Looking for some Halloween humor? Cthulhu Limericks is available on Amazon! This collection of 70+ rhymed verses based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos combines horror and humor in equal measure to demonstrate that man’s view of himself as the center of a known space-time continuum remains laughably out of scale with the reality that ancient forces control his world.
Night Garden Journal recently released its anthology of poems from last summer as a Lulu book. You can see the full list of authors above. I’m pleased to say my poem “The World is Ash” is included.
You can get a shipping discount (see image above) if you order today on Lulu at this link.
An online poetry journal focusing on dark and atmospheric work, Night Garden Journal has started compiling its offerings into quarterly anthologies. The Autumn 2017 Issue has just been released on Lulu. The cost is $5.99; you can probably get a coupon from Lulu to knock a percentage off that. You can buy the book here.
Two of my poems are included, “Future Dragons” and “Shattered Maps.”
An online journal of experimental poetry, Futures Trading compiles its issues into print anthologies. The fifth book was just released as an on-demand paperback, available via Amazon. It’s something of a who’s who of the international experimental poetry “scene,” including work by Mark Young, Volodymyr Bilyk, Eileen Tabios, Mark Cunnngham, Sanjeev Sethi, and many others. I’m pleased to be included with four poems from four different online issues.
I present two rip offs related to my bizarro Christmas novel Kill Claus!
First up, this game app: “Kill Santa Claus,” created by some company called ChipPOW and available through Amazon. Apparently, it encourages players to take revenge for bad or missing gifts by shooting Santa Claus.
The description of game play seriously needs a grammar and syntax intervention:
Kill Christmas old man!
Santa Claus did not bring you a gift dreams? Behaves like rudolph! Start the game Kill Santa Claus as a snowball! Shoot on target! This pathetic old holly is not going anywhere from a sniper rifle rudolph! Try role grinch, destroy Christmas!
Each year promises rudolph gifts, only they do not! Hatred grew as snowball. Shoot to destroy all the Santa Claus! Suggests sight and tap on the shot. Your timer is 5 minutes to clean the territory grinch. You have to win the game Kill Santa Claus!
How old were killed – see on the screen, there statistics rudolph. Take care of snowball cartridges and do not shoot into the air. Aim, shoot and then holly. So you can do away with the silly holiday Christmas!
One user gave the game a single star and declared they were deleting the game.
For the record, my surreal science fiction novel Kill Claus! does not involve shooting Santa with any sort of firearm. So the game is not technically the result of plagiarism. However, I’d like to think the app grew out of a superficial glance at the title of my book.
As a shameless plug, Kill Claus! is still available on Amazon and Lulu as both a eBook and paperback. The eBook can be downloaded for a mere $1.99 from either site. On Lulu, the paperback costs $13.50. As for the Amazon paperback, you can choose between two price points, either 15 bucks, or $609.11!
I love seeing these inflated prices on my books. It’s just further proof that when you put something out in the world, it takes on a life of its own.
As a contributor, I’m pleased to announce that the latest issue of Le Scat Noir literary journal happens to be a weird and wonderful encyclopedia! This tome contains “entries from Acrostic to Zwine, and features contributors from around the world…Discover rare factoids, flash fiction, nubile moon spew, mythological arcana, cabalistic pathogens, pataphysical detritus, scatological schemata, crypto-heuristic scripture, and radical homomorphism. Over 100 pages of profusely illustrated weirdness.” It’s available only in paperback from Amazon. You can check it out and buy a copy here.
All my contributions come from a short text I called the “Space Word Book.” I lost track of how many entries from my work ended up in the Scat Noir book, but it includes pieces on “Earth,” “International Control Board,” “heatshield,” and “interstellar space.” These articles stand alongside those on Alphonse Allais, fart bear, ouija scramble, phubbing and reducing windows. Some entries are funny, some are weird, and some are deadly serious. It’s an exploration of the hinterlands of human knowledge that should prove edifying to anyone.
While browsing Amazon, I ran across a new version of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (handy Wikipedia reference) that links the megalomaniacal, illogical tyrant Ubu with our current Dear Leader. The adaptation is fittingly titled Ubu Trump.
According to the synopsis, this book is: “Translated and Entirely Updated by Rosanna Hildyard. Though ostensibly Surrealist, Alfred Jarry’s 1888 play Ubu Roi bears disconcertingly close resemblance to America in 2017. This new version, which brings Ubu to the USA, is a bombastic, irreverent romp through the misadventures of the titular usurper of the White House, with a sharp eye for materialism and political infighting.”
I was actually pleased to see that someone else had made the Ubu/Trump link. Last year, I resurrected the “Ubu for President” campaign posters I made during one of the Obama elections. Some of these actually made it into paper boxes on the streets of DC in 2016. The first photo shows one of my posters in situ, collaged with the remains of a Washington Examiner magazine cover depicting the soon to be Dear Leader. Unfortunately, I got lazy and didn’t do much with this postering campaign.
“Pere Ubu for President” was meant to be a joke. The text on the poster, referring to Ubu’s real estate development concepts, was a broad reference to the Trump organization’s modus operandi. Who would elect an obese, raving, ignorant sociopath, dressed in a kind of KKK outfit, as a leader? Now we know the answer to that.
