S.T. Gulik

Birth or The Exquisite Sound of One Hand Falling Off a Turnip Truck is quite a challenging mouthful, but still within the scope of anyone who’s dated Brazilian. What is the name of this freak style anyway? One of the reviewers here calls it Bizarro, so I’ve looked that up and learned something. I would have previously associated it with gonzo journalism (unobjective experiences and emotions, overlapping with the hallucinogenic) but it isn’t first person author or set in a real enough place for a travelogue. Bizarro it is then. So, what the heck is that?

A diligent fourteen seconds of research tells me that Eraserhead Press, Raw Dog Screaming Press and Afterbirth Books started the genre off in 2005, with Eraserhead since 2008 hosting the BizzaroCon (convention). Wikipedia (don’t trust this source) says the genre typically includes “elements of absurdism, satire and the grotesque, along with pop-surrealism … to create subversive, weird and entertaining works”. It also says “the first Bizarro Starter Kit describes it as literature's equivalent to the cult section at the video store" and Rose O'Keefe of Eraserhead Press says "Basically, if an audience enjoys a book or film primarily because of its weirdness, then it is Bizarro”. There is a Mondo Bizarro Forum for the fans of the style.

That’s enough quoting – what did I think of it? Well, there’s a surreal setting to it but I’m into that because Spike, Monty Python and their million funny impersonators were all surrealists. Death is much easier in this place though, with plenty of splat and no fussy investigations or legal nuisances afterwards, so most of the characters and species seem only in this game to be killed in ever more entertaining ways. There are some set-piece battles for clearing out swathes of people at a time, along with the paying audience, then individual little bijou deaths when the hero’s pet gets possessive. Let’s avoid discussing Cakey. He’s very mucked up, with a capital F. Very strange things happen all the time in this, of course, and the author forms what can only be described as spectacularly bizarre connections of mental imagery, so must have an inventive brain with very few working brakes in that skull-thing of his. Yes, the blatant shambolic weirdness is entertaining.

The protagonist is a dislikeable, shallow hog of a man who doesn’t care about other people unless he has to, changes sides on a whim and doesn’t feel a lot of shame even when naked, covered in splashed guts or forced to wear baggy rapper trousers (please, no). The grotesque horror of sudden, messy deaths doesn’t upset him, even when they’re together in a confined space and the munched-up victim is his current squeeze. The most strikingly unlikely thing of all is the ease with which he pulls women – more accurately, he doesn’t even try. They just seem to meet him and unpack the inflatable mattress. From the repressed librarian who knocks on his door to the dominant cyber-punkette* and then the wily princess of espionage, they all seem much too attractive, easy to access, unrealistically disposable and their mindset that the whole gambit of human relationship culture can just be reduced to giving it up to this particular dropout is, frankly, a purely male fetish fantasy way of approaching the world which the author has flipped onto his female characters because he thinks a future where that happens would be nice, like a fast food delivery to save learning to cook. I mean, with this low-achieving layabout protagonist, what exactly is the incentive? Why do the girls in this make all the running? Ok, I remember – because that’s convenient to the man. Even if he were the only realistic offer in town and the women of the world had intimate cobwebs, I’m pretty sure none of us would ever need a cheap run through with a hoodie that badly.

He’s got me over a barrel here because all the weird random stuff, casual abdominal infiltration and cartoon horror in this book is officially supposed to be in this genre, which makes it an authentic example of its type – which, in turn, is the core criterion I’m meant to be assessing it on. The male, female and mutant characters behave more like expendable action figures though and the zombies have no character at all, so I’m docking a star for that two dimensionality, but otherwise it conforms to the gore and garbage spunk splatter plan that defines this foolishly entertaining genre and it is an undeniably entertaining road crash of the imagination. It isn’t Lewis Carroll’s idea of a dream and I want to say three stars out of five for literature but if it is supposed to be fun, bizarre and shocking – it obviously and intentionally is, that’s four stars. I also haven’t read anything else like this with which to compare it, so I’m still confused, wide-eyed, backing away and recommending that single young women don’t go anywhere near convention.

