Customer Reviews

Shall We Gather at the Garden?

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Most novels make me feel as if their main characters are taking many long, tedious, and uneventful bus trips to get to and from the interesting parts in their story. This often causes me to skim and ask myself why I'm wasting my time.

"Shall We Gather in the Garden?" doesn't fall under this category. It is an example of condensed storytelling at its best and never fails to entertain, induce laughter, and thrill with its imagination. It's the sort of book that you can start reading at any random page and still get a kick out of it.

I read the ebook edition, and it was even able to hold the attention of my bleeding eyes.

How many artists can get away with true absurdity? Borges, Marquez, Dali, Terry Gilliam...and now Donihe. He understands the rules of surreality (and, oh yes, it has rules) and brilliantly follows them to create a work of lasting impact. A stunning (and the adjective here is used in the hit-over-the-head-with-a-blunt-object sense) romp through space and time, a fierce examination of culture in all its facets, and a blindingly funny attack on all the things that make humanity less than human, this book will stay with you...even if you don't want it to. Here there be dwarves, and spatial displacement devices, and doughnut shops and the Church of The Byrds, and one very insistent Karma Wheel, and a Garden and a Pit, and it all blends together like a graveyard sno-cone to explode against your taste buds - while barbed chains come out your throat. Read it. If you like being challenged, and if you have a working brain, you need to read this. If not, stick with television - it doesn't hurt so much.

Have you ever felt dislocateed within the world? Did you ever have "one of those days" when everything unravelling before you seems truly bizarre and you begin to question your own sanity? Meet Mark Anders, the #1 bestselling romance writer in America.

He never imagined that his little novel, detailing the lives of circus midgets would ever be published, let alone top the charts of the romance bestsellers list! But that is consumerist America for you -- anything to fill a void -- it's all in the packaging. And then overnight everyone -- EVERYONE -- recognizes him! There is an international Mark Anders Appreciation Society. Everyone wants to know Mark Anders, even the dark suited, gun-wielding agents of rival publishers, even those little people with the red foam noses and floppy shoes.

And then things really get insane, in Kevin Donihe's first full length novel. Beware the turn of the Karma Wheel, beware the dueling cults rising up to usurp the new/old gods, beware the stench of greasey donuts for one day you could wake up being Mark Anders.

If your looking to break the bonds of corporate, bland bestsellers or series fiction, if your daring enough to actually try something refreshingly NEW and Different, then try any book published by Eraserhead Press. But if you want the second coming of J. G. Eccarius' "The Last Days of Christ the Vampire," well, then buy and read a copy of "Shall We Gather at The Garden," by Kevin L. Donihe. Cult fiction has a new god, and that is Kevin L. Donihe.

Buy this book!

I'll admit that when I started reading Kevin L. Donihe's "Shall we Gather at the Garden?" I had no expectation of making it to the end. However, the initially incomprehensible story began to unfold and I soon found myself drawn in to a work that is both very clever and deeply disconcerting. On a superficial level, this is a collection of short stories set in various realities, all interlinkled and referring to one another. The core plot being that circus midgets are trying to take over the world. The tales are ridiculous, but the more you think about them, the more it appears they have to say about the human condition. The work depends a good deal on your not knowing what is actually going on, so I'm not going to go into any detail about what the various stories actually involve.

"Shall we Gather at the Garden?" is the sort of writing that invites readers to try and devise an interpretation. Perhaps there isn't an underlying message, perhaps all is just chaos, but I suspect not. It is without a shadow of a doubt the kind of writing that challenges and obliges you to think. There is (I thought, at any rate) a grim commentary on how human desire to believe will cause the most dreadful effects. I wish the insanity portrayed by Donihe was the most ridiculous part of the text, but mass hysteria, obsessiveness and violence are very much with us.

