I 1st encountered Bradley Sands when we friended each other here on GoodReads. I had little or no impression of him. His picture seemed somewhat nondescript. Then I met him in Boulder when I was there to guest lecture & perform at Naropa University. I didn't get much of a chance to meet him there b/c I was so distracted but we did get a chance to talk a little & he seemed enthusiastic & friendly. I still had no idea of what his writing was like.

THEN he sent me this bk c/o my friend Amy Catanzano. I get a fair amt of bks given to me, I don't necessarily expect to like them all. Sometimes I'm a bit worried I won't like them at all & that then I'll be faced w/ writing a negative review since I review every bk I read here on GoodReads & try to always review them honestly. SO, imagine my relief when I started reading this & not only liked it but liked it more & more the more I read it. It's funny, surprising, fairly original (or, at least, I'm unaware of its milieu), & well-written. & he's not a one-trick pony: he explores a variety of techniques.

There're puns galore - such as "peanutbutterfly net". There're lively similes: "His body vibrates like a caffeinated poodle humping its favorite chew toy." Wonderful pun-based plot twists: "He sits on the floor of his bedroom, trying to balance his budget so he can afford a mattress. The window opens and a woman in a scat burglar suit ski-do-be-bops through it. Lost in the realm of her impeccable scatting abilities, she doesn't notice that someone in the room is hyperventilating. She steals the floor and is halfway to the pawnshop before she discovers she's committed a kidnapping. Their eyes meet, go out for dinner and a movie, and REALLY hit it off." All this & more in just the 1st story: "Abridged Version".

The author makes appearances throughout - such as in "Terror in the Haunted House": "Bradley waits until Crispin's skull is one crunch away from shattering before briefing you on his condition" & in "Jared Bruckheiny": "He responds by yelling, "Bradley Sands fall down - take one" and slams his head between the black and white agony of a clapboard."

Other recurrences include things like No Girls Allowed - vodka, a corporation, & a magazine. There're locations like the Humperdumper Yogurtarium and Toilet Paper Boutique; Cheesequake & Moonsylvania. The Encyclopedia Orangutannicas makes at least 2 appearances. All of these contribute to establishing Bradley's alternate universe.

Sands' world is a rollicking grotesquerie full of cartoon violence & what I like to call schizophrenic humor - where the figurative is turned literal & vice-versa. There're probably other writers out there like him, maybe even a whole underground scene, but if there're any better than him at this I'd like to have them called to my attn so I can read their work. The closest writer I can think of at the moment is Rupert Wondlowski, whose work I also like, but I think of Rupert's work as more 'poetic' & Bradley's as more fictional.

Sands' world is like a ghost bus that you had to take home from yr job at the fast food restaurant for kiddies where you had to clean up more puke than you'd ever imagined possible. It was late at nite, you'd fallen asleep on the bus, it'd crashed in a freak accident w/ the entire replacement shift for people going into a similar job. You'd woken up, not realized that you were dead & everyone around you was Bradley Sands in a different form of drag. You wondered where the party was & asked everyone what yr name was but they only laughed at you.

I liked this bk so much that when I was recently fotoed in bed for a "secretly famous" section of a nascent magazine I made sure to be fotoed reading "My Heart Said No, But The Camera Crew Said YES!" May that contribute to a steady stream of new readers for Sands. & may I read more by him. Amen. ( )