*My spell checker tried to change this to pancetta.… (meer)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Although I'm generally a fan of bizarro literature (as in "I don't actively hate it"), there's one big problem with this genre that prevents me from being a big fan or a fervent fan; namely, every bizarro novel in existence tends to sound exactly like every other bizarro novel in existence, a genre that can quite literally be defined as "a cartoon written out in narrative form," and therefore has a sort of randomly nonsensical "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" nature that makes every book in the genre sort of bleed into one giant absurdist fairytale without a beginning or an end. Take S.T. Gulik's Birth: or The Exquisite Sound of One Hand Falling Off a Turnip Truck for a good example; not badly written at all, its post-apocalyptic tale of an everyman stumbling through a series of comically disgusting situations nonetheless feels like a book I've already read a hundred times before, precisely because I really have read books exactly like this a hundred times before. The genre in general is sort of the ultimate example of a book type that can only be loved by hardcore fans of that book type, but who will then read a book every single day of this type exactly so they can get their daily dose of exactly what they were expecting; and although crime and romance are genres of this type that get a lot more attention, bizarro is one of the more pure examples of this phenomenon, with Birth being a perfect example of one of those throwaway books that a bizarro fan might start at 10 in the morning on a Wednesday, be done with by 8:00 that night, then be ready to start another one exactly like it at 10:00 Thursday morning. It should all be kept in mind when deciding whether to pick it up yourself, or even whether to be a fan of bizarro lit in the first place.

Out of 10: 7.5, or 9.0 for fans of bizarro literature… (meer)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

As regular readers know, I'm spending the week finally making my way through a whole series of books I found only so-so, some of which have been in my reading queue for months now; but it's important, though, that you not mistake these books for merely bad ones, because if they were merely bad I would say so, given that I've had no problems doing such a thing in the past. Take today's book, for example, ST Gulik's Muffy: or A Transmigration of Selves, which is actually not bad at all for what it aims to be, just that what it aims to be is something that has only a tiny fringe appeal among the general public -- it is one of those ultra-violent, absurdly comic erotic tales in the style of the Marquis de Sade, only in this case updated for the Riot-Grrrl age and with cultural references more suited for contemporary sensibilities.

But make no mistake -- in the grand tradition of anonymous French radical erotica from the Victorian Age, projects like The Story of O and Story of the Eye, Muffy is most definitely not for the faint of heart, a story that combines sex and gore in such outrageous ways as to become nearly fantastical, used as a metaphor for the pleasures to be had in embracing an all-consuming prurient attitude about life. And also like most of these stories, the plot fueling Muffy is a simplistic one only -- the tale of a suburban girl sexualized too early in life, because of the systematic ritual abuse suffered from her dad throughout her childhood, leaving her as a late teen ready to go prowl the parks at night in hooker outfits just to see what kinds of empty thrills she can find. It's at this point that we're introduced to our deliciously evil antihero, a sadistic dominatrix and serial killer named Sarah, who makes millions fashioning sculptures of pain out of the actual tortured bodies of her victims, sold exclusively to the perverted little members of the Illuminati secretly running the government. (Why, two of her sculptures are even in the White House, although of course the general public will never be aware of this.) Sarah had originally kidnapped Muffy in order to turn her into her next sculpture, but now finds herself falling in love with this deeply compliant masochist; and thus do the two form a twisted love affair of sorts, using their ridiculously squeamish sex sessions as an excuse to give us audience members lessons on the basics of BDSM, the importance of anti-authoritarianism, and the framework behind various leftist conspiracy theories out there, just for good measure.

Yeah, not exactly an eager realist cautionary tale about the dangers of abuse, this one is; in fact, anyone tempted to be offended by a story like this is completely missing the point, that the author is deliberately mentioning the most disgusting things they can think of precisely to show how easy it is to manipulate the emotions of most of the brain-dead sheep actually running society. I mean, when a book within its first 50 pages features a scene of a baby being dismembered while still alive and its limbs used as sex toys, you know that you've firmly left the realm of reality behind and entered the land of symbolism; Gulik clearly means for all this outrageousness to serve the same purpose as radical erotica from the 19th century did as well, as metaphorical stories about how important it is to think for yourself, to make your own conclusions about the world, to define your own desires and wants away from the suffocating influence of so-called "normal society." Those who like this kind of literature get this, and it's for these reasons that they become fans to begin with; it's just that you need a strong stomach and thick skin to do so, else run the risk of being profoundly offended or even physically sick just within the first ten or twenty pages of stories like these.

Ultimately Muffy is exactly what such people are looking for, a tale that takes all the great things about vintage radical erotica and sheds all the petticoats and top hats, a story firmly rooted in the world of early Anne Rice and Poppy Z Brite, except much dirtier than the former and much funnier than the latter. It's just that there aren't very many fans of this stuff out there to begin with, and that those who aren't are sure to be disgusted and insulted by such a book; that's why it's getting an only so-so score today, despite being a fine example of what it's attempting to be. All of this should be kept in mind before picking up a copy.

Out of 10: 7.7… (meer)