New Bizarro Author Series Review #9: Love In The Time Of Dinosaurs by Kirsten Alene

(NOTE: All parentheticals in this review were added by the reviewer's Ego for its own personal enjoyment/entertainment and do not reflect the views and opinions of the book or its author. The Ego does hope that the author's husband appreciates the joke. Okay, enough with this insidery bullshit. On to the review!)

Id Says:

MOTHERFUCKINRRROOOOOWWWWWRRRRRRRRMOTHERFUCKAZ!!!

Look out, monks! Here come the Jeremy (Johnson)!

It's the End of Days for this mountain forest's monastery and villages, hostile dinosaurs won't stop until every last human is dead and eaten. Our monk feels there must be a way to end the fighting, but knows his death at the hands of a samurai sword wielding pterodactyl or cannon blasting stegosaurus is most likely what fate has in store for him.

If only the Steve, energistic forest creatures birthed from the monks meditative thoughts, hadn't abandoned the people all those years ago. What shitheads!

Before they left, they bestowed upon Elder Zohar the secrets of a magic kung-fu most helpful in making lethal warriors out of the monks, but still not as effective as the monastery's stockpile of plasticizing ray guns and explosive elephant guns, or ingenious as their regenerative medical procedures. Unfortunately, all these combined still don't equate to a goddamned thing when stacked up against the monster tank Jeremy (Johnson) and their far superior technology.

During a surprise attack on the watchmen, our monk hitches a ride on one wild pterosaur flight that lands him in a clearing currently settled by an unknown species of mysterious dinosaur.

This revelation confuses our monk, leading him to seek enlightenment from the Elders. His searching eventually brings him to Petunia, a beautiful and peaceful Trachodon whose tribe, like the monks, only wants the fighting to cease.

The monks are on the losing side of an epic war and running out of options. Their prayers won't be enough to save anyone's ass.

Hope survives in the light of a billion fireflies burning brightly inside our monk!

Jeremy (Johnson), the Great Destroyer, must be stopped!!

For Petunia, and to give the whole world a chance at a tomorrow, at a new day!!!

Ego Says:

I had such a blast seeing inside the mind of our protagonist. The cornfields were fucking beautiful!

In true warrior monk fashion, our protagonist has learned the art of calming and focusing his mind to stay fighting fit. But amid so much violence and bloodshed, coupled with foreign but strong emotions for Petunia, he finds it increasingly harder to find balance with his inner self.

The elders are not making life any easier for him either. Most respected of these leaders is Elder Zohar. His legs were bitten off during the first victory against the Jeremy (Johnson) and now he crawls around on the ten fingers of the hands grafted onto his torso. Like a wise master should, he knows our protagonist is troubled and instructs accordingly, all the while keeping a watchful eye on him.

The Jeremy (Johnson) are the ultimate Cretaceous warriors. Killing machines evolved to be as swift and brutal as possible. Advanced also in mind and intelligence, their weaponry is unmatched by even the strongest of magic kung-fu.

It is our protagonist's higher level of awareness that helps him gain insight into a greater problem lurking underneath their current fight. The monks and the Jeremy (Johnson) have fought for so long now that neither side knows how to live any other way then through death.

I think if our protagonist isn't careful, he could find himself the enemy of both sides.

Super-Ego Says:

My absolute favorite sentence in Love In The Time Of Dinosaurs is as follows.

"You are only a series of still images conjured into existence by three objective perceivers."

That one, uttered by the stars to our narrator in order to calm his rising panic, clicks well with the LSD in me.

This is epic prehistorical fiction, its words bursting to life with Ms. Alene's vibrant, colorful language. Scenes of dinosaur carnage and monk guerrilla warfare tactics are juxtoposed with whirlwind mirages of pure symbolism created in the four dimensional space of our narrator's mind.

The book is also, as the reader might expect, a tale of love. Forbidden love even. The Jeremy (Johnson) and monks do not mix. Our narrator seeks to break monastic tradition in a world where their history is all they have left. It matters not how great the risks are, his life was unalterably changed the day he met Petunia.

For me, it is the kind of book I wanted to read when I was a kid, a fairy tale with meat on its bones and never afraid to get dirty. Our narrator's faith will be tested often as he bets it all on the dream of something perfect...

Does the dream of true love, however, even have the capability to conquer the Jeremy (Johnson)?

I believe it is possible. I have to believe in our narrator and Petunia. Together, they can stop the spread of this tooth and claw cancer. Watch out Jeremy (Johnson), you're about to get vaccinated with one serious love injection. Kah-Zow!

