Customer Reviews

Spider Pie

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I would have given this 4.5 stars if it were possible, but that isn't an option and I feel Spider Pie is closer to 4 stars than 5.

Anyways, this reminds me a lot of the stuff I've read by Carlton Mellick III, but seems to have condensed all the strangeness of his novels/novellas into short stories.

After reading this in August (it's now September), "Death of a UPS Man" stands out most vividly in my mind. I can only hope that a longer, more in depth version is someday written in which we are told more about the UPS man as he's handcuffed to the door. But maybe my love for this story has to do with the joy I sometimes get from checking the mail.

A few of the stories here weren't quite to my taste, "I Wear Black to Mourn Myself," for example, but nothing ever drags and not once did I grow even remotely bored. I might also add that this book is full of hilarious moments.

Bizarre and inspiring.

...I'm quite sure he would demand that Spider Pie be added to the menu. The vignettes within are grandiose fragments of surrealism and absurdity; the characters she creates appear to be multi-dimensional without ever having to drown them or the plot in background/history; she provides us with an adequate character sketch and she moves forward, successully weaving her wonderful webs (no pun intended). These tales have this magical ability to create within the reader a kind of poignant delight that commands attention, meaning, you are compelled by the 'what will happen next?' factor.
Capable of invoking laughter, eye-widening, laughter, consumer and cultural awareness, sympathy, laughter...Alyssa is the ringleader of a 24 ring circus.

At times satiric, at times grotesque, at times animated, at times poetic, there's not a bad apple in the bunch; the content is the very definition of surreal...

You ask: "How 'bout an example?"

Hmm...how 'bout:
"After closing the arm for a month of repairs as a result of the incident, Simian decided never to rent himself out again. Instead, when the extensive renovations were complete, he decided to enjoy the fruits of his own labor, and moved into himself." (from No.5 Simian Place)

You say unto me: "What...the...f---?"

I say unto you: "You simply HAVE to read for yourself."

A woman gives birth to a litter of kittens. Another woman finds out that she is pregnant and about to give birth to a television. A man sells bags of hair on the black market. A man installs a zipper into his arm for drug use. A serial killer likes to prey on albinos. Bunny aliens plan to invade earth. All of these things take place in Spider Pie. A short story collection from the genre of Irrealism or as most people refer to it as Bizarro. Alyssa Sturgill has written a collection of short stories that cant be defined.

Reading Spider Pie is like having the most bizarre dream you could imagine, or having a acid trip from hell. That is the only way I can describe this book. I have read a lot of different Bizarro stories but this one takes the cake. Spider Pie is on a level all its on and I loved every minute of the experience. It took a very vivid and wild imagination to comes up with these stories. I especially enjoyed Leviathan, Born, Not Made, I wear Black to Mourn Myself, and The Secret Ingredient. I had to go back and read them over and over again. They are gruesome, poetic, and satiric.

I highly recommend Spider Pie to anyone who enjoys the bizarre and surreal. This book was a pure joy to read and I wont soon forget it. If Carlton Mellick is the King of the Bizarro genre then Alyssa is the Queen. She is one of the brightest new voices out there and I cant wait to see what she gives us next. Go grab a copy for yourself and see what I mean. You wont be able to put it down.

I was really impressed by this collection of short stories. Alyssa leaves out the filler, accomplishing in a few pages what it would normally take an entire novel to achieve.

In one of my favorite stories, "Beware of Kitten" the protagonist's mother gives birth to a litter of kittens after her daughter is late for curfew. Most authors would feel that this clever idea satisfies their quota for uniqueness in a story and give us pages and pages of boring quirkiness about life with this unusual family. But Alyssa goes behind that - she has the protagonist buy a basket for her new siblings; a basket that is haunted by the ghost of a victim of the French Revolution who seems like a nice guy at first, but soon brainwashes the kittens into doing unspeakable things.

This book has lots of gore and lots of laughs. Alyssa possesses an extraordinary imagination, which is what I really look for in a book.

I was singularly unimpressed with this book. It promised so much good weirdness, but delivered next to none of it. While the Bizarro movement in general tends to full of books written in simple-yet-strange language, Sturgill's writing lacks any semblance of talent. Her repepitive use of hack tie-in statements like "Without even thinking he/she..." or "Then Suddenly", etc etc. I'd go back and look in the book to get better examples, but its already on its way back to the store. Sturgill just... tries too hard to say "Look at me murder cuteness in an Overly-Stereotypical-Goth way!! Bats and Spiders and Zombie Kittens!" in her re-hashededly boring stories cream-filled with run-of-the-mill strangeness.

