Betty Rocksteady

I've heard the genre of bizarro defined as a genre in which books are capable of "being (their) own planet" and this certainly fits that definition. The setting is home to an apartment building where it apparently rains, has both dirt floors and carpet, where insects serve functional roles like being living blankets, people consume emotional states like we consume meals, can watch advertising as their 9-to-5 job, and where apparently recent legislation has desegregated spiders and humans from living amongst one another. Spiders in this world ranging from what we could consider a normal size to about 4 feet in height. Against this backdrop we are introduced to Alex, an arachnophobic bigot, and his live-in girlfriend Heather. Their lives take a strange turn when a massive female spider moves in to the apartment next door to them, and in an effort to improve him as a person Heather insists Alex introduce himself. What follows is a turbulent series of events and emotions, including some exceptionally weird erotica. At no point, though, does the story, strange as it is, dissolve into silliness. The characters are treated as wholly real and complex individuals, living with all the hopes and fears and regrets real people have, which I think helps highlight the more outrÌ© aspects of it that much more. I also appreciated that as much as this story could be taken as metaphor, nothing is spelled-out or hand-fed to the reader, it maintains an internal integrity to the story, and let's the rest fall into place on its own. Definitely a very memorable story and strong entry in the New Bizarro Author Series.… (más)

I sat down fairly late last night to read a few pages of this and stayed up straight through until I finished it, I simply loved this book that much. It is a journey through the dark, disquieting, and disturbing, and ultimately into deliverance. 20-something Jacalyn finds her drunken evening take a turn for the strange when her grandfather picks her up‰ÃƒÂ›_ her grandfather who has been dead for years. What follows is an increasingly eerie and frightening journey through a regretful past and fever-dream present. Reality itself seems to warp in her grandfathers apartment where she is at first guest and then prisoner, held by doors that open to new locations unexpectedly each time they are opened and by a grandfather who begins resembling his old self less and less as he becomes something more and more punitive‰Û_ what is Jacalyn atoning for? The revelations are haunting and the catharsis meaningful. I highly recommend this story for fans of weird horror with some real depth to it.… (más)