I highly recommend this book. I call it “David Cronenberg meets Dr. Seuss.”
A demented fairy tale about a pickle, a pancake, and the apocalypse.
It is Gaston Glew’s sixteenth Sad Day – the sixteenth anniversary of the saddest day of his life: his day of birth – and his parents have just committed suicide. Fed up with the sadness of Pickled Planet, Gaston Glew builds a rocket ship and blasts off into outer space, hoping to escape his briny fate.
Meanwhile, on Pancake Island, Fanny Fod, the most beautiful pancake girl in the world, nurses a secret sadness as she guards the origin of all happiness: the mysterious Cuddlywumpus. When Gaston’s rocket ship crash-lands in the sea of maple syrup that surrounds Pancake Island, nothing will ever be the same for him, or for Fanny Fod.
Captain Pickle says: “Unchain yourself from this briny fate, oh pickled prisoner, and read Cameron Pierce’s The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island: A Tragedy for People Who Eat Food!”
When there’s no more meat in hell,
the vegans will walk the earth.
If you are a zombie fan or a vegan you need to check out this book. Published by Deadite Press, the cult horror imprint of Eraserhead Press. I urged “punk horror” author David Agranoff to write this book because I thought it was a book that needed to be written. No one in the world could have written this book but David. I’m not a vegan, but you don’t have to be a vegan to like this. It’s just a good horror comedy that pokes fun at hipsters, Portlanders, juggalos, zombie fans, and even some aspects vegan culture. Oh, and it also pokes fun at the whole “with zombies” trend in literature that started with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The main character works at a zombie publishing house and is copyediting the next big zombie mash-up: Of Mice and Men and Zombies.
“Like Shaun of the Dead with vegans and hipsters. A hilarious zombie comedy. I loved it!” – Carlton Mellick III
“Destined to become a favorite among zombie fans and vegans alike.” – Gina Ranalli, author of Praise the Dead
“This witty novel celebrates everything I love about vegan Portland and kills everything I hate!” – Jess of Portland’s Get Sconed vegan blog.
Presenting Stress Free Food! Animal suffering is a thing of the past. Hipsters can now enjoy bacon without guilt. Thanks to a new miracle drug the cute little pig no longer feels a thing as she is led to the slaughter. The only problem? Once the drug enters the food supply anyone who eats it is infected. From fast food burgers to free-range organic eggs, eating animal products turns people into shambling brain-dead zombies. Not even vegetarians are safe!
In Portland, Oregon, vegans, freegans, abolitionists, hardliners and raw fooders have holed up in Food Fight, one of the country’s premier vegan grocery stores at the vegan mini-mall. There they must prepare for their final battle to take back the city from the hordes of roaming undead. Will vegans filet the flesh-eaters or will they become zombie chow?
When there’s no more meat in hell, the vegans will walk the earth.
Posted in Bizarro Books on July 1, 2010 by carltonmellick
My D&D parody book is now available. It is perhaps the dumbest thing ever written (by me or anyone else). It is also the best.
Are you ready to play some Dungeons and Fucking Dragons?
The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2 is an absurd comedy about a group of adventurers (elf, halfling, bard, dwarf, assassin, thief) going through an existential crisis after having discovered that they are really just pre-rolled characters living inside of a classic AD&D role playing game. While exploring the ruins of Tardis Keep, these 6 characters must deal with their inept Dungeon Master’s retarded imagination and resist their horny teenaged players’ commands to have sex with everything in sight.
Featuring: punk rock elf chicks, death metal orcs, porn-addicted beholders, a goblin/halfling love affair, a gnoll orgy, and a magical dildo that holds the secrets of the universe.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
"Carlton Mellick III has the craziest book titles... and the kinkiest fans!"
—Christopher Moore
"Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction's most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale."
—Cory Doctorow
CARLTON MELLICK III is the Wonderland Book Award-winning author of over 45 novels, including Quicksand House, Bio Melt, Cuddly Holocaust and Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland. In 2013, he was named one of the top 20 science-fiction writers under the age of 40 by The Guardian UK. His work has appeared in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade, and Vice Magazine.
Featured Titles
Apeship
Six people are stranded at sea on a derelict cruise ship filled with immortal cannibal mutants.
Splatterpunk satire.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Carlton Mellick III 