Douglas Hackle

I received a paperback copy of Zoltergeist the Poltergeist, authored and published by Douglas Hackle, cover art by Hauke Vagt and cover design by Megan Moss, for review consideration. What follows below is my honest review, freely given.

I rated this novel 5 stars. Not going to lie, this may be the bizarroist bizarro novel I have read to date, so when I say it takes the cake (and does illegal things to it), you may feel the need to take it with a grain of salt, but seriously….this f*cked the cake.

Jimmy is our human MC. I make that distinction because there are sentient broths and leprechauns in this version of Earth, among odder things. Some definitely harder to conceptualize into living entities than others; does it go by level of belief? Sense of self-awareness? It also had me asking all sorts of unnecessary questions about Clarp Chessler’s (sentient broth) film career. In ‘The Savoriest Broth In The World’, does ingesting him count as a sex act or a type of cannibalism? And that’s my safest question to share with this review, people!!

This is not a book to read if you offend remotely easily, you won’t like it. I’m not in the mood to see your fake outrage and terrible review ranting about how you had no idea there would be so much masturbation and gutter speak; I warned you here! The depravity, violence, abrupt plot twists; read the room tw*twaffles. This is Hackle’s world now, and it’s dividing by zero while ingesting copious amounts of your mamma's LSD, not any of this weak ass modern sh*t. I was torn between having the time of my life and being irrevocably tainted by what I read in Poltergeist, so a perfect bizarro read, right...Right?

Yep, perfect.… (plus d'informations)

I have mixed feelings about this book. Being in a coma for the last nine months and suddenly waking to a world so drastically changed has its ups and downs. Soon after I closed my eyes back in March I realised that I couldn’t open them back up again. Just like in the movies I could hear everything going on around me, I could smell the smells, and when my eyelids were pulled open by someone checking my responses, I could blearily (mostly because I wasn’t wearing my glasses) see them.

I discovered that people want to help people in a coma. They mostly do this by playing them songs they think have a special significance to the comatose person. If you are a lucky comatose person, you will have people in your life who know what music moves you, and maybe they will even get in touch with Dave Grohl, who will record a special version of your favourite song, adding a gently amusing and heartfelt message and he might even adapt the lyrics to fit the situation. For some of us however, being comatose is a time to discover that our well meaning family and/or friends have never really taken notice of our interests, and the best they can do is remember the one time you were dragged reluctantly into a karaoke session and forced to sing a track you hate but were too polite/drunk to tell them just how much. This unfortunately can lead to a situation where “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye is your coma song.

If wildly screaming inwardly as the Gotye track is played on a loop couldn’t force my body to break the coma’s hold on me, I despaired that anything could. Eventually there was general consensus on the ineffectiveness of Gotye thankfully, and a new tactic was searched for. After several restful post-Gotye days, in walked the footsteps of someone I didn’t recognise. The person pulled a chair up next to the bed. Next thing I knew they started reading, or reciting from memory, I couldn’t tell which, the first story in the collection of stories, that can loosely be categorised as bizarro but who knows what they are really, titled Is Winona Ryder Still with the Dude from Soul Asylum? and Other LURID Tales of TERROR and DOOM!!! by author Douglas Hackle. A beautiful American woman’s voice told me the tales, tales so funny it was painful for me, my insides unable to experience the release of the laughter I so needed to laugh.

After completing the whole collection—a collection filled with just the right amount of meta to avoid being annoying, stories chocka with references just the right side of annoying, and humour that deals with stupidity with just the right amount of sharpness to avoid being annoying—the owner of the wonderful female voice flipped the pages right back to the beginning and started the whole book again. Ordinarily, I would’ve been thrilled. The lady reader did have a lovely voice, and the book would be fun to return to in almost every other circumstance. However, being comatose and internally imploding because a laugh has nowhere to go is not a pleasant place to be. Hour after hour the laugh pressure grew. Until finally

I woke up.

Before me sat a man, one I didn’t recognise. For a moment he sat dumbfounded, as I’d woken by springing up from my pillow in a quite melodramatic way. Eventually he called for a nurse, his voice that which had read me the book. I blinked and listened, realising I recognised the voice. His voice had been dubbed by the dubbed voice provided by Lindsay Crouse for Lysette Anthony playing the role of Princess Lyssa in the film Krull.

I still wonder who that man might be. Whoever he is, he brought me back to this hellscape called 2020, to which I owe him many thanks and an accusation of emotional damage, which I am willing to settle out of court.… (plus d'informations)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

It's a well-known fact that I find it difficult to review story collections -- my write-ups tend to be analytical and address the entire manuscript at once, hard to do when you have a dozen or two different pieces of wildly different quality and style -- and this is especially the case with bizarro fiction, which is so purposely designed to be a cartoon come to life that I find it hard to even assign qualitative scores to such stories, instead generally assuming that you either like bizarro or you don't, and that if you do, you're going to tend to like most of it that's ever been written. I will say about Douglas Hackle's Clown Tear Junkies, however, that it at least goes in crazy directions you wouldn't normally expect such stories to go, even if you're already a bizarro fan and are used to the random left turns that come with this genre; and that's always a great thing to see, in that so many bizarro authors rely on their stories simply being "weird" to make up the entirety of their compelling nature, and it's always nice to see a bizarro author work harder than this and to try to bring something legitimately unique to the genre. You know already whether you're going to like a book like this; if you do, definitely pick this up, and if you don't, stay way far away for your own good.

Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.0 for bizarro fans… (plus d'informations)