The Bizarro Starter Kit (Purple) [Paperback]

Yay! Time for another Bizarro Starter Kit. This time the color's purple and ten new Bizarro authors give us novellas, short stories, and, this time, even some comics. If you've never gotten a Bizarro Starter Kit before, they are meant to introduce readers to ten new underground authors that you should probably be paying attention to.

So let's get on to the stories:

Short Stories by Russell Edson - The celebrated master of short surrealism leads off this volume with ten pieces of surreal flash fiction. The stories are super-short but like a good dream (or nightmare), they tend to linger in your brain.

Clockwork Girl by Athena Villaverde - A little rich girl receives a clockwork doll for Christmas (which is actually made from the corpse of a poor girl). Problems arise when the toy/corpse falls in love with the rich girl. Villaverde is one of the newest Bizarro authors and I was really surprised at how great this story was.

Punkupine Moshers of the Apocalypse by David Agranoff - The author of "The Vegan Revolution . . . with Zombies" does a punk rock, post-apocalypse story. A town of anarchist punks that survived the end of the world meets another batch of survivors who worship Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher. Hijinks ensue.

Short Stories by Matthew Revert - LegumeMan's flagship author presents three short stories of bodily functions and surrealism. Revert was another author that I was unfamiliar with that really blew me away. "A Million Versions of Right" was one of the best short stories I've read in years.

Comics by Andrew Goldfarb - Goldfarb is the first comic artist to be featured in a Starter Kit but I see why he was included. Hillbillies, murderers, magic spells, monsters, and much more are featured in these strips. His bio describes him as "an unholy marriage of Walt Disney and H.P. Lovecraft." I would also add Tim Burton.

Cripple Wolf by Jeff Burk - The author of "Shatnerquake" gives us a story about a wheel-chair bound werewolf loose on an airplane. From the first sentence, there is loads of gore, sex, drugs, and punk rock. Basically, a Troma movie in prose form.

Re-Mancipator by Garrett Cook - Killer Abraham Lincolns are running rampant across the country and only a team of people escaped from Hell (including Marilyn Monroe, John Wilkes Booth, Herodotus, and more) can save the United States. Smart, violent, and funny. Cook really knocked it out of the park on this story.

Sparklewheel by Kris Saknussemm - The most experimental story in this Starter Kit. Told in second person, you follow a young couple on their sex-filled adventure across a surreal, dream-like landscape.

The Homewreckers by Cody Goodfellow - A neo-noir, Bizarro pulp adventure about a world in which a virus has rewritten human behavior and men and women violently hate each other. A detective who can travel between the "male" and "female" sectors of the city is tracking down a killer. Fun, thrilling, and it has killer babies!

The Destroyed Room by Cameron Pierce - The author of "A$$ Goblins of Aushwitz" closes out this volume with a more subdued story that he is known for. A man must deal with the ramifications of killing the love of his life after he cuts the puppet strings attached to her body. Sweet, sad, and strange.

I have never read any of the Bizarro Starter kits before. Purple is my first. I am now a convert. If you enjoy surrealism, the avant guard, or being the first with the coolest trends, you'll want to hop on this train soon.

Stand out stories for me, were Matthew Revert's three, with a particular nod toward Concentration Tongue. I had read the other two stories in A Million Versions of Right (his book) so I had high expectations and was not disappointed. I always enjoy absurdist fiction, and he is definitely a writer to watch.

Others that I want to mention are Garrett Cook's Re-Emancipator, and Kris Saknussemm's Sparklewheel. I'm familiar with both these authors and was thrilled to read more of their work here.

One last mention goes to Athena Villarverde for being the cool chick of the collection. Clockwork Girl is a great story.

If you are new to this style of fiction, all I can say is get in on the ground floor. The stars of tomorrow are congregating here and you really want to be the first with these names!

This is definitely the broadest, most diverse starter kit of the three. I consider myself well-read in the bizarro genre and the pieces in this book represent it really well. The pieces span from Russell Edson's prose poetry to Andrew Goldfarb's legendary comics. Even the seven novellas show a huge breadth of talent and interest within the bizarro genre. Athena Villaverde's novella, Clockwork Girl, plays so innocently with the classic trope of artificial intelligence that by the end of the story the reader is wondering when along the way the tale became so heart-wrenching. Master wordsmith Cody Goodfellow's Homewreckers is a strange future world of sex-segregation. A handicap werewolf terrorizes a domestic flight in Jeff Burk's Cripple Wolf, and the final story, Cameron Pierce's The Destroyed Room, somehow manages to convey a desperately sad humanness in a world where there are no cars and all of the trees are plastic. If you've never read any bizarro, this is the place to start and even if you're a bizarro connoisseur the work in this book will expand your definition of the genre.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 11 reviews  4.9 out of 5 stars