For a limited time, Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy is free for Kindle, Nook, and on Smashwords.

The price for Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You has been lowered.

Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face: A Novel is now available for Kindle.

9. The ‘burbs

8. Joe Versus the Volcanano

7 to 1: There aren’t any other good Tom Hanks movies

I’ll try to link to a bunch of other new books that also qualify in case you want to take advantage of the deal.

Well, first there’s my own book: Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You

It seems like all of the New Bizarro Author Series books qualify:

Vince Kramer’s Gigantic Death Worm

Constance Ann Fitzgerald’s Trashland A Go-Go

Justin Grimbol’s The Crud Masters

Troy Chamber’s Seven Seagulls for a Single Nipple

Michael Allen Rose’s Party Wolves in my Skull

Spike Marlowe’s Placenta of Love

Eric Beeny’s Lepers and Mannequins

S.D. Foster’s A Hollow Cube is a Lonely Space

Other books:

Carlton Mellick’s Fantastic Orgy and I Knocked Up Satan’s Daughter

Mykle Hansen’s Hooray for Death!

Andersen Prunty’s The Driver’s Guide to Hitting Pedestrians

Sam Pink’s The No Hellos Diet

Douglas Lain’s Fall into Time and Wave of Mutilation

David W. Barbee’s A Town Called Suckhole

Jordan Krall’s Beyond the Valley of the Apocalypse Donkeys

Andrew Goldfarb’s Hypno-Hog’s Moonshine Monster Jamboree

The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction (Issue Five)

Comment with a link if I missed any other new books.

Includes stories by Laird Hunt, D. Harlan Wilson, Cameron Pierce, Amanda Billings, Kirk Jones, Andrew W. Adams, Amber Sparks, and a novella by Kirsten Alene. Contains book reviews of Steve Lowe’s Muscle Memory and Shane Jones’s A Cake Appeared.

Cover photo by Cameron Pierce and Kirsten Alene.

Published by Lazy Fascist Press (an imprint of Eraserhead Press).

$6.95

Click here for more info.

This will be my last issue as the journal’s editor-in-chief. Sam Reeve, who was my former associate editor, will be taking over for me. I will continue to work on the journal as a contributing editor, doing things like proofreading, layout, and perhaps reading submissions that Sam is on the fence about.

A tour-de-force. A harrowing comic masterpiece. A timely novel that transcends the times. An instant American classic. This is what critics are not saying about Bradley Sands’ latest magnum opus, Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face: A Novel.

A novel in three parts, Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face: A Novel is the story of one boy detective, the worst ninja in the world, and the great American fast food wars. It is a novel of loss, destruction, and–incredibly–genuine hope.

Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face: A Novel contains three classic Bradley Sands novellas: “Frankie Nougat and the Case of the Missing Heart,” “Cheesequake Smash-Up,” and “Apocalypse Ninja.”

Praise for Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face: A Novel:

“Bradley Sands has succeeded where all other novelists have failed: he has written the Great American Novel. Martin Amis came close to beating him to the punch a few years ago, but he accidentally wrote his novel on the wrong body of land and has been crying like a little girl ever since. If you have any compassion in your heart, end Martin Amis’s sorrow with the joy of Sands’s brilliant American prose. But be sure to read Please Do Not Shoot Me In the Face before giving it away forever—Amis has never returned a book in his life.”
—Bradley Sands, author of Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy

“This is a book for anyone who has ever hated someone. This is a book for anyone who has ever wanted to break into someone’s house while they were sleeping, wrap a book around your fist, and punch that asshole in the throat until they’re dead. This is that kind of book.”
—Bradley Sands, author of Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You

“In Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face, Bradley Sands uses literary sleight of hand to miraculously create a novel out of three novellas. The novella, “Apocalypse Ninja,” achieves the grand feat of being the stupidest thing ever written. With shuriken-sharp writing, Sands fulfills mankind’s greatest unconscious desire without even pooping his pants.”
—Bradley Sands, author of My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes!

Click here to buy Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face: A Novel

This is the last piece of writing from Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy that I will be posting on my website:

Scenes from the Life of a Greeting Card Designer

OCTOBER 31, 5008 BS

Missiles fly through Tim Hallmark’s cardboard window while he puts the finishing touches on his latest creation. He loses interest in calligraphing, “I bear about you,” underneath a drawing of a big bear crushing the life out of a little bear. He gains interest in the flames eating through his cardboard couch. He picks up a cardboard fire extinguisher and shoots cardboard foam at his cardboard couch. The flames grow in stature. He is ashamed of his inability to afford an aluminum extinguisher.

Outside, a little boy in a Patrick Swayze mask yells, “Give us some candy or prepare for annihilation.”

Tim Hallmark grabs his cardboard AK-47, crawls over to the window, shoots cardboard bullets at the little boy and his masked posse, and yells, “Didn’t you read the greeting card I stapled to the front door?”