Bizarro is good, and should be read by people looking for interesting fiction. Spider Pie is NOT it, and really shouldn't be read by any but Third Grade Pseudo-Goths with short attention spans and no reading experience. Go buy a Carlton Mellick book- there you would get your money's worth, and really get what you hoped you were buying.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of "Spider Pie" as it is rather difficult to classify. I do know one thing; I liked it...a lot! These two dozen short tales from the mind of Alyssa Sturgill are like Grimm's Fairy tales on acid with a steroid chaser. They are insanity-filled whimsy that range from the truly horrific to the outrageously humorous and just about everything in between. Classifying these short stories as horror simply would not do them justice. Sturgill blends a child-like fascination with monsters with skull-splitting irony.

"Leviathan" is about a boy and his monster. Jester just does not seem to be able to get his pet Leviathan to grow and is the subject of ridicule from his family. But you'll soon wonder who the master is and who is the pet.

In "Bag of Hair" Justin works in a barber shop and sweeps up the hair, making extra money by selling it on the side. When he can't make a sale to his usual contacts, he takes the bad home, but soon the hair takes on a life of its own.

"Bunny Threat" is the most darkly amusing tale in the book. Benny has a thing for albinos...he likes to kill them. Pretty soon poor Benny has wiped out all of the albinos in the world. His attempts at creating them by injecting kids with chlorine only creates youngsters who can chlorinate a pool by whizzing into it...but then Benny meets the alien albino bunnies!

Sturgill shows her gruesome and gory side with "Death of a UPS Man". Here we have a driver that is so dedicated and determined to deliver his package that he handcuffs himself to the door of the house, Hellbent on getting that signature no matter what happens to him.

Alyssa takes aim at gluttonous and greedy kids in the appropriately titled "Scary Tale". Little Jill and Bobby love to get their Slappy Meals. Dad has to run out and constantly buy them more so they can get their Slappy Meal toys and line them up on the shelves in their room. But one night, the Slappy Meal toys come to life and prove they are not suitable your young children.

At just over a hundred pages the book is short with most of the stories being only a few pages long, but what Sturgill does in just a few pages is amazing. She's able to push many different buttons on the reader; amusing them, scaring them, and even grossing them out, but what she does best of all is entertain.

Reviewed by Tim Janson

An action packed punched to the gut. Alyssa really embodies the phrase, "All Killer and No Filler" in this collection of stories. I mean seriously how many people do you know, or authors, can cram 24 little vignettes/stories into 1 book under 100 pages? ONE - Alyssa Sturgill.

A great little amalgamation of great stories you can read during any short breaks of your day. Standouts to me being: No.5 Simian Place, Beware of Kittens, Love Samurai, We Twins, etc. But they were all great, not a dud in the mix. There was funny, BIZARRE, gross, poetic, sleazy, and so much more.

Great little snippets and glimpses into the authors bizarro mind, a great introduction to the genre for non-bizarro readers. 4.5 Stars!

One of my earliest introductions to the weird and wonderful realm that is bizarro fiction, Alyssa Sturgill's SPIDER PIE assembles 24 "salacious selections" of unabashed oddity. Steeped in pop culture and infused with a manic, almost whimsical, sense of humor, Sturgill dishes out these snippets of the strange with breezy deftness.

Though the stories in SPIDER PIE are really sketches or vignettes (most span a few hundred words; even with two dozen tales and illustrations the book runs less than a hundred pages), Sturgill packs in plenty of bizarre imagery and keen insight. Standouts include "Leviathan" (a coming-of-age story in which a shy young boy learns life lessons from his pet squid), "Beware of Kittens" (a teenage girl's broken curfew results in her mother's spontaneous birth of a litter of kittens), and "We Twins" (Siamese twins meet an inevitable fate in a rogue magician's stage act).

Featuring a skin-swapping Abe Lincoln, a woman who gives birth to a television, a dinner date with Countess Bathory, and Jon Lovitz's disembodied ear, SPIDER PIE presents a wide array of the weird in its abbreviated page count. Fans of cult humor will want to check out this collection.

So punchy it'll break a rib.

As a collection of short stories some are better than others but unlike other books, none left me wanting. The added charm is that each story takes about the same amount of time to read that a healthy bowel movement takes to drop so it's perfect for le toilette.