My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes! [Paperback]

Bradley Sands (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 2010

"Have you ever had one of those nights when you could swear in front of a court of law that you haven't had a wink of sleep, but the prosecutor would have a field day with details concerning your alarm clock going off after what seemed like only an hour and your lingering memories of mischievous lawn furniture?"

Forget everything you know about life, the world, and all the objects in it. Bradley Sands can bend them to his will with a frightening disregard for reality. You never know who, or what, is lying in wait behind the next comma. Whether it's Super Noxious Air Man and his sidekick, Kid Centrifugal Force, or the next episode of Teddy the Rottweiler Spayer, Sands keeps you off-balance with laughter and astonishment.

These stories are crammed with the delightfully odd and the scurrilously silly. From moment to moment My Heart Said No requires the most unexpected, perplexing, and hilarious leaps of faith. But you'll be glad you took this exhilarating jump into uncharted territory.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The book's strength lies in the way irreverent images are juxtaposed, repeatedly, often rhythmically, creating a sensation that has no use for the traditional confines of literature." --Outsider Writers Collective

Throughout, Sands displays an adept knack for twisting familiar words and phrases into new forms, altering their meaning while poking fun at the overused, the clichéd. --decomP

From the Inside Flap

"There's a place past all reason, most possibility, and all the jokes I can think of. A place shaped kind of like the human heart. Bradley Sands doesn't write about this place, but he writes from it, pushing farther into the unguessable with each word, each scene." - Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theory & It Came From Del Rio 

"There is a disorienting alchemy at work in Bradley Sands' fiction. Here phantasmagoria shifts into stand-up and the avant-garde saddles up besides the geek. Imagine: a hyper-palimpsest beneath which burbles a heady brew of surrealism, poetry, memoir, and horror all set to a DaDa soundtrack that sounds surprisingly like the End of the World." - Rayo Casablanca, author of 6 Sick Hipsters & Very Mercenary

"Reading this collection is like ingesting a bag of fun-colored candy, removing your stomach, and then taking it to a party for use as a pinata. Some readers will love these stories, some readers will hate them but, displayed throughout, is a true love of language and a generous dose of creativity." - Andersen Prunty, author of The Beard

Product Details

• Paperback: 140 pages
• Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press (April 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933293934
• ISBN-13: 978-1933293936
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.3 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,247,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bradley Sands is an author of bizarro fiction. He wrote TV Snorted My Brain, Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face: A Novel, Rico Slade Will F*cking Kill You, Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy, and other books.

Visit him at www.bradleysands.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Sands Keeps It Real...Interesting April 14, 2010

By Jason L. Jordan

Format:Paperback

Known for his novel "It Came from Below the Belt" (Afterbirth Books, 2006) and his publication Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, Bizarro author Bradley Sands is now offering "My Heart Said No, but the Camera Crew Said Yes!" (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2010), a collection that is wholeheartedly rooted in Sands's chosen aesthetic. Then again, perhaps Sands's aesthetic chose him. In either case, cast aside predictability, because these stories are anything but commonplace.

The good: Throughout, Sands displays an adept knack for twisting familiar words and phrases into new forms, altering their meaning while poking fun at the overused, the clichéd. In example, from page 52: "The plant tears off its disguise, roars, and gives Crispin a 30 Seconal head start...and asks Crispin why he's not fleeing from its terrifying presence. Crispin explains that his cooperation in a chase sequence isn't free. It costs $3.95 for the first minute and $1.25 for each additional minute."

Often, he'll deliver a ludicrous, hilarious development out of the blue: "Since birth, an eerie mariachi band had followed Lemony Fresh around, hellbent on providing atmospheric music to accompany his rollicking adventures" (72). And there's something to be said, again, about how unpredictable these stories are. There's something new around every turn, and the unknown is part of the fun.

The bad: Because so much changes from start to finish, in most of these stories, the tension suffers. It's also difficult to keep in mind what the protagonist is trying to achieve due to such rampant transformation--especially in longer stories like "Terror in the Haunted House" and "The Anals of Piracy," both of which overstay their welcome. In fact, a few of the shorter shorts--"The Two-Toed Sapsucker (from The Encyclopedia Orangutannicas)," "Jonathan Seabreeze Upward," and the satirical "Jared Bruckheiny"--upstage their lengthier peers.

The ugly: the two guys on the cover.

Certainly "My Heart Said No, but the Camera Crew Said Yes!" is for a select audience, but if you're searching for an unusual book that continually surprises and entertains, you've found it. Just don't expect nail biting plots and loveable characters.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A very carefully crafted patchwork quilt of sheer oddity and confusion October 13, 2010

By Matthew Revert

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Bradley Sands is unlike most authors you've probably read. It's not really suitable to label his work "Bizarro" or "Absurd", even though it certainly is Bizarre and absurd. His work is more like a very carefully crafted patchwork quilt of sheer oddity and confusion. His stories are a leaning tower of mind-melting scenarios that bleed into each other, forming a thread by virtue of their placement. Saying this may give you the impression that Sands is a chaotic randomist, however, this isn't true either. Reading the stories in `My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said YES!" reveals the care and craftsmanship involved.