Yes, the masked children have read the greeting card he stapled to the front door. No, they will not give their deep and heartfelt sympathies to Tim Hallmark during his time of need. No, they cannot bring themselves to forgive him for being unable to afford non-cardboard flavored Halloween candy. Children do not enjoy cardboard Halloween candy. Children enjoy cardboard Halloween candy even less when it is presented to them inside a cardboard box with “One per person PLEASE!!!” calligraphed on it. Children have been known to misbehave when presented with cardboard Halloween candy. Children have been known to misbehave on Halloween. They may obey the rules of their parents and the state on every other day of the year, but on the last few Halloweens they’ve become the scourge of the Earth.

Tim Hallmark loves children, but the masked children have just grenaded the cardboard roof off his cardboard house and Tim Hallmark does not love masked children who grenade his cardboard roof off his cardboard house.

Tim Hallmark looks through the hole where his roof used to be. He sees a nuclear warhead hurtling towards him. He sees an airplane, but not the little girl in a Chewbacca mask giggling in its cockpit.

Tim Hallmark watches the nuclear warhead and thinks about his life. He screams out the words from his favorite creations:

Happy birthday! You are one day closer to your putrification!

Happy Mother’s Day, but I never asked to be thrust out of rotting taco!

Sorry your grandma died! She molested me when I was eight!

He doesn’t understand why the American public has never understood his genius. He doesn’t understand why they haven’t showered him with riches. He regrets never finding true love.

Tim Hallmark is very depressed. He is very depressed and a nuclear warhead is about to disintegrate his head.

OCTOBER 31, 5009 BS

This year, Tim Hallmark saved up his money from his new part-time job as a sideshow attraction and bought poison eggplant candies in bulk. “One for you,” he says to a little naked boy in a 42-foot white beard, “and one for you,” he says to a little girl in a naughty nurse costume. He has been poisoning thousands of little girls and boys all night from the comforts of his dumpster. They have been complimenting him on his mask. He is very bitter about their compliments. He does not tell them that it is not a mask, that his face has been maligned by radiation poisoning. He does not want to horrify them with this factoid. He does not want them to run away. Instead, he wants them to stay put and thank him for his delicious poison eggplant candies.

The effects of the poison begin. A horde of little girls and boys stammer towards his dumpster with an amalgam of pus and blood spewing out of their orifices. “What have you done to us?” they ask.

A little boy tears opens a greeting card envelope and card, sees a picture of a skeleton in a thong bikini. Under the picture, he reads:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
You have been poisoned
and it sucks to be you.

Below the poem, he deciphers Tim Hallmark’s flowery handwriting:

Help me overthrow the government if you ever want to see your mommies and daddies again. My antidote tastes like chocolate milkshake.

XOXO,

Tim Hallmark

The little poisoned girls and boys overthrow the government for Tim Hallmark. This makes him happy. He is the new dictator.

The little poisoned girls and boys are not happy. They are still spewing an amalgam of pus and blood out of their orifices. They are taking an extremely long time to die. They are in agony.

They look at Tim Hallmark as if he were a cruel man. But he is not a cruel man. The sideshow business just isn’t very lucrative. It may have paid for his supply of poison eggplant candies, but it wasn’t enough to afford the antidote.

“Stop looking at me like that!” Tim Hallmark says as he addresses the nation on live TV. “My first amendment to the Constitution is to send everyone who doesn’t stop looking at me like that to rape camp. My second amendment to the constitution is to send everyone who doesn’t buy at least one of my greeting cards a day to rape camp.”

And so begins Tim Hallmark’s reign as the top-selling greeting card designer in the country.

OCTOBER 31, 5010 BS

Tim Hallmark leaves the White House with an army of bodyguards. He wants to visit Fort Knox and rub his testicles over every gold bar in the treasury. He wants his testicles to feel that cold, refreshing sensation millions and millions of times.

Tim Hallmark only travels by parade float. His float rolls towards Fort Knox. He stands in the center of a giant chocolate rose and takes a nibble whenever he gets a craving. His army of bodyguards march on the side, hoping to avoid rape camp, hoping they won’t accidentally insult their dictator.

Tim Hallmark is easily insulted.

Terrorists attack Tim Hallmark’s float with airplanes. Many bodyguards save Tim Hallmark’s life by blocking the crashing planes with their bodies.

By doing this, they avoid rape camp. Getting hit by an airplane is preferable to rape camp.

Tim Hallmark does not negotiate with terrorists.

Terrorists = the parents of the children he poisoned last Halloween.

Tim Hallmark arrives at Fort Knox. He goes inside, leaving his bodyguards behind. There are too many to fit inside the lobby. All of the bodyguards or none of the bodyguards—this is the principle that Tim Hallmark’s dictatorship is based upon.

