BEST NOVEL OF 2011: Haunt by Laura Lee Bahr

Haunt is a tripping-balls Los Angeles noir, where a mysterious dame drags you through a time-warping Bizarro hall of mirrors. She’s the girl of your dreams. Too bad she’s dead. OR IS SHE? In Haunt, “you” are the hapless corporate tool and rock star wannabe turned private Dick. Here, even your most inconsequential choices can make all the difference between a Hollywood ending on the beach and sucking cock for clues. This is genial lowbrow high lit weirdness: the funny, punchy cousin of Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a Vonnegut and Salinger paté on a choose-your-own cracker, with a lapdance from Nancy Drew. As much fun to make as it is to eat! Laura Lee Bahr is an award-winning indie actor/playwrite/screenwriter with a gift for the hilariously, tragically absurd. Haunt is her first novel.

BEST COLLECTION OF 2011: We Live Inside You by Jeremy Robert Johnson

“WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is fucking terrific. Jeremy Robert Johnson is dancing to a way different drummer. He loves language, he loves the edge, and he loves us people. These stories have range and style and wit. This is entertainment… and literature.”–JACK KETCHUM, author of Off Season, The Girl Next Door, and The Woman (w/Lucky McKee)

We are within you, and we are growing. Watching. Waiting for your empires to fall. It won’t be long now.

We are the fear of death that drives you and the terrible hunger that reshapes you in its name. We are the vengeance born from senseless slaughter and the pulsing reptile desire that negates your consciousness. We are the lie on your lips, the collapsing star in your heart, and the still-warm gun in your shaking hands. The illusion of control is all we’ll allow you, and no matter what you do…

WE LIVE INSIDE YOU

BEST NOVEL

“A Town Called Suckhole” by David W. Barbee
“Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You” by Bradley Sands
“Beyond the Valley of the Apocalypse Donkeys” by Jordan Krall
“I Knocked Up Satan’s Daughter” by Carlton Mellick III
“Haunt” by Laura Lee Bahr

BEST COLLECTION

“Clockwork Girl” by Athena Villaverde
“Abortion Arcade” by Cameron Pierce
“We Live Inside You” by Jeremy Robert Johnson
“Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective” by Garrett Cook
“Baby’s First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit” by Robert Devereaux

Voting ends October 31st. Only BizarroCon attendees are eligible to vote. Send your votes (one per category) to bizarrocon@yahoo.com

We’d like to give honorable mentions to those titles that came close to placing in the final ballot. These titles include:  “Island of the Super People” by Kevin Shamel, “The Tumours Made Me Interesting” by Matthew Revert, “Fuckness” by Andersen Prunty and “Gigantic Death Worm” by Vince Kramer  in the best novel category, and “The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians” by Andersen Prunty, “The Traveling Dildo Salesman” by Kevin L. Donihe, “Hooray for Death” by Mykle Hansen, and “Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face: A Novel” by Bradley Sands in the best collection category.

ALL-MONSTER ACTION! by Cody Goodfellow is now available at Amazon, featuring art from Mike Dubisch (cover and interiors) and Nick Gucker (interiors):

“A tour-de-force! Goodfellow’s latest is his best yet. Compulsive, breakneck reading!” —BRIAN KEENE, author of The Rising and Ghoul

IT’S THEIR WORLD… NOW GET THE FUCK OFF!

Whether on the sun-kissed beaches of a nameless South Pacific paradise or in the suffocating dungeons of retail Hell, the misfits of evolution and mistakes of misbegotten science are battling, breeding, and feeding. And they’re looking at you…

COMING ATTRACTIONS!

They came seeking cheap thrills and interspecies recreational sex, but they reaped a whirlwind of clusterfuckery when they toyed with the unspeakable forces of monster lust. From the idyllic nostalgia of WW2 to the thoroughly bat-shit future, witness the wages of sin and mutation as you’ve never seen them before (unless you read them previously in the periodicals or anthologies in which they first appeared)!

OUR MAIN FEATURE!

The world gave him a blank check and a demand: Create giant monsters to fight our wars. But Dr. Otaku was not satisfied with mere chaos and mass destruction…. Even as his subversively delicious kaiju creatures undermined the very fabric of American life, he hatched a scheme to animate the cities themselves and inaugurate a new dark age of mega-monster abominations who would finally give humanity the ass-whipping it deserved. Now only one man, riding inside the skull of a much larger man, stands between us and the planet-devastating madness of…

ALL-MONSTER ACTION!

