They Had Goat Heads [Paperback]

D. Harlan Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 27, 2010

D. Harlan Wilson returns with another ferociously mindbending collection of short fiction. Masked in absurdity, these stories reveal the horrifying and hilarious faces of everyday life. Wilson tells of egg raids, hog rippers, monk spitters, fathers who take their children to pet stores to buy them whales, sociopaths who threaten to clothesline eternity, and the simple act of the story itself becoming a means of repetitive, endless torture. Put on your goat head, hop in your hovercraft, and take a ride with a juggernaut of modern imaginative fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Funny, experimental, troubling, this brilliant collection of short stories proves conclusively that D. Harlan Wilson is a maverick author of genius. Some of his stories remind me of Barthelme: they are playful, rhythmic and utilise form in hilariously unexpected ways, and they are eminently quotable ("Conflict is an illusion without which apes and begonias would shrivel in the wind."). Other tales resemble early Calvino: absurd and light but also pithy and profound. But aside from these comparisons, Wilson is clearly a writer with his own distinctive voice. For years I have grumbled that there is too little quality fiction of this type. Wilson has persuaded me to shut my goddamn mouth." - Rhys Hughes, author of The Smell of Telescopes and A New Universal History of Infamy

"D. Harlan Wilson doesn't just gaze into the abyss. He dives headlong into it, pulling us with him and laughing maniacally all the way down." - Tim Waggoner, author of Cross County and Nekropolis

"D. Harlan Wilson is a surgical practitioner of the surreal and absurd." - The Black Boot

"At times troubling, often brilliant, always unpredictable, D. Harlan Wilson's short story collection, They Had Goat Heads, is an unmitigated marriage of discomfort and delight. The . . . stories bound together in this, Wilson's latest collection, combine elements of humor and horror with hints of madness and a touch of brazen creative brilliance rarely seen in modern stream of consciousness stories. Each tale is unpleasantly absurd, from 'Monster Truck,' in which a man welds wheels to his knees and elbows in order to fulfill a dream of becoming a monster truck, to 'The Arrest,' in which seven men attempt to arrest one another. Dark and decidedly disturbing, the stories in They Had Goat Heads succeed where similarly styled stories have predominantly failed. Wilson masks meaning behind the macabre flow of thoughts and words that, combined, comprise his unique vision." - Horrorbound Magazine

"Here we have a very gifted wordsmith, one who puts as much emphasis on tempo as he does lucidity, and while, oftentimes, Wilson's stories (forty in all, many of which aren't much longer than a few paragraphs, some as short as a single line) veer off into the absurd, they never failed to register some sort of response in me. It's like the written equivalent of an abstract painting, where almost everything is left open to interpretation. It goes against everything I've ever learned as a writer, but that's precisely the point. This is bold, experimental stuff ... schizophrenic sci-fi wrapped in nightmare logic." - Horrorview

"They Had Goat Heads is best swallowed whole. A set of individual stories, vignettes, flash fictions and single-sentence narratives, it is by turns menacing, hilarious, eccentric, surreal and downright incomprehensible ... It is almost an epic poem of the absurd ... Gloriously anarchic, satisfyingly different and immensely rewarding." - The Future Fire

Product Details

• Paperback: 146 pages
• Publisher: Atlatl Press (September 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0982628129
• ISBN-13: 978-0982628126
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.3 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,094,101 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm a novelist, editor, literary critic, and English prof. My stories have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies across the world in several languages. My books include THE SCIKUNGFI TRILOGY, THEY HAD GOAT HEADS, PECKINPAH: AN ULTRAVIOLENT ROMANCE, TECHNOLOGIZED DESIRE: SELFHOOD & THE BODY IN POSTCAPITALIST SCIENCE FICTION, and others. Visit me online at www.dharlanwilson.com and www.thekyotoman.com.