Fort Knox’s lobby looks like the inside of a savings bank. He does not think this is peculiar. He is too busy leering at the teller’s exquisite beauty. He wants to have sex with her. He will have sex with her. He is the dictator and no one wants to go to rape camp.

He cuts the line and hands the teller a greeting card. She opens it. It shows a newborn baby holding a human heart as if it were a rattle and reads, “Will you be my Valentine?”

The teller looks horrified. She looks a little less exquisitely beautiful. Tim Hallmark is ok with this. He winks at her and says, “You’re too beautiful for rape camp but just right for my collection of camel skin condoms.” He feels a little sad. He knows his tryst with the bank teller will be identical to the thousands of empty sexual experiences that have come before. He is beginning to think saying, “You’re too beautiful for rape camp but just right for my collection of camel skin condoms,” isn’t the best way to start a meaningful relationship. But maybe this time it’ll be different and he’ll find true love. Feel something warm and fuzzy in his head rather than just something warm and gooey down below.

The teller tries to stop looking horrified. She says, “Follow me to the vault, Mr. Dictator.”

She leads him into an enormous room. It is empty.

Tim Hallmark asks, “Where are my gold bars? Where is your golden lingerie? Where is my true love?”

The teller transforms into a tank. The tank shoots Tim Hallmark in the crotch with an armor-piercing kinetic energy penetrator.

Tim Hallmark is very stupid for being tricked into believing Fort Knox is run by a bunch of bankers instead of the U.S. Army and their killer robots.

OCTOBER 31, 5011 BS

Tim Hallmark is not the dictator anymore. He is an exile and a eunuch. He hides in the sewers because the parents of the children he poisoned two Halloweens ago are still trying to work out their grief with acts of violence and he no longer has an army of bodyguards to threaten with rape camp.

The sewers are awash in greeting cards. Tim Hallmark has been very productive since journeying down below. Right now, he is sitting on a pipe, working on his latest creation. He is calligraphing the words, “I’ll never flush you, my darling. We’re purr-fect for each other.” He has already drawn a cat blowing kisses at an unflushed bowel movement. All of his soggy greeting cards have been designed for bowel movement and urine recipients. Tim Hallmark does not care if bowel movements and urine cannot read. Tim Hallmark does not care if bowel movements and urine lack the sentiency to be classified as recipients. Tim Hallmark doesn’t have anyone else to make greeting cards for besides rats and alligators, and Tim Hallmark is no friend of rats and alligators.

A little boy in a black person’s mask rises out of the sewage, holding a Super Soaker. He says, “Give us some candy or prepare for annihilation.”

Many little girls and boys in masks representing various ethnic groups submerge out of the sewage.

Tim Hallmark asks, “Didn’t I kill all the little girls and boys?”

The little girls and boys say, “Yes, but that’s when we were babies. Now we’re all

grown up and you must give us some candy or we will annihilate you.”

Tim Hallmark says, “I don’t have to buy Halloween candy anymore. I live in the sewers. Little girls and boys do not live in the sewers.” He stares at them in terror. “Little girls and boys should not be in the sewers. I should not have to avoid annihilation by buying candy!”

The little girls and boys say, “We tracked you to the sewers to avenge the deaths of our older brothers and sisters. We would also be happy with a bunch of candy.”

Tim Hallmark is nervous. He twitches. The little girls and boys aim their Super Soakers at his head. He realizes the Super Soakers are just water guns. He wonders why the manufacturers designed them to resemble bazookas. He stops twitching. He starts to cackle. He says, “What? Are you going to soak me to death?”

The little girls and boys do not say anything. They press the triggers on their Super Soakers. Flames shoot out. Tim Hallmark is on fire.

Tim Hallmark considers jumping into the sewage. He hesitates. That is where the little girls and boys are standing. He does not want them to shoot more fire at him. He does not want to be engulfed in twice as many flames.

The little girls and boys say, “Now we’re going to put you out because we like you…Our older brothers and sisters were really mean.” They each press a button on their Super Soakers and pull the trigger. The guns now shoot water. Tim Hallmark is not on fire anymore. The little girls and boys say, “Give us some candy or prepare for a second round of annihilation.”

Tim Hallmark says, “Ok.” He pretends to look for candy. He is actually looking for dry greeting cards. He is actually folding them into origami shuriken.

He kills all the little girls and boys with his origami shuriken.

Tim Hallmark is ninja.

He does a little dance to celebrate being ninja. He notices his reflection in the sewage. He falls in love with it. This love is a by-product of not being in the presence of a woman since last Halloween. This love wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the armor-piercing kinetic energy penetrator that evaporated his crotch. He is not sexually attracted to his reflection. He is spiritually attracted to his reflection. He lacks the capacity for sexual attraction, but not spiritual attraction. He has found true love.