Having never read Hildyard’s adaptation, I can’t recommend it over the original. If you have not read Jarry’s play, now’s the time. It’s a remarkably adept likeness of the Tweeter in Chief, performed only once in 1896. On the play’s opening night, it caused riots in the audience, starting with Ubu’s first pronouncement, a corruption of the French word for feces: “Merdre!” You can easily find copies of Ubu Roi available on Amazon. Once, the title was translated as “King Turd,” just to let you know the general zone of the satire involved.
When you’re done reading about King Ubu, you can read Jarry’s two sequels: Ubu Cuckolded and Ubu Enchained. It could be likely these plays spell out the full trajectory of the current regime!
Goofing around on Amazon today, I noticed they are offering copies of my book Savage Night and Other Stories for only $4.41. That’s a huge discount on the $19.99 list price! What a great opportunity to grab a copy if you’re interested. Check it out here.
This book collects a bunch of my early experimental science fiction stories alongside my early science fiction novel Savage Night, which uses the Ancient Egyptian myth of crossing the Land of the Dead to describe a journey into the self. Thematically, everything here seems to follow the classic sex or death duality, often at the same time.
Not sure how many they have at this price. I would buy them all, but I still have a couple big boxes of them from the last time I saw the price drop. After my royalty payment, I got copies for a buck each.
Although the back cover synopsis is available on the listing, here it is anyway:
Two books in one this collection includes a short novel Savage Night and a group of stories exploring similar themes of death control self actualization and the conflict between the socialized self and the True or inner self. In Savage Night, Jean Savage is a crew member on an industrial ship forced to land on a desolate planet so its parent corporation can form an alliance with the ultimate enforcers of control the serpent headed demons of the Duat, a nocturnal underworld the Ancient Egyptians visualized in their funereal text The Book of Coming into Day. Not content to own the bodies of its employees, the RA corporation wants to exploit their souls as well In the Duat there are no enemies of RA. Not anymore. Fighting a guerilla war using sex magic rituals and protective spells, Jean struggles against the corporation and its demon allies to keep her true self alive until the dawn that brings escape. But her biggest challenge is finding her own soul her True Self ,which has been lost in layers of social psychological and corporate control.
“Other Stories” features two early Jean Savage texts exploring similar themes in different contexts where she is a juvenile delinquent struggling against the hostile influences of family and society. There are also stories involving killer clowns spreading a bizarre sex virus, pirates seeking immortality in deep space, a trio of eco terrorist mermaids, and the gingerbread man as a computer hacker. Using black humor, social satire, violent eroticism, science fiction motifs, and experimental narrative structures, these compelling yarns perform themselves in the cinema of the mind s eye.
In case you’re really sick of Christmas already, you might be interested in my book Kill Claus! A surreal science fiction tale inspired by bizarro fiction, the novel follows a young man named Sesam on a journey through a far distant, post-apocalyptic future in which “the Claus” is a fearsome monster that regularly culls the “human” population. After Sesam’s village is destroyed, he is forced to cross a forbidding landscape to get revenge on “the Claus.” On the way he runs into zombie Christmas trees, a mutant reindeer, flying jellyfish, a tribe of living snowmen, and many more strange creatures before he gets to the North Pole, where he must confront the Claus. A friend of mine called it the “most disturbing book” he’d ever read. High praise, indeed.
Kill Claus! is available in paperback and kindle formats from Amazon. Just follow the links if you’re interested. It’s also available from Lulu as a discounted paperback, an eBook in ePub format, and an eBook in PDF.
It still amuses me to think of the time I bought 100 copies of my own book, Savage Night and Other Stories, for $1 each on Amazon. Looking back at my Amazon orders, this was on April 1, 2011.
I caught the sale at the right time. Amazon was listing my book for $3. I assume they had warehoused a few stock copies due to the success of my earlier book, Mondo DC. Now they had unsold copies to get rid of. On a whim, I placed an order for my own book, requesting 100 copies. I had to order the books in batches of 33, with one batch of a single copy. I figured they would cut me off based on the number they actually had in stock. But no.
They sent me 100 copies of Savage Night.
For me, this was a no-brainer. Kind of. My royalty rate on Xlibris, where I had self-published Savage Night, was $2 per copy. So eventually I got a check from them covering two thirds of the price I paid Amazon. My net cost was $1 a copy.
Of course I have roughly 98 copies of the book left in my house. If anyone wants one, let me know. I’m sure we can work out a fair price.
This actually happened a second time in May 2015 with the second book I published through Xlibris, Spells of Coming Day. Amazon listed the book for $4, and I tried to order 100 copies. However, the bookseller had learned their lesson. I was only able to buy 4 copies at the reduced price. Of course, I still have those sitting in my house.
Every now and then, I check the Amazon listings for my books. I haven’t seen any big sales lately. But it’s remarkable how many third party sellers are offering my titles, usually at prices far higher than either Amazon or Lulu list them. I’d like to know how that’s supposed to work. But in some way, it’s flattering to think that someone listed my book in their catalog, hoping to make a little bread. I’m sure it’s a win-win for them: if one sells, they just have to order it from Lulu (or Xlibris or AuthorHouse) and then send it out, reaping big profits.
Since I rarely see any royalties from my own books, I guess they aren’t selling too many copies. Somehow, it all seems like a commentary on today’s publishing industry.
jeff bagato 