Review of Alternative Reality News Service: Luna for the Lunies.

Alternate Reality News Service, Luna for the Lunies by Ira Nayman

The third in the Alternate Reality News Service books, and in which this reviewer’s LOL muscles were exercised in at least 11 dimensions and two universes.

Published by CreateSpace, 2012   274 pages

ISBN: 978-1470053734 for paperback

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/126271 for ebook of various formats.

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

ARNS: Luna for the Lunies by Ira Nayman

In the spirit of alternate reality I am starting near the end. Bear in mind that this isn’t just a humorous book, it is absolutely hilarious in its own bizarro fashion. Each chapter is an alternate something. You might expect eco textbooks to have chapter headings as in this book such as Alternate Technology and Alternate Politics, but not an Alternate Glossary. How many other books have a glossary boasting that the words are NOT those you’d find in the book! Hilarious. One item to tickle your alternate eye might be – Parallelogramme (noun): a telegram from a parallel universe.

 

Between the ten chapters is a longer story – The Reality Threshold – which teases readers with insights into the manic workings of the Alternate Reality News Service office and its staff. I like this because one of the few problems with short story / article collections is the lack of a main character with whom the reader can connect. With this interwoven story we get to know Brenda Brundtland-Govanni, her six feet six height and pink sundress, and engage with her desires.

 

As fans of the earlier ARNS books would expect there are zany inventions and what-ifs that strangely are just an extension to the logic and practice of what happens already. So many times, I read something Nayman invents and think – so obvious, why hasn’t it already been done? Why haven’t I thought of it first? A few examples: a computer program that enacted via search engines trawls the world to erase everything about the target individual. Innocuous? Not in the hands of Ira Nayman – the holes in the internet grow… Then there are the alternate gadgets: the Teen Annoyance Reduction; Aural Confusinator; fridges that send messages not only to the authorities re: the unhealthy contents, but to fridges in other cities, for a natter.

 

As a climate aficionado and lover of stochastic phenomena, I am particularly fond of the international havoc caused by the discovery and attempts to capture in China (and sell) the individual butterfly whose effect will create a hurricane in the US.

 

There are many more incidents and phenomena in this book that challenge conventions, crease that smile and raise an eyebrow, but there is an academic piece that intrigued me. Theories on humour have interested me for years, as it has for philosophers, psychologists and comedians. Are all jokes based on someone’s misfortune as Bob Monkhouse claimed? So, my eyes pricked up when I read a reference to Aristotle, as I knew he had written on Comedy in his Poetics tomes. Did Ira Nayman elaborate on incongruity theory of comedy, superiority, or relief theories? Nearly. An intelligent argument explores why jokes lose their humour with time. He comes up with a formula: the half-life of a joke is proportionate to its relationship to popular culture. His exemplar is to quote a 2,300-year-old joke he found in one of Aristotle’s lost books on comedy. It isn’t funny anymore. Why? His ruminations take us into the latest science. No less than the Large Hadron Collider, which on smashing sub-atomic particles reveals an emission discovered to be humour. It degrades via black holes to another dimension. Hence some old jokes are no longer funny because their humour is rib-tickling people in another dimension, or a parallel universe. Makes sense to me. Or as Nayman has it, the universe has the last laugh. Just maybe not this universe.

 

There’s far more than I can mention in this review, such as when apostrophes go’’’’’’ berserk; and fly-through fast food outlets for witches leave pedestrians running for cover from litter falling at terminal velocity.

 

As always, Ira Nayman, crosses my reality threshold at 90 mph and leaves me laughing, thoughtful, inspired and enriched even if no wiser. I strongly recommend his Alternate Reality News Service to readers in all dimensions and universes.

 

Those eyeballs – arrggh!

Review of eyeballs growing all over me again by Tony Rauch

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

Paperback: 144 pages

Publisher: Eraserhead Press (October 24, 2010)

Language: English

ISBN-13: 978-1936383337

 

This is a Young Adult collection of humorous, no, whacky, stories you shouldn’t miss. Note the unconventional use of lower case letters in titles. I did that once on a poster in the late 1960s to advertise a meeting of the local Labour Party Young Socialists and was reprimanded by the vice-principal of the college for being too avant garde. I am envious that Tony Rauch is doing it to good effect now. There are writing conventions Rauch ignores, and this will either matter to you if you are an editor, or be unaffected if you are a reader.

