F**kers

Deceptive title. It's actually the name of a Japanese punk band, nothing sexual. This book is quite hilarious and insane. It's about an endless suburban neighborhood that seems to be expanding as our characters go through it, unable to find any way out. And it's actually darker and more complex than they can imagine. Great commentary on automation and mechanization of culture.

*

My wrists hurt, and you can figure out what's up with these books on their titles alone and yes, they are all awesome and all deliver on their titles' promises: The Cannibals of Candyland, The Morbidly Obese Ninja, Bio Melt, Tumor Fruit, Crab Town, and I Knocked Up Satan's Daughter. I would put his kids' book about the vampire in this category, but I don't want to even repeat its title.

The following were okay, or blah: Sea of the Patchwork Cats, Cybernetrix, Village of the Mermaids, War Slut, Hungry Bug, Sex and Death in Television Town, Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland, and Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands.

Fantastic Orgy

Okay, this one was actually pretty good, but really all over the place. Same with his other short story collection, Hammer Wives. Some gems, but some head-scratchers, too. Some I'd prefer to see expanded as novels, some I'd prefer not to have read. I don't know that I'd shove either one in your hand and scream, "READ THIS NOW!" The way I would with the books reviewed above.


The Menstruating Mall

Also not exactly bad. Much like The Haunted Vagina, he's coming out of his relentless literary experimentation and trying to tell a more straightforward story here. Much allegory, and most of it works. He was still making his points about the joys of nonconformity too blatantly. He got a lot better at weaving his themes into the work more effortlessly in years to come.

*


FROM HERE DOWN- BEWARE. The following made me cringe and squirm and wish my brain didn't work anymore, but in an entertaining, interesting way.

Cuddly Holocaust

This book broke me in ways I didn't know I could be broken. It's a world of sentient stuffed animals and human-toy hybrids and the terrible, terrible way these things are manufactured. My heart is sinking just thinking about that scene in the factory. I can't.

Apes**t

This is possibly the most disturbing book I ever read. I felt ill and trepidatious almost the entire time. It's basically a cabin-in-the-woods slasher story, but incredibly off-the-wall and gross, with a third-act twist that will churn the most stout stomach. Its sequel, Clusterf**k, was even "better." That one is set in a series of claustrophobic caverns and I found myself genuinely terrified while reading it. Fear of tight spots is potent. Mellick manages real horror in addition to the gross-out stuff.

As She Stabbed Me Gently in the Face

A surprisingly suspenseful relationship thriller about a brutal female serial killer who meets her match in the form of an immortal angel who loves being tortured and mutilated. So much squirm. Even more squirmy than The Handsome Squirm, another super-icky Mellick book I kinda liked but don't want to ever think about again.


The Egg Man

Actually really really good. It's told as a series of smells. Very unusual approach, but it works. But so gross I can't condone it.

These were so gross I didn't really like them: The Tick People, Exercise Bike, Parasite Milk, The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightment, and Ocean of Lard.

*

Full disclosure: I wish I could write characters half as well as Mr. Mellick. I am deeply jealous of him. No matter how crazy his stories or plot details get, you almost never disengage from his characters. That's a special literary gift, in any genre.


-Phony McFakename

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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

"Man of Florida: Please Don't Eat My Face 2!" by Phony McFakename

This is it. The epic sequel you've been impatiently, angrily waiting for. That's right. Here it comes...

An epic masterpiece of literary tour de force majeure...

It's Man of Florida!!!

The insanely-long-awaited sequel to Please Don't Eat My Face!!!

Here's the wind-up, and the pitch:

Miami is going down! 

Not by natural disaster, but by an army of citizens under the influence of bath salts. 

Our hapless hero, a formerly respectable cocaine dealer, is probably to blame for this mess. But he just wants to get back home to Food Crime City.

Will he make it? Will he fall under the spell of the Beach Party to End All Beach Parties? Will he finally take responsibility for this metropolitan apocalypse and fix things?

Probably not, but let's have some grim laughs along the way.

Read and be happy!


-Phony McFakename


* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Cinemasterworks: "Video Demons Do Psychotown"

I came here to, ostensibly, review Video Demons Do Psychotown. But this requires some context.

This is a Troma film. Only it is not.

Troma is a gonzo independent production company rooted in late-70s idiot comedies before transitioning to mid-80s idiot horror. Following this, they expanded their repertoire to a wide variety of externally-produced distribution product.

Some of it was pretty great (Cannibal! The Musical, Monster in the Closet, Redneck Zombies, Combat Shock) and some of it was pretty darned bad (Rabid Grannies, Surf Nazis Must Die!, Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell).
Video Demons Do Psychotown is one such externally-produced film. File it under “pretty darned bad.”

I first discovered Troma in 1991 when USA network’s “Up All Night” late-night movie series (hosted by Rhonda Shear) did regular marathons of their flagship Toxic Avenger films. Even heavily edited for basic cable, I found a pleasantly demented spirit in these cinematic abominations. I subsequently grabbed up every Troma film I could find at my local video stores.

Class of Nuke ‘em High didn’t disappoint. Its sequel did. Troma’s War was insane and so incredibly not right (one of its bad guys attacked people by giving them AIDS). Sgt. Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D. impressed me with its gumption. Finally seeing the Toxic Avenger films uncut was jarringly intense. They had some far-beyond-deranged X-rated violence. But nothing that would upset a demented adolescent such as myself at the time. (Trying to re-watch them as an adult is a challenge; they’re pretty nasty. It's funny how kids can handle stuff that adults can't, yet we're always trying to protect them from "dangerous" imagery. We're dumb.)

Around the same time, in a bin in the back of a grimy, decaying comic shop, I found this musty old issue of a short-lived magazine called Toxic Horror. One issue had a lengthy interview with Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman. Dude was funny! A really old-school hammy/charismatic raconteur/showman. And all the Troma movie stills and posters and titles really captured my imagination. I wanted to see them all. (Especially Video Demons Do Psychotown.)

I finally discovered a fine, upstanding local haunt named Video Vault a couple years later. This place had a Troma SECTION in their “Cult” video room up on the third floor. I was in Heaven.

But their collection had some holes. No Evil Clutch or Video Demons. Bah!

And that brings us to today, a wonderful world of infinite online entertainment options, in which Video Demons Do Psychotown just popped up on Amazon Prime. (So did Evil Clutch, which was likewise a lame-o disappointment with a few cool scenes.)

I will say this for the movie: Great title!

That is the last nice thing I’ll say about it.

Kidding. Kind of.

It’s very dull and the dialogue is hilariously inane. It's about two teens who wander around a weird town because they heard it had some spooky things happen there. There's some kind of cult at work there, weird things pop up on the videos the students shoot there, it's a mess.

But in all fairness, check out these gems of screenwriting:

“This place reeks of death and negative vibrations, and yet you walk around is if nothing had happened!”

“You’re asking me to forget everything I ever knew about physics! I’m not ready to do that!”

All in all, a more accurate title would be: Video Production Students Visit Psychic Town. There's no demons, just some mild paranormal phenomena.

It's garbage. But garbage can have a pleasant, familiar flavor that tickles the taste buds like nothing else.

(Just looked it up out of curiosity and yes, Troma is still in business. Over 40 years of producing and distributing the "finest" cinema around.) 


-Phony McFakename


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I exist on Twitter and Facebook and InstagramAnd my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.