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There’s a new genre rising from the underground. Its name: BIZARRO. For years, readers have been asking for a category of fiction dedicated to the weird, crazy, cult side of storytelling that has become a staple in the film industry (with directors such as David Lynch, Takashi Miike, Tim Burton, and even Lloyd Kaufman) but has been largely ignored in the literary world, until now.

The Bizarro Starter Kit features short novels and story collections by ten of the leading authors in the bizarro genre: D. Harlan Wilson, Carlton Mellick III, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Kevin L Donihe, Gina Ranalli, Andre Duza, VIncent W. Sakowski, Steve Beard, John Edward Lawson, and Bruce Taylor.

For those of you that are unfamiliar, the first page offers the following explanation:

Defining Bizarro
1. Bizarro, simply put is the genre of the weird.
2. Bizarro is literature’s equivalent to the cult section at the video store.
3. Like cult movies, Bizarro is sometimes surreal, sometimes goofy, sometimes bloody, and sometimes borderline pornographic.
4. Bizarro often contains a certain cartoon logic that, when applied to the read world, creates an unstable universe where the bizarre becomes the norm and absurdities are made flesh.
5. Bizarro strives not only to be strange, but fascinating, thought-provoking, and, above all, fun to read.
6. Bizarro was created by a group of small press publishers in response to the increasing demand for (good) weird fiction and the increasing number of authors who specialize in it.
7. Bizarro is:
Franz Kafka meets Joe Bob Briggs
Dr. Suess of the post-apocalypse
Japanese animation directed by David Lynch

Grade 2-3–This humorous story features a nontraditional but goodhearted principal who skateboards to school and constantly challenges students to strive for academic excellence. When second-grader A.J. gets sent to the office because he didn’t do his homework, Mr. Klutz gives him a candy bar as an incentive to try harder. Then the man proposes that if all students in the school complete one million math problems he will throw a chocolate party with all the treats they can eat. Other challenges follow, as Mr. Klutz promises to climb the flagpole if the kids complete Election Day essays, dress up in a turkey costume and ride a pogo stick down Main Street when they compile a list of 100,000 spelling words, etc. Although the children hold up their end of each bargain, they begin to worry about Mr. Klutz as his promises get weirder and weirder. Eventually, they tell him that they will stop learning unless he stops his crazy antics. Black-and-white cartoons add to the silliness, and the large print and simple vocabulary make this an easy chapter book that will satisfy newly confident as well as reluctant readers who ask for funny books.–Kristina Aaronson, Henniker Community School, NH
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Library Binding edition.

” … an easy chapter book that will satisfy newly confident as well as reluctant readers who ask for funny books.” — School Library Journal

Will satisfy newly confident as well as reluctant readers who ask for funny books. — School Library Journal

By turns bizarre, unsettling, spooky, and sublime, Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories showcases nine incomparable stories from master conjuror Algernon Blackwood. Evoking the uncanny spiritual forces of Nature, Blackwood’s writings all tread the nebulous borderland between fantasy, awe, wonder, and horror. Here Blackwood displays his best and most disturbing work-including “The Willows,” which Lovecraft singled out as “the single finest weird tale in literature”; “The Wendigo”; “The Insanity of Jones”; and “Sand.”

About the Author
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) trained as a doctor and took up a special interest in Eastern medicine and religion. He published several short story collections before becoming an undercover agent for Britain during World War I. After the war he became known for his regular appearances reading ghost stories on BBC radio and television.

Famed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury provides the foreword to Volume Three of this classic, creepy EC title! This hardcover reprints twenty-four stories by Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines, with art by legendary illustrators such as Wally Wood, Joe Orlando, Jack Kamen, Will Elder and more – all in spectacular full color! Reprints Weird Science issues #13-18, originally published in 1952 and 1953.

In general, the EC WEIRD SCIENCE stories are excellently rendered, with mediocre writing by Al Feldstein. Feldstein had never read SF when Gaines got the idea to do a science fiction comic. He loaned Feldstein some books to read, and Al basically recycled many tried and true plots. His “twist” endings stop being a surprise when you come to expect a twist, and are fairly predictable as he tended toward cataclysmic and tragic endings.

The art, of course, is spectacular. Not only did EC hire top artists, Gaines paid them top dollar. These guys were getting paid by the page, so EC’s rates allowed them to spend more time on each page.

