Eraserhead Press

150 pages, $10.95

Review by David S. Atkinson

I’d never heard of bizarro lit before a few years ago. However, I’ve read what I would consider a decent amount of it lately. It seems like I should have a handle on exactly what is or isn’t bizarro by now…but I really don’t. For what seems to be a somewhat small genre in literature as a whole, there appears to be at least twice as many ways to do bizarro as there are writers within the field. My impressions of this were further cemented when I took a recent look at You Are Sloth by Steve Lowe (author of humorously odd books such as King of the Perverts, Muscle Memory, and Samurai VS Robo-Dick).

The book starts ordinarily enough:

            The dude writes, “You are sloth!” and that’s how it begins.
Bam, sloth.
He didn’t write “a sloth,” just sloth, and that has you wondering what he means. It concerns you a little that this is some kind of Se7en thing where you’re going to die in a very lazy way because some foreign spammer has seen too many American movies without quite grasping their gist.

***

But that wasn’t what he meant.
When he says, “You are sloth,” he’s being quite literal, but in your hangover haze, that just flies right on by. You just don’t get it until you reach for the keyboard to respond and instead spend ten minutes staring at your yellow, curved fingernails (three to be exact; you count them over and over to confirm) and thin paws covered in long, wiry hair. Continue reading →