Edited By CARLTON MELLICK III (Eraserhead Press; 2010)
This anti-Christmas anthology hails from the Bizarro crew, and delivers exactly what you might expect: a lot of XXX-rated, black humored weirdness, rendered in prose that’s on the level of a high school creative writing assignment. This means that if you happen to like bizarro fiction you’ll almost certainly enjoy this book.
The opener is “Santa Claus and Elves of Fuck” by bizarro mainstay Jordan Krall. Here Mrs. Claus attempts to have her hubbie killed by the “Elves of Fuck” because of his philandering ways, just as Santa gets abducted by a psychotic woman who holds him hostage in a room whose ceiling is hung with mutated sugarplums.
Next is “Frosty and the Full Monty” by Jeff Burke. It has Frosty the Snowman becoming addicted to methamphetamines, getting sent to prison (where he survives by performing “snow jobs” on the other inmates) and eventually becoming a prostitute.
In “Two-Way Santa” by Kevin L. Donihe a dude takes home a bum who turns out to be Santa Claus. This Santa has fallen on hard times, reduced to begging and directing porno movies. Before long Santa and his newfound friend are getting intimate in the latter’s bed, leading to a disappointingly inconclusive conclusion.
“The Christmas Turn-On” by Edmund Colell is told from the point of view of sentient batteries who liken being put into toys to having sex, which makes Christmas the “biggest orgy of the year.” There are some striking passages here, but the story overall sounds a lot better than it reads.
“The Elf Slut Sisters” by Cameron Pierce and Kirsten Alene involves twin elf sisters having a mighty randy encounter with Santa, with mutilation and cannibalism mixed in with the perviness. It’s the book’s most extreme story, and also the most nonsensical.
The final entry is “Christmas Crabs” by Kevin Shamel, who replaces the lechery of the preceding tales with B-movie goofiness, in the form of seemingly lifeless crabs that turn up in peoples’ living rooms on Christmas morning. When placed in water the crabs come to life and fire deadly laser beams.
I laughed a number of times reading this book (such as when Frosty in “Frosty and the Full Monty” gets beaten up by Crips who mistake blood stains on his snow for him “reppin’ the wrong colors”), and there is definitely some arrestingly odd imagery to be found (mostly in “The Christmas Turn-On”—see above), but I say this sort of thing has already been done in other books, and far better (see this review for proof).