“Sometimes in the wild, animals you might think could hurt each other actually help each other in surprising ways.” Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey provide specific examples of these unusual duos with brief text and humorous pen-and-ink, gouache and watercolor illustrations in Weird Friends: Unlikely Allies in the Animal Kingdom.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Kindergarten-Grade 3–An introduction to symbiosis. The rhino and the cattle egret, the blind shrimp and its buddy the goby, and the red phalaropes paired with the sperm whale-in all, 14 relationships are described, and many exotic animals are introduced. Certainly, the tuatara and its helpful pal the sooty shearwater will be new to youngsters. The typeface is large and easy to read, and the text is either black or white, depending on the background; pages are awash with color. The pen-and-ink, gouache, pastel, and watercolor illustrations are cartoonlike and kid-friendly, and anthropomorphism is rampant: zebras look puzzled; a shark looks angry; scared mackerels swim toward the safety of home; a hippo looks content to have oxpeckers land on its back, etc. There is a helpful pronunciation guide, and the page on where to find weird friends suggests that one must travel far and wide to locate them. This book fills a niche.
Anne Chapman Callaghan, Racine Public Library, WI
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

It’s the start of a new school year, and A.J.’s third-grade teacher, Mr. Granite, is out of this world! He’s a supergenius who talks weird, acts weird, and looks weird. He knows everything. Is he a computer posing as a person, or does he come from another planet?

This series is so funny. It is about 2nd grade children and their days at school. Each book is about a different teacher.

It’s hilarious! It says funny things. A girl runs into a cow and, as usual, the teacher is crazy. GREAT SERIES – HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!!

When Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, beat out Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh for the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, a controversy in the British press ensued. But this imaginative and unconventional writer strikes back at her detractors in her third book (after Human Croquet), skewering the academic literary establishment with understated but spot-on humor, while telling an imaginative tale both outrageously funny and poignantly human: Tom Robbins meets John Irving. Euphemia “Effie” Andrews, a 21-year-old Scot and student at the University of Dundee, arrives at a remote, barren Scottish island to swap life stories with her mother, Nora. Effie comes with a slew of tales about the free-love and druggy chaos of her early 1970s college life, and also armed with questions for Nora, determined to learn the truth about their family history. That is, if Nora is her mother, and if any of the stories either of them tell are true (“My mother is a virgin”). These are unreliable narrators in top form, keeping readers guessing delightedly throughout. The author uses different fonts to intertwine several narratives, including hilarious entries from Effie’s, and her classmates’, novels-in-progress, while these excerpts are interrupted by Nora’s snide commentary. Effie’s academic hijinks may be a bit exaggerated, since she’s slogging along on a paper on George Eliot while living with occasional electricity and a continually stoned boyfriend. But truly alarming things are happening in Dundee: someone is killing residents of a retirement home, and a strange woman is following Effie. While the narrators’ constant backtalk can be tiresome, Atkinson’s clever and sophisticated prose preserves the voices’ sparkling energy. Readers may guess the family secret before it is revealed, but that doesn’t steal any thunder from the unsettling and utterly original denouement. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s unique contribution to American literature was a melding of traditional supernaturalism (derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe) with the genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1920s. This new Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition brings together a dozen of the master’s tales-from his early short stories “Under the Pyramids” (originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini) and “The Music of Erich Zann” (which Lovecraft ranked second among his own favorites) through his more fully developed works, “The Dunwich Horror,” The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and At the Mountains of Madness.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S. T. Joshi’s illuminating introduction and notes to each story.

About the Author
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. His relatively small body of work-three novels and sixty short stories-has nevertheless exercised an incalculable influence on horror and supernatural fiction.

THE WHITE PEOPLE AND OTHER STORIES is an eclectic collection of Machen’s weird stories, his poetry, and some of his later writings for newspapers. Despite being a fan of Lovecraft, I have always wondered what HPL meant when he consistently referred to a protagonist hinting at things unknown (to others), dropping outlandish names and meaning more than is said. Well, he borrowed this technique from Machen’s “The White People”, a story made to look like a young girl’s diary. Her journal is just a collection of thoughts and experiences, and many things are hinted at as reminders to herself which we will never understand, but these brief glimpses are horrible enough. Machen’s poetry collection, “Ornaments in Jade”, also struck me as weirdly beautiful but also indecipherable. More is unsaid than said, hinted at than revealed. I felt that it relied on some code, a common frame of reference, that has been lost over the course of a hundred years. Perhaps his contemporaries felt the same way.

Born in Wales in 1863, Machen was a London journalist for much of his life.Among his fiction, he may be best known for the allusive, haunting title story of this book, &”The White People”, which H.P. Lovecraft thought to be the second greatest horror story ever written (after Blackwood’s “The Wilows”). This wide ranging collection also includes the crystalline novelette “A Fragment of Life”, & “The Angel of Mons” (a story so widely reported that it was imagined true by millions in the grim initial days of the Great War), and “The Great Return” telling of the stately visions which graced the Welsh village of Llantristant for a time. Four more tales and the poetical “Ornaments in Jade” are all finely told. This is the second Machen volume edited by S. T. Joshi and published by Chaosium. The first volume was The Three Impostors.