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Archive for June, 2010

“Lost in Cat Brain Land” by Cameron Pierce

Posted in Bizarro Books on June 30, 2010 by carltonmellick

A new collection by Portland bizarro fiction writer, Cameron Pierce, is out now. It includes several short stories as well as the novella Drain Angel.

LOST IN CAT BRAIN LAND

Sad stories from a surreal world.

A fascist mustache, the ghost of Franz Kafka, a desert inside a dead cat. 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.

Click here to get it from amazon.com

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Bizarro Issue of Pedestal Magazine

Posted in Bizarro Fiction on June 29, 2010 by carltonmellick

D. Harlan Wilson edited a special issue of the Pedestal Magazine featuring bizarro fiction stories.

Here’s the lineup:

Me. “Pangea II: A Travel Narrative.” Introduction.
Steve Aylett. “Logical Harm.” Novel Excerpt.
Dawn Comer. “Avocado.” Flash Fiction.
Mykle Hansen. “Please Do Not Rub the Clams.” Flash Fiction.
Taik Hobson. “Project Gryphon.” Short Story.
John Edward Lawson. “View from a Pedestal.” Short Story.
Cameron Pierce. “The Grown Family, Destroyed.” Short Story.
Nick Kocz. “Memo from Arachnid Productions.” Novel Excerpt.

You can read them free online here.

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books by Edward Lee

Posted in Bizarro Books on June 28, 2010 by carltonmellick

Deadite Press, the cult horror imprint of Eraserhead Press, has just released two books by gore legend Edward Lee.

What is really awesome is that I personally came up with the titles for each of these books. I also selected the cover images (both by the great Alan Clark). When Edward Lee submitted these collections, he told Eraserhead Press to go ahead and name them for him. After a couple of days of brainstorming with Rose O’Keefe and Jeff Burk, I pitched the titles “Bullet Through Your Face” and “Brain Cheese Buffet” and everybody liked them.

Check them out:

Bullet Through Your Face

No writer is more extreme, perverted, or gross than Edward Lee. His world is one of psychopathic redneck rapists, sex addicted demons, and semen stealing aliens. Brace yourself, the king of splatterspunk is guaranteed to shock, offend, and make you laugh until you vomit. Bullet Through Your Face collects three novellas demonstrating Lee’s mind-blasting talent.

Ever Nat – One man is forced to endure an unimaginable torment just to stay alive, one night at a time.

The Salt-Diviner – A touching story of one couple and the quadriplegic, homeless fortune teller locked in their basement.

The Refrigerator Full of Sperm – Why are all the men of Luntville falling into comas with their pants down and dicks up?

Click here to order from Amazon

Brain Cheese Buffet

You’ve seen Cannibal Holocaust. You’ve seen Salo. You’ve seen Nekromantik. You ain’t seen shit!

Zombie prostitutes, religious rapists, horny werewolves, death by vomit, and sexual fetishes scraped off the sidewalk. From sex prisons to mafia torture chambers, hold on tight because you’re about to enter the perverted and twisted mind of Edward Lee. Once you’ve seen what he has to show you – there’s no coming back.

Brain Cheese Buffet collects nine of Lee’s most sought after tales of violence and body fluids. Featuring the Stoker nominated “Mr. Torso,” the legendary gross-out piece “the Dritiphilist,” the notorious “The McCrath Model SS40-C, Series S,” and six more stories to test your gag reflex.

Click here to order from Amazon

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Werewolf anthology featuring “War Pig” now available for pre-order

Posted in Bizarro Books, Bizarro Fiction, Fiction on June 27, 2010 by carltonmellick

My story “War Pig” will soon appear in the werewolf anthology “Werewolves and Shape Shifters: Encounters with the Beast Within” edited by the one and only John Skipp. This story (about 6,000 words) is the one that I described as a steampunk version of Fight Club with werepigs. Of course, it’s actually more like Death Sport than Fight Club and there’s only one werepig, but there is also a werebear, a were jaguar, werejellyfish, and a werebulldog, among others. It’s personally one of my favorite short stories I’ve written in a long time. I hope to write more like it.

This anthology also includes fellow bizarros Jeremy Robert Johnson, Cody Goodfellow, and Nicole Cushing, as well as Chuck Palahniuk, Neil Gaiman, HP Lovecraft, George R R Martin, Kathe Koja, Francesca Lia Block, Charlainne Harris, Joe R Landsdale and a ton of other amazing writers.

