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Eyeballs Growing All Over Me …Again by Tony Rauch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Aliens. Goblins. Giant robots. Regular-sized sexy robots. Big hairy, smelly beasts. Dimensional travel. Mutations.

These elements make up the series of fever dreams that is Eyeballs Growing All Over Me…Again, a collection of short stories by Tony Rauch.

Each story packs a punch of weird into it, which makes it a good things that this is a short story collection. Eyeballs is a book best taken in small doses, and it feels like it would be very easy to get a Bizarro overdose if reading too much at once.

How to describe it? Well, that’s actually really hard to do, especially when it come to short story collections like this. There can be different ways of interpreting the stories and if they’re related at all. For example, I got the feeling that all these stories could have taken place in the same community or small town. There’s nothing to suggest that in any of the stories, as there are no common characters or threads through anything, but I somehow got that impression. It probably has to do with the consistent writing style throughout the book.

There’s also a sense of humor about everything. With a couple of exception (the story of the nosy paperboy, or the one where the man’s head starts growing to gargantuan size), you get the feeling that the characters aren’t that bothered by the strange and unusual going on around them. Yeah, Boone builds a sexy robot to help him meet women. We try to disuade him from doing so. He does it anyway. Life goes on. Huh. It’s like a scifi version of “Airplane!” or “The Naked Gun.” Yeah, there are eyeballs growing all over me. It’ll probably pass. Let’s go yell at airplanes. (This actually happens in one of the stories.)

As I started writing this review, I was going to suggest that it could be a good starter to Bizarro fiction being a short story collection. But as I think about it some more, I’m starting to question that conclusion. First, as I said above, it’s much better taken in small doses, as a story or two at a time. Given how short some of the stories are, a reader could be very tempted to keep plugging through, but they’ll probably regret it. It’s kind of like how it takes twenty minutes for a person to feel full after eating, so they keep eating not realizing this. These stories are like a literary superfood, small in portion size but packing a heavier-than-expected nutritional punch that needs a little time to sink in. But if you don’t give it time to digest, you’ll probably make yourself sick. Mentally.

Second, some of these stories have a subtext to them and go outside the norm enough in other ways that some people might not grasp. I’m familiar with the Bizarro line of books, and the subtext in some of these stories took a little while to sink in. The storytelling style itself is unusual, to say the least. It definitely gets the author’s distinctive flavor (ewww!), but it’s unconventional enough that I would find it hard to recommend to a casual reader.

One thing that is notable, however, is how tame a lot of the stories are. There’s a distinct lack of profanity, violence, or “adult” situations. Rauch chooses to mess with your mind in other ways. I’m not a prude in any sense, but it’s something that I think a lot of newer authors could learn from. For some reason, reading profanity on the page can be a lot more jarring than hearing it from a movie screen, and can yank a reader out of a story more easily. Bravo to the author for taking this route, and choosing to challenge the reader in other ways. I might even go so far as to call it a Bizarro book aimed at young adults. It made the book feel different and refreshing.

Eyeballs Growing All Over Me…Again works most of the time, but there’s a couple stories that went a little wide of the mark for me. This invariably happens with most short story collections. In addition, I didn’t have the foresight to take my own advice and read the book in small doses. Use the benefit of my hindsight when reading this book.

Eyeballs Growing All Over Me…Again by Tony Rauch earns 3 out of 5 stars.

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The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Rapture. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. It’s the belief held by most Christians that, at the end times, the faithful will be lifted up to heaven, disappearing from the earth, leaving the unfaithful behind. But what if the Rapture actually occurred, but it wasn’t really the Rapture?

This is the question posed by Tom Perrotta in The Leftovers. In the novel, a Rapture-like event occurs, where millions of people around the world simply vanish. Except that this Rapture, instead of resulting in the disappearance of the Christian faithful, appears to be random. People from all walks of life, and from all faiths disappeared. In the aftermath of the Sudden Departure, as it’s referred to, society tries to pick up and carry on with life. There’s speculation as to what actually happened. Some say it was the Rapture. Others say it was a natural event, such as the planet’s immune response to too many people. Whatever the explanation, it only serves as background, and the novel instead focuses on the social aftermath of the Sudden Departure, primarily focused on one family, the Garveys.

The novel starts (after the prologue) on the three year anniversary of the Sudden Departure as a parade for the Heroes’ Day of Remembrance begins through the town of Mapleton. We are introduced to the characters and how each has reacted to the changed world. Kevin Garvey, the patriarch of the family, has been elected as town mayor, and does his best to continue handling business and juggle his disintegrating family. His wife, Laurie, has left him to join a nihilistic cult known as the Guilty Remnant, who believe that the world has essentially ended and people need to be reminded of the fact that nothing else now matters. Their daughter Jill, who was an eyewitness as her friend disappeared while right next to her, and has gone from being a star student to a rebellious teenager in the vein of the movie “Thirteen.” And their son, Tom, has joined a different cult known as the Church of the Holy Wayne, a cult with a charismatic leader who has recently been arrested on a large number of charges. In addition, another character, Nora, whose entire family disappeared in the Sudden Departure, becomes loosely involved with the Garveys and their story.