Here's what some other authors and reviewers have said about me and my writing:

"Wilson has been duly anointed as speculative fiction's most unpredictable stylist." BOOKLIST

"If reality is a crutch, D. Harlan Wilson has thrown it away." RAIN TAXI

"A bludgeoning celluloid rush of language and ideas served from an action-painter's bucket of fluorescent spatter, PECKINPAH: AN ULTRAVIOLENT ROMANCE is an incendiary gem and very probably the most extraordinary new novel you will read this year." ALAN MOORE

"CODENAME PRAGUE is from the wild edge of science fiction, in the tradition of Philip K. Dick's Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch--fast, smart, funny, and full of a scarily plausible vision of just how weird things could get if we take our biological fate into our own hands." KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

"This intense mixture of giddy activity, cyberpunk essences, avant fusion and social satire may make your head spin at an accelerated rate. Actual brain damage is unlikely, in most cases." JOHN SHIRLEY

"CODENAME PRAGUE is a thrill-a-minute combination of James Bond, Robert Ludlum, and cyberpunk, set in a dangerous, erotic, and not-as-distant-as-you'd-wish future." MIKE RESNICK

"Who IS this guy?" PAT CADIGAN

"DR. IDENTITY is a rollicking romp through a future so absurd, it can't help but feel real. D. Harlan Wilson shows us everything we know--but wish we didn't--about ourselves." ROBERT VENDITTI

"Let's dispense with the usual predictable analogies ('Kafka/Cronenberg-on-laughing-gas'), redundancies ('Phillip K. Dick/William Gibson-on-acid'), or accurate-but-somewhat-obscure references ('the most intense and, in a certain sense, the most significant young prose writer since Mark Leyner and Ben Marcus ... establishes Wilson as the Steve Katz of the post-everything generation ... vies with Derek Pell's THE LITTLE RED BOOK OF ADOBE LIVEMOTION for being the funniest book of the new millennium'), and cut to the chase: D Harlan Wilson's hilarious meta-pulp SF novel, DR. IDENTITY, is a funhouse mirror whose cartoonish distortions continually amaze and amuse--until one realizes that what we're seeing is a disturbingly accurate vision of ourselves. An instant avant-pop classic by a major new talent. Two surgically-enhanced, stainless-steel thumbs way, way up!" LARRY MCCAFFERY

"This book's better'n the bushelfull of Benzedrine-spiked donut holes with which DR. IDENTITY tries to bribe his students into civilized demeanor! Pomo cybertheory never tasted so good or made you fly this high!" AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW

"Readers with a taste for wacky experimental fiction will enjoy D. Harlan Wilson's DR. IDENITY, OR, FAREWELL TO PLAQUEDEMIA, a pulp science fiction novel set in the postcapitalist city of Bliptown." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"'Destroy time so that chaos may be ordered' was the instruction more than half a century ago of Mailer's Man Who Studied Yoga and D. Harlan Wilson has taken that advice seriously; here is a novel which implodes and conflates autobiography, biography, history, quasi-history, alternate history and Occam's Safety Razor in a fashion which I find utterly original and utterly discommoding. The exquisite tilt of BLANKETY BLANK runs us all off the board and on; its originality is a weapon. Firing at that bullseye on time." BARRY N. MALZBERG

"If you had a time machine and could secure the living brains of James Thurber and Andre Breton ripped untimely from their skulls, run them through a juicer, then mainline the blended liquid neurons, you might become a writer like D. Harlan Wilson. In fact, I know with certainty that this is how he actually got his start. As evidenced by his new 'Memoir of Vulgaria,' BLANKETY BLANK, we are facing a writer who can evoke howls of pity and tears of laughter on the same page, and generally within the same sentence. In this 'multimedia' novel, suburban inanity and insanity are depicted in loving and intimate depth, resulting in a furiously animated canvas equal parts Bosch and Tex Avery. Imagine an episode of The Simpsons scripted by Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme, then directed by Michel Gondry, and you won't be far off the mark. If this be "interstitial" fiction, then it's a case of the interstices expanding like a galaxy to overwhelm whatever bland shores once flanked them." PAUL DI FILIPPO