Here are the contents:

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES – Angela Carter
THE OTHER SIDE – Count Stenbock
THE LADY ON THE GREY – John Collier
GABRIEL-ERNEST — Saki
THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH – H.P. Lovecraft
GRANDFATHER WOLF – Steve Rasnic Tem
FIRE DOG – Joe R. Lansdale
PURE SILVER – A.C. Crispin and Kathleen O’Malley
GIFT-WRAP – Charlaine Harris
SIDE-EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE – Steve Duffy
UNLESS YOU CHANGE – Francesca Lia Block
FORGIVEN – Eric Shapiro
THE COLD THAT FLAYS THE SKIN – Tessa Gratton
IL DONNAIOLO – Brad C. Hodson
WEREWOLF 101 – Mercedes M. Yardley
MANDIBLE – Alice Henderson
FAR AND WEE – Kathe Koja
BRAIDS – Melanie Tem
NOT FROM AROUND HERE – David J. Schow
THE SKIN TRADE – George R.R. Martin
THE ANIMAL ASPECT OF HER MOVEMENT – Adam Golaski
STRANGE SKIN – Bentley Little
BREAK-UP – Richard Christian Matheson
THE BETTER HALF: A LOVE STORY – Scott Bradley and Peter Giglio
PLASTIC FANTASTIC – Dieter Meyer and Maxwell Hart
WARM, IN YOUR COAT – Violet Glaze
ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN PIGGY CLASS – Nicole Cushing
HOWL OF THE SHEEP – Cody Goodfellow
PIECES OF ETHAN – Adam-Troy Castro
I COVET ALL THE WANING HOURS – Zak Jarvis
WHEN SUSSURUS STIRS – Jeremy Robert Johnson
WAR PIG – Carlton Mellick III
DISSERTATION – Chuck Palahniuk
ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD AGAIN – Neil Gaiman
SWEETHEART COME – Alethea Kontis

It will be released September 22nd, but you can preorder it on amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/Werewolves-Shape-Shifters-Encounters-Beasts/dp/1579128521

This anthology is a followup to the zombie anthology, “Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead,” which includes my story “Lemon Knives n Cockroaches.”

You can get this one now at amazon.com.

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Zombies and Shit

Posted in Bizarro Books on June 17, 2010 by carltonmellick

So for the next week I’ll be working on a new book. This one is going to be another over the top parody of B-horror movies, like Apeshit. However, instead of a Friday the 13th type of story, this one is going to be about zombies. I’m not talking Night of the Living Dead zombies. I’m talking RETURN of the Living Dead zombies. I’m talking about brain-eaters with mohawks. Basically, I just want to do something like Apeshit, but this time with zombies.

The premise of this book is: Battle Royale meets Return of the Living Dead.

It’s about a group of people who wake to find themselves in a boarded up building in the middle of the zombie wasteland. They soon realize they have been chosen as contestants in a popular game show called Zombie Survival. Each contestant is given a backpack of supplies and a unique weapon. Their goal: be the first to make it through the zombie-plagued city to the pick-up zone alive. Some will choose to work together, some will go solo, some will turn on the other contestants to make sure they make it to the helicopter first.

Or something like that . . . (I haven’t written it yet, so we’ll see how it goes)

I’m really excited about this one. I have always been a huge zombie fan. Many of my earlier books have zombies in them, but none of them were real zombie books. For years I decided not to write a zombie book because there were just way too many zombie books out there already. However, I don’t give a crap anymore. I just want to write one. Besides, I promise this zombie book will be one of a kind.

Eraserhead Press has a few zombie books coming out this year. All of them are excellent zombie comedies that I highly recommend. More info on that later.

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I’m going to LARP the FUCK out of you!

Posted in Bizarro Books on June 11, 2010 by carltonmellick

An illustration from my upcoming book, The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2, which should be available within a couple of weeks.

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Featured Titles

Apeship
Six people are stranded at sea on a derelict cruise ship filled with immortal cannibal mutants.
Splatterpunk satire.

Why I Married a Clown Girl From the Dimension of Death
An man who is scared of clowns marries one and instantly regrets it.
Creepy and fun.

