The cult section of the literary world
Garrett Cook here. Efe Tusder approached me on Reddit. Self-published Bizarro guy. He was patient as I looked through his pieces, which I found surging with both emotion and outsider style, but not necessarily right. He was patient and polite as I sifted through about a dozen stories to find […]
Garrett Cook here. Ryan C Bradley is one of the most entertaining writers and performers I’ve ever met. His performances are lively, and his ear for language makes everything delectably readable. I’m glad I reached out to Ryan because he deserves all the ink he can get. My Whey or […]
International takes on Bizarro always make me happy. Oddly enough, America is not the only place whose strangeness is destroying consensus reality as we know it. Ronaldo Lages comes out of Brazil and has for you a piece that feels grandiose while still being quiet and poetic. I quite like […]
Garrett Cook here. I breathed a sigh of relief on this first week of open subs when I got someone I knew. Ben Arzate writes hip, transgressive plays and novellas influenced by Battaille and the like, along with stuff on Japanese noise bands you’ve never heard of. It’s a truly […]
Garrett Cook here. Alaina Hammond is dear to me; she is a friend from college who has become a sister to me, a vestige of family instrumental to rebuilding my life. She is smart, determined, funny, and as giving as a person can be. For years, I’ve been in a […]
Garrett Cook here. I trust John Baltisberger with a lot of my boldest work. As a publisher, he has let me get away with depressing, gory, hardcore pornography and an RPG made to mock the gamemaster’s mom until they quit. Madness Heart has done a lot to reinvigorate the scene […]
Garrett Cook here. I’ve been working with Chris Meekings for over a decade now in one way or another. I was proud to present his book Elephant Vice, a buddy cop yarn in which Vincent Van Gogh was partnered with the Hindu God Ganesha. His work is very British, very […]
I don’t know Matt Henshaw all too well, so am sad to report I can’t accompany this piece with one of my sincere, heartfelt compliments. What I can say is that Matthew was quick to respond when I said I wanted a couple more pieces before we open to unsolicited […]
Luciana Centeno does work that is really hard to categorize, even for Bizarro. It seems on the surface like it’s dark fantasy until you look at the transgressive elements and the meditations on queer selfhood at the core of it. This piece and the novel whose world it comes from […]
Shelly Lyons comes out of screenwriting. It’s a specific, draconian, and hard-to-develop skillset that can sometimes hamper writers trying their hand at fiction. Shelly has no such issue. She takes the scenemaking skills and the eyes of a screenwriter and brings that to fiction. Shelly is an impressive voice, and […]
I have been working with Madeleine Swann for years. She has a gift for combining wonder, horror, and beauty into some of the most distinctive and unusual fiction you have ever read. A new piece from Madeleine is always a pleasure and one I am grateful to share. Making Memories […]
Garrett Cook here. I have known Michael Allen Rose since BizarroCon 2 where we found each other to be staunch defenders of each other’s pitches in the pitch workshop, which is notable because mine was otherwise universally disliked. He is now President of the Bizarro Writer’s Association as well as […]
Garrett Cook here. Jonathan Gensler impresses the hell out of me. Everything from his in your face performance style to the meticulous intensity of his prose show that he’s going places. He’s doing great stuff for the Bizarro community and I think you’ll dig the work . Tattoorovka by Jonathan […]
Garrett Cook here. Christine Morgan has been a supportive matriarch in the Bizarro community. She is ready with cookies, cool gifts, and support whenever we have needed it. She also has an edge that comes out of nowhere and knocks you on your ass. Christine is one of my favorite […]
Garrett Cook here. Yeah, that’s two fish people in a row. To quote Marge Simpson, “I just think they’re neat”. Matthew Gleason is also neat. Matthew has a gleeful nihilism, a strong hustle, and a passion for everything grotesque that makes them one to watch. False Hopes by Matthew J. […]
Garrett Cook here. Writer, editor, Wonderland winner, Bizarro Showdown winner. Longtime Bizarro. Proud to be here, taking the reigns of Flash Fiction Friday. In the coming months, you’ll see handpicked stories from Bizarros old and new and weird folks in the periphery of the community. First up is an author […]
By: Douglas Hackle The ’70 Plymouth Barracuda was already doing a steady 95 MPH down I-90, causing the ’cuda’s shotgun-riding passenger—a lamplighter by trade—to grip the dashboard with a white-knuckled hand, dig his shoes into the floor, and press his back hard into his seat, his forehead slick with terror-sweat. […]
By: John Bruni The end. _____ John Bruni is the author of BLOOD, DONG OF FRANKENSTEIN and POOR BASTARDS AND RICH FUCKS. He lives in Elmhurst, IL, where he spends waaaaaaaay too much time thinking about weird shit for a guy who doesn’t smoke weed.