“ALL-MONSTER ACTION! is hilarious, action-packed, and way too much fun. Over-the-top and wild! Highly recommended.” — JONATHAN MABERRY, New York Times Bestselling author of Dust & Decay and Assassin’s Code

“This is your chance. You only think you’re hip—but you haven’t read this Cody Goodfellow book, so you’re not yet. Now you can be hip, and read something crazy entertaining too. You can’t go wrong, man, I’m telling you. You’ve got to read this thing. I mean, if a book rocks, it rocks, that’s all.” —JOHN SHIRLEY, author of A Song Called Youth

“Cody Goodfellow’s writing etches itself inside your eyelids and chases your brain back into the dark corners where you can’t escape. ALL-MONSTER ACTION! has more high concepts in a paragraph than a whole summer of blockbusters: a mad scientist who’s passed on like the flu; biotech mutants harvested for fun and profit; and a giant monster arms race that ends in a showdown on the moon. This book is a human’s-eye view of the future coming down hard on us, like a Tokyo resident gazing up at the sky and seeing only the outline of a giant foot.” —CHRISTOPHER FARNSWORTH, author of Blood Oath and The President’s Vampire

“ALL-MONSTER ACTION! is a dirty bomb right to the cerebral cortex—it’s sharp, smart, scary, scarring, sexy and brutally funny. And like any good bomb, it’s got specific targets in mind: Genre and gender, racism, colonialism, ageism and classism. ALL-MONSTER ACTION! demonstrates again that Cody Goodfellow is some kind of mad-ass genius.” —LISA MORTON, author of The Castle of Los Angeles and Monsters of L.A. and Four-Time Winner of the Bram Stoker Award

“One of the most unique and creative works I’ve ever read. The author is quite obviously insane, but like Colonel Kurtz, he’s got a plan. ALL-MONSTER ACTION! is packed with wild, driving energy that carries the reader along like an out-of-control Disney ride. Cody Goodfellow combines genres and crazed pop-cult tropes with finesse and style. Old Mr. Yeats kept bitchin’ about ‘the centre cannot hold.’ Bullshit. With ALL-MONSTER ACTION! Cody Goodfellow proves he can hold the center together and play lead guitar at the same time. Filled with crazed, strange characters drawn from pop-cult, z-grade cinema and zillions of comic books, the pace is frantic and the imagery often makes you laugh while you cringe. What impresses me most with ALL-MONSTER ACTION! is Cody’s ability to take cultural icons and clichés and turn them into a funny, intelligent, satiric story that perhaps Max Ernst would have written if he fronted Black Flag. ALL-MONSTER ACTION! made me remember those late nights as a kid, watching amazingly strange films and thrilling to every minute. Cody Goodfellow must have caught those films, too, because his fevered stories have one foot in the past and one foot in the present. Reading ALL-MONSTER ACTION! gave me the same pleasure as the first time I saw ‘The Navy vs. the Night Monsters.’ Brilliant!”—RICKY LEE GROVE, The Greatest Character Actor Ever (Army Of Darkness, Point Break, Scanner Cop) and the Pizza Delivery Man in Your Mom’s Recurring Wet Dreams

BEST NOVEL OF 2010: By the Time We Leave Here, We’ll Be Friends by J. David Osborne

Siberia, 1953. Stalin is dead and a once-prosperous thief named Alek Karriker is feeling the pressure. Trapped in an icy prison camp where violent criminals run the show, betrayed by his friends and his body, Karriker is surrounded by death and disorder. Bizarre Inuit shamans are issuing ever-stranger commands that he must obey. Opium is running scarce and bad magic is plentiful. Razor-tooth gangsters can smell Karriker’s blood and they plan to murder him more than once. The only option: ESCAPE.

Enlisting the aid of an aging guard, a cold-blooded killer, and a beautiful, murderous nurse, Karriker must now secure his getaway by finding a “calf”: a gullible prisoner to be cannibalized when the tundra is at its most barren. As the vice grows tighter and life in the gulag becomes increasingly surreal, Karriker must hurry to find his mark and convince him…

BY THE TIME WE LEAVE HERE, WE’LL BE FRIENDS

BEST COLLECTION OF 2010: Lost in Cat Brain Land by Cameron Pierce

Sad stories from a surreal world.

A fascist mustache. A desert inside a dead cat. The ghost of Franz Kafka. Primordial entities mourn the death of their child. The desperate serve tea to mysterious creatures. A hopeless romantic falls in love with a pterodactyl.

From a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where robotic gargoyles are law, to a blighted suburbia where the elephant god Ganesh seeks revenge on a man and his android wife, Cat Brain Land is a place of domestic despair and nightmare foreboding. Where sirloin steaks enroll in daycare and ex-lovers return as tiny dolls. This is a land of camel people and the Lord of Meat. The farther into Cat Brain Land you get, the more difficult it will be to get out.

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