The Leftovers follows these characters lives for approximately six months following the third anniversary of the Sudden Departure. It’s a slice-of-life novel about these characters’ struggles and their changing lives during this period. And, with the exception of some minor speculation at the beginning about the nature of the event, the Sudden Departure doesn’t play a big roll in the novel altogether. This novel could be about a family’s struggles after any national or global tragedy. It becomes a fairly generic family struggle in the wake of these events, with the possible exception of a major cult presence.

And this is the biggest problem with The Leftovers. What makes it stand out…is that it doesn’t really stand out. It could have been any disaster that causes people to search for themselves and to lose family members. The Sudden Departure itself turns out not to be that significant to the story, and the family’s struggles are generic if a bit extreme. As such, The Leftovers failed to grip me, which is likely why it took me so long to finish it and the more I read, the more it felt like I was going through my own kind of struggle.

Which is a major problem. It’s so generic that, at the end, I had to ask myself what the point was. Which may be the point itself. I recall that the Center for Disease Control recently issued guidelines for how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse. It wasn’t serious, but their point was that most disasters call for the same type of preparation (food, water, blankets, etc.). This could be the point of the The Leftovers, that being that personal and family struggles during different disasters may change their form, but at the end are all similar.

There’s a certain underlying dark humor to the novel. The language is accessible and beautiful at the same time, and the characters are most definitely believable. Some of the characters are simply average, and others you just downright doesn’t like. In fact, I didn’t like most of the characters. Most of them are too self-centered for me to care about what happens to them.

Ultimately, I can’t give The Leftovers a recommendation. It ultimately felt too generic and near the end I found myself detesting the characters and wanting to give up on the book. There are small elements to like about the novel that prevent me from giving it a bottom rating, and maybe others will find more to like about the book than I did, but in the end, it’s not for me.

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta earns 2 out of 5 stars.

Note: A free Advanced Reader’s Edition of this book was sent to this reviewer by St. Martin’s Press through a Goodreads First Read giveaway. This did not affect this review in any way.

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Love in the Time of Dinosaurs by Kirsten Alene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tyrannosaurs carrying three-barreled bazookas!

That is all.

Okay, maybe not all. That would be too short for a proper review, but if the world were a fair place, that’s all that would need to be said about Love in the Time of Dinosaurs by Kirsten Alene.

To start with, the author builds an entire world populated by what we assume are probably humans, although at times I questioned this. The unnamed hero of the novel is a warrior monk fighting off an invasion of heavily armed dinosaurs. Is this Earth’s unknown past? Its future? My take is that it’s an entirely mythical world, but this is open to interpretation.

In this world, all dinosaurs, or Jeremies as they’re referred to by the monks, are vicious killers. Even dinosaurs that have traditionally been considered herbivores will kill and devour people, such as the stegosaurus that ate the hero’s best friend. That is until the hero catches a glimpse of a previously unseen dinosaur (a trachodon) who is peaceful, intelligent, and also a monk, something that the humans believe is impossible since all dinosaurs are animals to them. Armor-wearing, gun-toting, samurai-sword wielding animals. This trachodon is a female named Petunia, and the two are instantly drawn to each other. Hence the “love” part of the title. It’s almost a Romeo-and-Juliet star-crossed lovers kind of deal, except that instead of Verona, it takes place on a world invaded by dinosaurs, and Tybalt is a stegosaurus with cannons mounted on his back.

There are only two complaints I have with this novel. The first is that it feels like there’s more to tell. I know that I say this a lot when reviewing books from the Eraserhead Press label, but this is really the case here. It feels like there is a large chunk of the overall story missing, such as why the dinosaurs are called Jeremies, why the half-badger spiritish animals are called Steves, and where the dinosaurs came from and why they attacked. This last one is a question that seems to be creeping around in the back of the hero’s mind, but is never answered, and there are hints dropped that there is definitely something going on here. But it’s never fully pursued. Maybe the author will write a sequel which explores this, particularly as this whole war seems to center around the one monastery and the surrounding area, and we don’t see the much of the rest of the world. There’s a myth in the book surrounding islands floating at the center of the planet with one old man and one old woman on each one who never meet, and of the Great Destroyer Jeremy. If this has to do with something larger, I would like to read it.

The second problem is more of a pet peeve, that being the author completely ignores basic physical (not to mention physiological) laws. At one point, a character who has been cut in half, and generally seems to be okay if only a little upset at losing his lower half, opens his ribcage up after jumping with the hero from a pterodactyl in order to become a parachute and slow their descent (did you get all that?). I can understand and accept some stretching of basic physical principles, but when they’re completely broken like that, it rips me off the page and restores disbelief. Others may be more accepting of this, but unfortunately, I just can’t do it. It’s not in my nature.

Still, Love in the Time of Dinosaurs is a good read. It can be surprisingly deep at times, and Kirsten Alene has an interesting and unique writing style. Her imagery, not to mention her prose, can actually be quite poetic. The novel can also be very gory, so interested readers should keep this in mind before they start reading it, aside from the above issues I mentioned. Because of those aforementioned issues, I can’t say that I loved the book. However, I can say that despite those issues, I still really did like it, and I feel comfortable in giving it a solid recommendation.

Love in the Time of Dinosaurs earns four out of five stars.

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