Glass Children
An old man is forced to get a job at a daycare center for children made of glass.
Absurd and dark.

You Always Try to Kill Me In Your Dreams
A man struggles to survive in the hellish dream worlds of his college crush.
Dark and surreal.

The Girl with the Barbed Wire Hair
A boy is stalked by a dead girl that’s fallen desperately in love with him.
Dark and creepy.

Goblins on the Other Side
A girl visits her dead grandmother in Heaven.
Creepy and surreal.

Full Metal Octopus
A fairy and an octomaid go on the run from the elf yakuza.
Pulpy and sexual.

The Bad Box
A class of fifth grade students find themselves at the mercy of a malicious godlike teacher.
Dark and absurd.

Snuggle Club
A short horror comedy that takes the art of communal snuggling to a whole new extreme.
Awkward and creepy.

Mouse Trap
A group of school children try to survive an alien invasion within an abandoned amusement park.
Dark and pulpy.

The Boy with the Chainsaw Heart
A Bio-Mech pilot drafted into Hell’s army must fight his way through a surreal afterlife in order to save his wife from slavery.
Dark and pulpy.

Neverday
The story of what happens to society after everyone in the world gets trapped in a never-ending time loop.
Dark and dystopian.

Stacking Doll
The story of a man who falls in love with a Russian nesting doll.
Dark and surreal.

Parasite MIlk
A travel show producer is infected with deadly sexually transmitted parasites after visiting a brothel on an alien planet.
Body horror science-fiction comedy.

The Big Meat
A kaiju tribute novel that explores the surreal aftermath of a giant monster attack.
Dark and gritty.

Spider Bunny
A group of college kids get trapped inside a deranged children’s cereal commercial from the 1980’s.
Creepy and absurd.

Exercise Bike
The story of a man who transformed himself into a human exercise bike and the woman who is forced to ride him.
Absurd body horror.

The Terrible Thing That Happens
In a post-apocalypse world, a small community of scavengers must survive by looting a grocery store that’s stuck in a time loop.
Dark and surreal.

Every Time We Meet at the Dairy Queen, Your Whole Fucking Face Explodes
A tale of childhood love and spontaneous face explosions.
Cute and disturbing.

Bio Melt
Within a toxic wasteland, six strangers find themselves trapped in an abandoned hotel, surrounded by a mysterious black ooze.
Dark and surreal.

ClownFellas
Six interconnected novellas revolving around the Bozo clown crime family
Surreal and Pulpy.

As She Stabbed Me Gently in the Face
A sociopathic killer meets an even more sociopathic victim
Dark and strange.

Sweet Story
A children’s book gone horribly wrong.
Dark humor.

The Tick People
In a city where people live like parasites on the back of a giant animal, a professional sadness-maker discovers that his soul mate is a hideous mutant.
Dark and surreal.

Hungry Bug
In a world where magic exists, spell-casting has become a serious addiction.
Gritty and pulpy.

Clusterfuck
A bunch of douchebag frat boys get trapped in a cave with subterranean cannibal mutants and try to survive not by using their wits but by following the bro code.
Comical and violent.

Quicksand House
Two children who have never met their parents before, even though they live in the same house with them, must fight for survival once their nursery becomes uninhabitable.
Dark and Dystopian.

Village of the Mermaids
An eccentric doctor travels to an isolated village of carnivorous mermaids to investigate a new disease spreading through the herd of human livestock.
Dark and Dystopian.

Cuddly Holocaust
A tale of survival set in a world where most of the human race has been exterminated by vicious stuffed animals.
Apocalyptic and brutal.

Hammer Wives
Six novellas and short stories.

Kill Ball
A slasher thriller set in a city where everyone lives in plastic bubbles.
Dystopian and surreal.

Tumor Fruit
Seven castaways stranded on a bizarre deserted island must go to extremes in order to survive.
Surreal and disturbing.

The Handsome Squirm
It’s Franz Kafka’s The Trial meets an erotic horror version of The Blob when a man is forced by law to marry an alien woman who devours her mates.
Absurd and dystopian.

Armadillo Fists
Set in a world where people drive mechanical dinosaurs instead of cars, a female boxer with armadillo hands is on the run from deranged mobsters.
Pulpy and fun.