Consider the following passage from the story, `Terror in the Haunted House':

"An Eiffel Tower struts down the hallway in a sexy maid's uniform, blitzkrieging the high ceiling with its feather boa duster. The canvas of Lord Remarkably Stiff For His Age bubbles over its frame like a pan of stovetop popcorn. Then the painting extracts itself from the wall, uncovering a crevice and the backside of the painting's true ally against gravity. Super Noxious Air Man and his sidekick, Kid Centrifugal Force, fight to make the world safe for Dermatology - one incurable skin condition at a time - and the face of the brittle portrait putrefies."

In isolation, it's almost like an ultra dense piece of nano fiction. Now, pile these pieces of nano fiction together, following something akin to narrative in the process, and you have a Bradley Sands story. Depending on the sort of person you are, this either a great thing or a terrible thing. I fall firmly in the `great' camp. I love how well-crafted this insanity is, and the imagery these stories provoke is quite unique.

In my mind, there are two ways to enjoy this book: you can let it all wash over you, or you can dive into each sentence and drink every word. I'm a drinker and found a lot of enjoyment slowly working through each sentence and tying them all together. This also leads to exhaustion (at least it did for me). I couldn't read this book in large chunks. After each story, I felt like taking a little nap. During my down time, this book kept calling to me, asking me with subversive politeness to pick it up again. As I started each new story, I had a sense that this one wouldn't hurt as bad - of course, I was always left trying to absorb the same chaos.

You'll notice that I'm not really telling you what this book is about. This is very deliberate, because I feel it would belittle the content. It would be pointless for me to go into more detail than the blurb provides. It's enough to say that it's a chronicle of oddity - a cluster of confusion.

Bradley Sands is a fascinating author. His work is both uncompromising and delightfully playful. It can also be very funny and crass in the most unexpected ways. If you really take the time to imagine what he is describing, you brain will turn itself inside out in divine delirium. There were several points throughout that I was in complete hysterics. There are even moments where he touches upon what I'd classify `perfect nonsense'. This is nonsense so unapologetically nonsensical that all it can really do is make sense. I'm led to believe that Sands' style has changed somewhat since this book, so it will be very interesting to read his upcoming books.

There's nothing left to do but wholeheartedly recommend this book. Even by Bizarro standards you have to be an adventurous reader, but if you give yourself in to Sands' world, there is ample reward in store. If you wind up throwing this book against a wall, well, it certainly says something about the power of the writing within. I love that writing like this exists and finds publication. The world needs it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Say Yes! October 14, 2010

By Adam Breckenridge

Format:Paperback

Do you like romance? Passion? Melodrama? Are you the kind of person who likes to weep at an Oxygen movie of the week while eating low-fat ice cream straight from the carton? Do you love to curl up with a scented candle and a glass of wine and lose yourself in a passionate romance of unrequited love?

Then what the hell are you doing here?

Bradley Sands is, admittedly, the kind of writer who devours romance novels, but by devour I mean he actually puts them in a blender along with some doll heads, fresh lichen and the tears of children's nightmares and drinks them at midnight at the crossroads of route 666 by the light of a gibbous moon. The closest he's ever come to a scented candle is when he's chasing his own demons through the mall and throws them through the storefront at Bath & Body Works. He then proceeds to punch the secrets of their childhood anxieties out of them so he can record them in a book like My Heart Said No, but the Camera Crew Said Yes.

If Bradley Sands ever met Danielle Steele the matter/anti-matter explosion would wipe out everything from here to Moonsylvania (and if you want to know where that is, try reading the book).

But I've mostly spoken of what this book is not, so what exactly is the "is" of this book? Well, it's a lot of the the things romance is not, it's weird, it's unpredictable and stitched together from all the spare parts he could carry home with him from a night of galavanting about in the subconsciouses of the comically insane. Where most fiction neatly sticks tab A into slot B, Sands has a peculiar way of shoving tab A into slot Omicron and making you realize just how well they go together. These stories are best read in short bursts, but what fun little bursts they are, each one a new glimpse at whatever insanity makes the Sands-man tick. You may laugh, you may be baffled, you may start worrying what your mother would think, but you will not be bored. So you could read another one of the eighty-four novels Nora Roberts somehow manages to turn out every year (a feat she accomplishes, I assume, because she has eighteen arms that type nine different manuscripts at once while lackeys shove the steamed tripe into her mouth that fuels her creative inspiration), or you could read something that does something new and different.

All I know is I'm glad I'm not one of Bradley Sands' demons.