The first short story is ‘the stench’. Rather loosely written but with plenty of sensory Show and three-dimensional characters. The retching by the reader from the odorous lead-in, and follow-up is exquisitely twisted with the end game. Beautifully done.

‘people have been drifting away lately’ – a tale detailing what happens when people deflate, curl up like a leaf and drift, twirl into the sky as if a gentle, silent but inexorable twister is taking them away. Beautifully written. Is it a metaphor of life and mortality? The steps to acceptance of the end, perhaps. Whatever, it cunningly reflects a whimsy we all must have now and then.

Through to ‘the sandbox’ where treasure lies at the end of this rainbow of short stories, some gross, others rendering the reader thoughtful and admiring.

A stimulating collection suited for bizarro aficionados and anyone who curls up with thoughtful stories for the curious.

Get it from Amazon as a slim paperback.

No ebook just yet.

 

Codename Prague

Codename Prague
A Pulp Science Fiction novel by D. Harlan Wilson
ISBN: (PB) • ISBN 978-1-935738-05-3
(HC) • ISBN 978-1-935738-04-06
Published by Raw Dog Screaming Press January 2011
198 pages • Trade Paperback & Hardcover • 6″ x 9”

‘…every spoken word is a message…’
Reviewed by Geoff Nelder
Recently, Max Bunny Sparber said that if a work is to be incomprehensible then do it deliberately. Reading Codename Prague brings this quote to mind quite frequently. Of course it is a work of genius: it might appear to contain pages of random thoughts but everything is mapped out.
In this bizzaro novel, an agent, Vincent Prague, impossibly assassinates The Nowhere Man with predictable yet random results. He is now a celebrity but this has awful repercussions with his limbs and life in constant jeopardy. Luckily he carries around his own spare parts. Prague’s mission is to crack a code but the plot isn’t important to this novel. It is in the writing that the reader luxuriates: sometimes so weird it seems that D. Harlan Wilson’s keyboard wrote the odd page by accident on its own, while others are a blend of streams of poetic consciousness.
Set in the near future and yet with many hark-backs to fifties detective genre, there is mild horror, science fiction and much humour on every page. Consider some examples: ‘The detectives were barely perceptible beneath the thick swathes of gore that caked them from fedora to flat feet.’ And the whole of Chapter 06 reflecting on Prague’s time in jail: ‘”Eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine, nrrrrrrr…”
He trailed off. He hadn’t been counting long. But there was nothing else to do. He grew bored of the count quicker than desired or anticipated. How long had he been incarcerated here? No more than a few hours. Maybe just a few minutes. Now what could he do?
This is what happened next: eighteen years passed…’
There are notions in the novel that paint the protagonist and his milieu in certain lights. For example he often encounters German names and language. Who can’t be fascinated by the way Germans accrete words so much a single word can’t fit over a doorway. Eg Wütendeswissenschaftlermunster (mad scientist monster) – five times on one page! Brilliant. The guttural feel of the German voice is echoed in actions and clothing. Methinks D. Harlan Wilson, or at least his characters, lean in fashion towards Deutch Erwache regalia – or Nazi chic Sturmabteiling attire, in Prague’s words.
A touch of SF is spiced through such as when Prague finds his shoelaces undone and he orders them to do themselves up. Weirdness can be equally relished in such descriptions as of a bell-hop’s sister, whose breasts are filled with low-sodium peanut butter and ‘her hips swung like a pendulum as she walked’. I’ve been looking at the rear of women in a new way since I read that. Wonder if it’ll wear off? Hope not.
Chapter 29 carries an editorial note that it should be deleted or the chapter should be the whole book. I can understand why – it is the epitome of bizarro – a long draught of ‘spenpalatine ganglionneuralgia (Margarita brain freeze) beautifully crafted.
The novel is full of stimulating one-liners – you don’t drown in a puddle of True Romance and there is even a sentence thus “. . . . . . . . . . .” ie full of itself. Such self-referential sentences, worthy of Douglas Hofstadter, pervades this book. There’s even a graphic chapter – chapter 48. I have to quote: ‘A man’s shadow elected to cast the man…’ Even the chapter numbers reach into decimal points then to negatives to the consternation of the narrator. Don’t worry, there is a surprise at the end. You’d think a bizarro novel, where the joy is more in the reading than the plot, would not have a ‘proper’ ending but you’d be wrong. A denouement unfolds with exposition guaranteed, but whether you’ll agree with it is up to you. Like other books, once you’ve paid for it, and read it, then it belongs to you not the author.
My congratulations to D. Harlan Wilson for an entertaining, head-hurting flamboyance called Codename Prague.”