I Knocked Up Satan’s Daughter
A parody of romantic comedies about a man who finds himself engaged to a succubus who’s pregnant with his child.
Light and satirical.

Fantastic Orgy
One novella plus four short stories.

Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands
The sequel to Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland.

The Morbidly Obese Ninja
A 700 pound killing machine must go against his corporate employers in order to save a terminal child.
Pulpy and fun.

Crab Town
A bizarre bank heist set in a radioactive post-nuke ghetto.
Dystopian and relevant.

Zombies and Shit
It’s Battle Royale meets Return of the Living dead in a fight to the death game of survival where twenty contestants are put against each other in the middle of the zombie wasteland.
Apocalyptic, pulpy, and epic.

The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2
A group of adventurers learn they are actually fictional characters trapped in the worst Dungeons & Dragons campaign of all time.

Satirical and dumb.

Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland
A Wonderland Book Award-winning novel about a three-armed man who finds himself in the middle of a war between a gang of road warrior werewolves and mutants from a dystopian version of McDonaldland.

Apocalyptic, pulpy, and epic.

The Cannibals of Candyland
A man finds himself imprisoned in an under ground world populated by child-eating mutants made of candy.
Erotic and horrific.

Apeshit

A parody of cabin in the woods horror stories where the victims turn out to be far more deranged than the mutant killers who hunt them.

Campy and fucked up.

The Egg Man
It is a survival of the fittest world where humans reproduce like insects, children are the property of corporations, and having a ten-foot tall brain is a grotesque sexual fetish.
Dark, dystopian, and ugly.

Cybernetrix
A dark and bizarre parody of the movie Tron where a game world and our world bleed together into one reality.
Pulpy and awesome.

The Faggiest Vampire
A bizarro children’s book about two vampire rivals competing in a mustache contest to determine which one is the faggiest.
Cute and relevant.

The Ultra Fuckers
A landscaper and a trio of Japanese punks find themselves stranded in a suburban gated community that seems to go on forever.
Nightmarish and absurd.

Adolf in Wonderland
Nazis from an alternate world of absolute perfection go down the rabbit hole into a dark surreal world of chaos and imperfection.
Absurd and horrific.

Sausagey Santa
A bizarro Christmas story… filled with sex and violence.
Satirical and pulpy.

The Haunted Vagina
It’s difficult to love a woman whose vagina is a gateway to the world of the dead.
Satirical and absurd.

Praise for Carlton Mellick III

"If you like satires which are highly imaginative, subversive, gory, funny as hell and completely surreal CM3 may be your literary messiah."

—Ricardo Gonzalez Del Valle

"CM3 is the most imaginative writer since Lethem and Vonnegut. Different, and absolutely thought provoking..."

—Daniel McCreary

"Carlton Mellick creates fascinating and intricate worlds out of meat, slime, sexuality, wire, and the kind of nightmares that make you laugh when you wake up."

—Jemiah Jefferson

"Brilliant writing that oozes into your skull and melts your brain like a box of a zillion crayons."

—Idiot Alien Thought Creature

"His books are from another universe."

—Cameron Pierce

"Mellick is smarter than the dumbness he tries to coat his writing in; you feel like you're reading a comic or watching MTV - but that underneath there is something deeper and smarter than the cartoonish presentation before your eyes."

—Euchrid

"Through childlike narration Mr. Mellick can present to his reader some of the most curious and knee-slapingly hysterical blaspheme."

—Ian David McGowen

"There is depth behind his simplistic prose, and humor all around it. What at first seems unsophisticated quickly becomes a firm identity to the characters, and you realize the intelligence behind the naivety. Yes, it's all on purpose, and you've just been had!"

—Schtinky

"Mellick has definitely joined the ranks of the bizarre literary geniuses such as Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, and Vonnegut."

—Charles Glover

"Mellick's imagination is boundless, and his writing truly shows this. His characters, plot, and writing style are original, enjoyable, and inspiring."

—Lionel Bigsby

Carlton Mellick III

Archive for June, 2010

“Lost in Cat Brain Land” by Cameron Pierce

Bizarro Issue of Pedestal Magazine

books by Edward Lee

Werewolf anthology featuring “War Pig” now available for pre-order

Zombies and Shit

I’m going to LARP the FUCK out of you!

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Praise for Carlton Mellick III

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