More bizarro books are dropping for the Christmas season, brought to
you by Atlatl Press, Strangehouse, and Bizarro Pulp Press. Click the
titles to head over to the book’s Amazon page.
Abraham Koyfman is a widower of nine months. He works from home selling subliminal self-help tapes for a questionable doctor he found in an ad in the back of a magazine. His meager retirement is enough now that he’s alone and Abraham is ready to quit his job—a task proving to be difficult due to the company’s tactics. The combination of grief and the lack of empathy from his adult children have him ready to quit life, also. On the day he reaches the breaking point his friend Horace pays an unexpected visit with his new girlfriend. Horace’s remedy for Abraham’s plight is to party hard, act juvenile, and take a road trip to confront the doctor in charge of the work from home scam. But will an insufferable friend, a bad case of misanthropy, and the absurdity of modern technology and its sociocultural impact make Abraham’s situation better?
It’s Corpse Bride meets Eraserhead despite Gonzalo’s best efforts to live a life like Leave It to Beaver’s. Gonzalo grew up in the cemetery under the care of his monstrous parents and in the company of decaying corpses. As a result, he only desired one thing throughout his childhood: To be normal enough to join society. But despite his attempts at running away from his family, he has never been able to leave the mortuary. Now, as an adult, Gonzalo manages the cemetery. His family has died yet he is still unable to leave. Then, on the night of the annual Cadaver Tea party, something impossible happens—he impregnates the corpseFiona. In an attempt to normalize the cemetery before his child’s birth, Gonzalo begins to close all the coffins, forever locking the dead inside. Without the intercession of corpses like Henry, the voluntary babysitter of abused children, Lionel, the life-long explorer, Victoria, the world’s first professional deep-sea water ski champion, and Vincent, Victoria’s long-time lover and trainer, Gonzalo believes he and Fiona will be able to raise their child to join the rest of the world. But in the throes of terminal calcium deficiency, Fiona’s bones deteriorate to dust immediately after she gives birth. Can Gonzalo make the young Frank, his now motherless, half-corpse son, normal enough for society? Can he raise his son without becoming like his own parents? Will Gonzalo become the Mortuary Monster he has spent his whole life trying to escape? taste.
It’s going to be a long, hellish day on Utica Ave. The employees of Brooklyn’s seediest soul food joint, Clayvon’s King Prawn Chicken N’ Biscuit, have a mysterious new patron: Edgerin. Called a “vagrant” and a “beggar”, he’s got a thing or two to learn them in the delicate art of begging… Within twenty-four tense, bloody hours, all the filthy secrets buried under the nail beds of the Clayvon staff are revealed in this darkly comic urban crime story from author Bob Freville.
Starting in the fall of 1896, something very strange was going on in the night skies of the western United States. Newspapers and law enforcement were inundated with reports of bizarre machines flying over cities and towns, mostly in Texas. There are thousands of accounts in the newspapers from that time; no one knew what to make of them then, and today in the 21st century, we still don’t. There were also numerous reports of odd people or figures manning the airships of unknown origin and speaking in unfamiliar languages. What was going on? Were people on the ground just making up these stories or do we have a case of multiple witnesses to a major secret event occurring years before the Wright Brothers?
Matt Bialer, poet of the weird and unexplained, grapples with the mystery in his epic poem, WONDER WEAVERS. The narrator of the poem is writing a book on the subject while at the same time helping his extremely shy teenage son prepare a book report on HG Wells’ INVISIBLE MAN. He is also continuing his never-ending search for his long lost missing brother who loved airplanes and who first told him about the Wonder Weavers.
Then the key to the mystery of the airships is possibly found: A series of large old scrapbooks of esoteric drawings, collages, and watercolors of these unreal flying machines are found at a garbage dump. The books are from another time and possibly even another realm. They turn out to be the creation of a reclusive old Prussian butcher who lived in Texas in the 1890s named Charles Dellschau. The drawings have German and some sort of code in them and many references to a “Sonora Aero Club.” The object here is to crack the code; the code of human ingenuity. And to soar to the heights of exhilaration and imagination and maybe something even well beyond.
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