by: D.J. Tyrer People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, they say. But, what if you live in a house of lint and wool: should you throw stones then? Serennessa lived in a house of lint and wool on the edge of the village, not far from the […]
by: S.E. Casey It was during the limbo contest that I knew something was horribly wrong. I wasn’t being ageist in noting the winner was a sixty year old man. As the captain of the cruise ship, he certainly had a lifetime of practice. But when the bar was lowered […]
by: Ben Fitts Mike spotted the water cube first, which meant that it was his to jump in. The water cube slithered across the desert towards us where we waited in nothing but our swim trunks, the hot sand stinging the bottoms of our feet. It looked like a big […]
by: David S. Atkinson I spent the better part of the afternoon packaging up my excreta in cardboard boxes and clear packing tape again. It’s time consuming, but there isn’t a whole lot of choice. Given my particular situation, I have to dispose of it through the mail. A piece […]
by: JP Vallières We couldn’t get the iceberg to melt no matter how hard we tried: blow torch, bonfire, hairdryer, rubbing our butts back and forth to the song, That’s the Way (I Like It). I’m not into melting things usually, but there were some important items encased in that […]
by: Zoltán Komor My wife wants a baby, but I’d prefer a remote control drone with HD Wi-Fi camera, so I figure out an intermediate solution: I’ll knock up my wife, let her give birth to the child, and after a couple of weeks, when she gets bored with this […]
by: Sean Noah Noah Y2K came and went and pretty much everyone could agree that the world had ended, but nobody could figure out exactly how. Just days before, everything had seemed so certain: all the computers wouldn’t be able to change the dates correctly and they’d break down and […]
by: Bert Stanton All he wanted was a bag with handles. Just one large bag with two handles. Paper or plastic, didn’t matter. Big enough to fit the contents of the brown bag sitting on the checkout counter, almost filled to the top with enough food and assorted sundries to […]
by: James Burr He danced in the dry ice, his limbs staccato-jerking in the strobes. He’d cleared a space for himself and was dancing on the spot, breathing heavily through his nose and mouth, his eyes glazed and staring blankly ahead. “I’m dancing, I’m dancing,” he kept repeating as he […]
by: Martin Rutley It was late, Saturday night, when they brought me in. Strapped to a stretcher, disinfectant smeared into the corners of my eyes, the smell of petroleum in their greasy sideburns. Dressed in the green and gray of the company uniform, each of the six had joyously taken […]
by: John Wayne Comunale Jonathan Switz was loved and renowned by his people as much if not more than he was loathed and reviled by them. Such is the plight of every leader, but Switz remained unaffected. He couldn’t feel the love, hate, or indifference of his people because he […]
by: Neil Sanzari When the girl of malnourished complexion crossed paths with the ribbit in the ruins of Saint X’s Parochial Middle School, she refrained from drawing a single arrow. It was her first encounter with the dread creature. In fact, she had only heard the faintest of frightened whispers […]
by: Cornell R. Nichols When I got to work on Monday, 8 a.m. sharp, vampire swans were eating their way through my office building. Zipping around the corporate high-rise in a flock, a ballet, a whiteness, they have managed to strip away the concrete from all twenty regular and five […]
by: Ira Rat I wonder if there will be enough air in here to last the next few hours. The guys who built this fucking thing said so, but how would they know? It’s not like they would ever come down here and test it, bet their lives their calculations […]
by: Avichai Brautigam We mined the planet dead. Not in the sense that we burrowed, like dwarves, carving Morias and Morias into the crust till it all came apart; it was Bitcoin that did us in. Somewhere, in the moldy basement of some half-forgotten Department of the Bureau of the […]
by: Christopher Lesko Mom: C’mon we need to get you some new slacks. They’ve got good deals going on at Sears right now. Boy: You’re hurting my arm. Mom: I need you to hold my hand when we cross. Could be a weed maniac zipping around the corner. People never […]
by: Ben Fitts I was excited to be back in New York City. I had grown up there and always thought I would end up living my whole life in the city, but the four years I planned to spend in New England for college had into stretched nine and […]