This is highly unconventional fiction, it is quite surreal most of the time, and this surrealism can be very threatening. Sometimes I laughed out loud, but while, for example, the notion of a battle between the church of Crosby and the church of Lionel Richie is rather silly, it is also rather sinister. If you like safe, conventional ficiton then you will probably not get on with this book. If you want your notions of reality stretched almost to breaking point, if you can really suspend your disbelief and if you aren't going to start a cult based on this book, then read it.

Kevin Donihe's Shall We Gather at the Garden is one of the strangest books I've read in a long time. It's parody, it's satire, it's surrealism gone wild. This absurdist take on religion and politics leaves the mind bent, and the eyes watering.

Donihe knows how to make me laugh. And sometimes shudder just a bit. Like a painting by Magritte viewed with a head full of acid, this book just gets weirder and weirder.

It's highly entertaining, very smart, and lots of fun. I recommend this book to anyone with a sense of the surreal.

If you think society is going to hell in a handbasket, this book will give you a very unmerciful preview of the doom to come. It skewers society's pillars of religion, classism, corporate greed and celebrity status on a bloody altar built by midgets. For those of us who have ever been made to feel small, it is an empowering comeuppance, an exaggerated-to-the-ultimate revenge fantasy. And for those of us who just enjoy sick, sarcastic and twisted imagery and Lionel Richie (and especially if you hate Lionel Richie), it's a guilty pleasure. Warning: You're not going to get it if you don't finish it.

First of all, I'm not going to sit here and write some pseudo-intellectual book report. I don't get paid for this. I'll just tell you what I think in English.

Mystical Circus Midgets! The little guys are always the ones you least expect, both literally and metaphorically. You never pay attention to them enough (except maybe for Mini-Me) like you do with Brad Pitt or Shrubya. It's like, that's their only feature to Big People, that they're supernaturally short. So Kevin here elevates them in their mystery to gods. They're EVERYWHERE!!!

I don't know if he meant to say this, but it sounded to me like a story about the contrasts of power and powerlessness, and how both can be achieved simultaneously, and having one or the other isn't going to make the world (yours or everyone's) any better. In every story there is a struggle of that nature.

I also think that even though this novel has a theme that's pretty darned deep, Kevin uses total absurd humor to make it both more easy to get and to keep it from sinking under its own weight.

I can sit here and analyze this book to death, but that's my reality, and this book works on several slants of reality. I enjoyed it immensely and if you read it, I think you will either "get it" or scratch your head. And if you scratch your head, I've got some Bottled Barbed Chains for you....

i was really intrigued by the title and cover art. while trying to read it and make sense of it i became very confused and dismayed. it seemed it was written to be confusing to hide the fact of not being much of a cohesive story but a conglomeration of words strung together in the pretense of being above our understanding. unfortunately it falls short of what it could have been. the second half of the book, or the second book attached to the first was more enjoyable and made more sense. it just seems it could have been so much more. i had recently read "satan burger" and thought that it was so funny and well written that i would try another of the bizarro fiction. i would recommend skipping this and trying another.

I really, really enjoyed this book, which in my opinion is only a taste of what the author has out there as e-books and chapbooks and such. An excellent debut novel, Shall We Gather.... is a philosophy in itself as well as a witty reminder that literature, true literature, has no bounds. An awesome escape from reality, I highly recommend this book to anyone.

Who controls the world?

The Illuminati? The Freemasons? Gorgulax, the Solar Emperor?

No. All wrong.

The real force that moves the world is a group of reality-bending circus midgets intent on instilling chaos and absurdity into the lives of the human race, engineering colorful ends for all seventy epochs.

The midgets are the engineers, but we are the laborers making apocalypse possible, blindly throwing faith on pop culture messiahs, gladly giving the Grand Dictator power to pulp us. The Wheel of Karma crushes murderous Zen masters while desperate men attempt suicide with a pickle.

What does this all mean?

I'm not totally sure, but that isn't the point. The point is: there is a Pit and a Garden, and if you wish to go to the Garden (or is it the Pit?), you'd best buy this book.

So sayeth the High Priest Gorgulax.