He takes out a piece of cardstock, draws Cupid with a bow and arrow in his mouth, calligraphies, “I’ll love you until your flesh rots off your skeleton,” puts the card in an envelope, gives it to himself, says, “Thank you.”

Then he takes off his scalp and prepares for spiritual penetration.

(Originally appeared in Spine Road)

Cormac McCarthy

The alleyway lacks light but it is day and the stars in the sky provide illumination for Cormac McCarthy to view the buildings’ walls which are covered by posters depicting the image of a man who is unknown to him and woman yells out the window in a voice of dissonance and Cormac McCarthy runs out of view towards the front of the building. But instead of the front of the building there is only an empty lot filled with transparent dirt that exhibits the bodies of those who argued with the existence of the dirt’s transparency and since Cormac McCarthy is skeptical he walks beyond the territory where the transparent dirt has authority and the place looks like an empty white room without furniture but is actually the fertile land where farmers grow trombones and he tries to pick an instrument for his personal use because he is a talented jazz musician but he looks into his hand and sees empty white space and a lack of furniture and he is delighted because a trombone creates the bellow of an elephant which is a sound that his ears are allergic to and prolonged exposure will cause them to revert to their original state of being  cauliflower and he leaves the empty white room and passes a man who is outside walking his house on a leash and Cormac McCarthy wonders if this walk will produce urine or feces or wood shavings and he nods to the man grimly knowing the fate of a man who believes in the plausibility of walking his own house and the house barks at him and he is afraid of this criticism of his presence so he turns onto Everything Street and is dismayed to discover everything blocking his path and he makes mean faces at everything but it does not budge and Cormac McCarthy calls his wife to tell her he will be late for supper.

Hide and Seek Champion

He hides in the ground. Liquid granite shoots through his veins, escapes through his pores. The gravestone sprouts out from the dirt. He does not. He lies there until his epitaph develops on the stone. He lies there some more.

(Originally appeared in Spine Road)

Tao Lin

Tao Lin drinks an ape-flavored smoothie. The ape is displeased. He punishes Tao Lin by giving him the ability to turn his eyebrows into gold. Tao Lin turns his eyebrows into gold. He tries to shave them off so he can afford a gourmet tofu dog at an expensive downtown restaurant. The Bic razor is powerless against the precious metal. Tao Lin is frustrated. Tao Lin wants a chainsaw. He cannot find a chainsaw in Brooklyn, so he takes a train to Long Island. It stops in Long Island and Tao Lin breaks into someone’s garage to chainsaw off his eyebrows. It is graphic. Inappropriate for a general audience. But his wounds are also inappropriate for expensive downtown restaurants, and when he goes to one of them to spend his gold eyebrows on a gourmet tofu dog, the attractive hostess refuses him entry. He goes to a hospital to make his wounds appropriate for an expensive downtown restaurant, but he does not have insurance. Full-time writers do not have insurance. So he offers his gold eyebrows in exchange for appropriateness. The nurse says, I’m sorry but we only accept cash check or credit card. Tao Lin goes to a bank to exchange his eyebrows for hundred dollar bills. He bleeds on the teller. The man punches him in the face. Tao Lin makes a neutral facial expression to avoid the embarrassment of tears. The teller to the left feels sorry for him. She feels sorry for him because she is very old and has suffered through many inappropriate wounds. She says, It is usually against bank policy to exchange gold for currency but I will make an exception because you look like my cute little hamster. Tao Lin accepts the money and spends all of it on appropriateness. He is sad that he can no longer afford a gourmet tofu dog. Feeling existentially fucked, Tao Lin goes home to wait for his eyebrows to grow back.

(Originally appeared in Opium Magazine)

Liquid Gold

Captain Thumbtack looks for buried treasure up his nose. He pokes through an ocean of decaffeinated coffee, prods a bipolar sea monster, bests the Rubber Duckie armada in combat, lands on a desserted island, stabs into the cakey earth, uncovers a gorilla chest, participates in an exciting battle with his crew over the identity of the chest’s owner, discovers his men consist of a drugstore’s hand mirror display, cleans his wounds with brake fluid, and unlocks the gorilla with his thumbtack’s skeleton key-like attributes. A spurt of blood shoots out of the captain’s nose. It lands in a funnel welded into an arm belonging to the pirate’s son. The boy resuscitates. The blood flows into an open vein. He gets a little purple back into his face. The blood continues to spit across the room. The pirate waits. He watches a program on bass fishing. The host sits in a rowboat for 30 minutes. Sometimes the pirate can make out a wave. The credits roll. The blood transfusion is complete. Captain Thumbtack’s son leaps into his arms. The pirate presents his son with a toothy grin. The boy is disgusted by his father’s poor dental hygiene. His arm vomits out a swimming pool-worth of blood. The son dies, reaching for an electric toothbrush.