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars As surreal as it gets November 24, 2010

By Geoff Nelder

Format:Paperback

Some anthologies are soothing tales, quaint, charming and help you pass the time waiting in an airport, or to assist your head to drift off to the land of nod at bedtime. This book is NOTHING LIKE THAT! Each story is a unique coruscating mind adventure. It's not possible to take it all in and be embroiled in each intrigue in one go. While bizarro stories seem to be meaningless and an injection of lateral-thinking hilarity, there's more to them than that. When you hammer a banana, and a bee buzzes a window cleaner outside the plane on a clockwork bowl of custard... well, your head is either messed up, or it begins to think in a different way, loosening the cobwebs in there.

Listen to the beginning of `Beneath a Pink Sun':
"Conflict is an illusion without which apes and begonias would shrivel in the wind. The grill, however, is covered with steaks. Tenderloins. They sizzle in the back yard beneath a pink sun. Somebody turns on a bugzapper. Music of tiny deaths..."

Laugh at a line in Chimpanzee where `I' is in a bad situation, calls 911 and finds the operator "sounds attractive". Unfortunately, `I' is badly mistreated by the arriving police - beaten, pistol-whipped, kicked and thrown into a cell. All outrageous and illegal. He's allowed the proverbial single phone call, so calls 911. Brilliant.

In many ways the tales have a message, however deeply buried then working upwards into your subconscious. They're apparent nonsense maybe not so - in the ilk of the sufi homilies of Idries Shah, for example in his The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin. In particular the stories: Cape Crusade, Turns, and The Womb. I'm not saying they are the same style exactly - both Shah and D. Harlan Wilson are unique, but that if you enjoy one you are likely to relish the other. Another writer's work triggered by the style of these stories are the alternate reality ones by Ira Nayman - eg in his Alternate Reality Ain't What It Used To Be.

The funniest gory story I've ever read is in this book - The Arrest. I tease you with a few lines from the beginning:
A man said, "You are under arrest."
Another man said, "No, you are under arrest."
"No," said the first man. "It's the other way around. You are the one who is under arrest."
"I'm not under arrest," said the second man. "You are."
"I'm going to arrest you now," said the first man, taking the second man by the elbow.
"No. Now I will arrest you"
... and so it goes on hilariously involving more men, more arrests, fights, fatalities. Several of the stories have this kind of self-referential effect, and I've always been drawn to literary recursion.
Lines I wish I'd written include `The clouds fell into the horizon' - in the story, Monk Splitter. `Time is the splash of a raindrop on a cornflake.'
For readers of graphic stories, there is one, The Sister, illustrated horrifically by Skye Thorstenson. It's a dark story summed up by the opening line: `And the moment I finished sewing up my little sister...' It is hellically [sic] recursive.
Some of the stories leave me cold, but there are a total of 39 stories, most of which are semi-precious with a sprinkling of gems.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars No. October 4, 2011

By readerDee

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I wanted so much to like this because I like adventure in words, inventiveness and surreal use of our wonderful language. I was disappointed and the glowing reviews feel sour now. It's not that the work is bad it's just not good enough. Clever for clever sake but only clever, not truly original. I could find no meaning at all, just clever.
I'm disappointed. I wanted so much to like this.
I wanted.
I sought.
I didn't find.
It's not here.
The grail.
Not.
No.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fantastic Collection August 4, 2011

By R. Moschgat Jr.

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is the first thing that I have read by Mr. Wilson but since getting into the Bizarro genre I just can't get enough so I decided to pick this one up.
There are tons of stories included and while some of them are only a few sentences or paragraphs each one is fantastically written.
It's hard for me to pick a favorite but some of the ones I liked best are: Monster Truck, The Arrest, Cape Crusade, and Fathers & Sons.
Each story is fantastic in it's own way and anyone reading this will find many to their liking.
This collection will not disappoint!