They Had Goat Heads

They Had Goat Heads by D. Harlan Wilson

A collection of short stories published in 2010 by Atlatl Press

Poetic prose in a hallucinogenic kind of way.

Paperback

ISBN 978-0-9826281-2-6

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

Some anthologies are soothing tales, quaint, charming and help you pass the time waiting in an airport, or to assist your head to drift off to the land of nod at bedtime. This book is NOTHING LIKE THAT! Each story is a unique coruscating mind adventure. It’s not possible to take it all in and be embroiled in each intrigue in one go. While bizarro stories seem to be meaningless and an injection of lateral-thinking hilarity, there’s more to them than that. When you hammer a banana, and a bee buzzes a window cleaner outside the plane on a clockwork bowl of custard… well, your head is either messed up, or it begins to think in a different way, loosening the cobwebs in there.

Listen to the beginning of ‘Beneath a Pink Sun’:

“Conflict is an illusion without which apes and begonias would shrivel in the wind. The grill, however, is covered with steaks. Tenderloins. They sizzle in the back yard beneath a pink sun. Somebody turns on a bugzapper. Music of tiny deaths…”

Laugh at a line in Chimpanzee where ‘I’ is in a bad situation, calls 911 and finds the operator “sounds attractive”. Unfortunately, ‘I’ is badly mistreated by the arriving police – beaten, pistol-whipped, kicked and thrown into a cell. All outrageous and illegal. He’s allowed the proverbial single phone call, so calls 911. Brilliant.

In many ways the tales have a message, however deeply buried then working upwards into your subconscious. They’re apparent nonsense maybe not so – in the ilk of the sufi homilies of Idries Shah, for example in his The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin. In particular the stories: Cape Crusade, Turns, and The Womb. I’m not saying they are the same style exactly – both Shah and D. Harlan Wilson are unique, but that if you enjoy one you are likely to relish the other.

Another writer’s work triggered by the style of these stories are the alternate reality ones by Ira Nayman – eg in his Alternate Reality Ain’t What It Used To Be.

The funniest gory story I’ve ever read is in this book – The Arrest. I tease you with a few lines from the beginning:

A man said, “You are under arrest.”

Another man said, “No, you are under arrest.”

“No,” said the first man. “It’s the other way around. You are the one who is under arrest.”

“I’m not under arrest,” said the second man. “You are.”

“I’m going to arrest you now,” said the first man, taking the second man by the elbow.

“No. Now I will arrest you”

… and so it goes on hilariously involving more men, more arrests, fights, fatalities. Several of the stories have this kind of self-referential effect, and I’ve always been drawn to literary recursion.

Lines I wish I’d written include ‘The clouds fell into the horizon’ – in the story, Monk Splitter. ‘Time is the splash of a raindrop on a cornflake.’

For readers of graphic stories, there is one, The Sister, illustrated horrifically by Skye Thorstenson. It’s a dark story summed up by the opening line: ‘And the moment I finished sewing up my little sister…’ It is hellically [sic] recursive.

Some of the stories leave me cold, but there are a total of 39 stories, most of which are semi-precious with a sprinkling of gems.

purchase from Amazon.co.uk

purchase from Amazon.com

D. Harlan Wilson has won awards for his writing winning novelist, and is a literarycritic, and English professor. Visit him at www.dharlanwilson.com.