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Here's a picture I drew of a dinosaur for my nephew Elijah. He was pretty amazed that it could breathe fire.

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Love In The Time Of Dinosaurs at Amazon.com

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New Bizarro Author Series Review #8: How To Eat Fried Furries by Nicole Cushing

Id Says:

As Roofi, the less successful, younger cousin to that famous children's singer, asked in his only hit song: "Squeal, squeal, pink kid, have you flesh for me?"

I'm pretty sure he's talking about cannibalism, right? Well, when that bugger(er) gets out of prison, he'll be ecstatic to discover the latest and greatest food cultivation technique ever devised in the history of eating!

I wasn't able to attend the 19th A.A.F.F. (American Association of Furry Farming) annual trade show last year, but I did snag a copy of the booklet commemorating the event from a black market pamphlets dealer in exchange for a slice of my mom's award winning Furry Toe Pie.

The booklet, more a novella really, contains more furry farming info than could be stuffed into a giant panda suit. Sprinkled among stories of alien squirrel invasion, skinless rebels, holiday organized crime and the most disfigured group of furry superheroins to ever grace network television are several informative articles and fabulous recipes you can try at home.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll even get the sudden urge to declare your nuetrality in protest of the Ministry of Flesh, but by the end you'll mostly be glad that the world finally has an answer to the question, "Whatever happened to Wilhelm Vaclav?"

Ego Says:

Huh, how about that! Here I am thinking that it's the pigeons who were planning to take over the world when all along it was the squirrels.

My favorite character from these stories is the mastermind behind the 2012 liberation of Earh squirrels, his Holiness Pope Squirrelly XXXII. He is an antagonist who fits the description of "deliciously evil" perfectly. He's just as worried about his priestly garment wardrobe as he is his plot to annihilate humanity, and his insatiable lust for young squirrel cardinals and desire to skull fuck live furries is nearly respectable.

I think we'd get along just fine, dirty minds do think alike and mine has never been cleaned out very thoroughly.

I found an interesting protagonist amid this flying circus in Sonny Bunny, A.K.A. Sonny Bune. He's a minority inside a minority, a reverse-furry. Where once there was an unhappy rabbit, expensive plastic surgeries swooped in, devoured it and shat out an oddly attractive looking human being. A great modeling career may be on the horizon for this lapine-sapian, but, regardless of their estrangement, he still has some important family. Family that has important business for him to take care of. If Sonny fails them, he'll be getting one fat lump of coal in his stocking this Christmas.

I think what I love most about the many people populating the world of furry farming is that, as far as I can tell, the furries are never consulted about their being harvested. Yes, some of them do occassionally stand up and pronounce themselves to be human (Ha!), but the Ministry of Flesh has assured us time and time again that they always take the steps necessary to help confused animals remember what they truly are.

Amen!

Super-Ego Says:

I have to be blunt a moment: This is some weird s-h-i-t, folks!

In a genre filled with the weird, whether it be characters, settings, conflicts or all three, How To Eat Fried Furries manages to stand out as an oddity unto itself. Ms. Cushing reveals to the reader a kind of weirdness hidden inside that part of life usually too difficult to coax it out from, that of the mundane. The general populous is not very interested in our agricultural techniques, in the origins of our food. We are more concerned with ingesting and forgetting about food until it forces itself back out of us.

Oh, but if only we thought about where that Genuine Amish beef comes from!

The multiple narrators bubble with pure enthusiasm, exciting the reader and drawing them into strange scenarios with youthful naivety. Even when led down the darker paths of life, each way is approached from an optimistic angle. The full view only hinted at in between the lines.

There is also a snap to the dialogue, a sort of insider-joke feeling birthed from the motivations of each character. When the Supreme Commander of God's Army of Southern Illinois spells out profane thoughts of carnality with a woman he hates amid Squirellmageddon, he's really explaining to the reader his entire life up to that point. His faith is his torchlight, and he speaks in flames.

I want to thank Nicole Cushing for shedding new light on this serious social and economical hot button issue. I can't think of a better person suited for the task of keeping informed the furry farmers of America. Her undercover work in solving the mystery of the great actor Mr. Vaclav's disappearance all those years ago, along with her reinstating into the public consciousness that short lived but much loved series Ferret Force Five proves that she is truly a loyal friend to the alternative food cultivators of the world.

I hope her noteriety increases because of this book and she is invited to write up the pamphlet for next year's National Gathering of Cannibals Anonymous.

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How To Eat Fried Furries at Amazon.com

For more info on Bizarro Fiction, look no further.

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