John Edward Lawson Knihy

There's a new genre rising from the underground. Its name: BIZARRO. For years, readers have been asking for a category of fiction dedicated to the weird, crazy, cult side of storytelling that has become a staple in the film industry (with directors such as David Lynch, Takashi Miike, Tim Burton, and Lloyd Kaufman) but has been largely ignored in the literary world, until now. The Bizarro Starter Kit features short novels and story collections by ten of the leading authors in the bizarro genre: D. Harlan Wilson, Carlton Mellick III, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Kevin L Donihe, Gina Ranalli, Andre Duza, VIncent W. Sakowski, Steve Beard, John Edward Lawson, and Bruce Taylor.

Gives fans of super spy Alex Rider a behind-the-scenes look at top-secret blueprints and plans for his high-tech gadgets, including the Game Boy that doubled as a Geiger counter in Skeleton Key, and the CD player with the fast-spinning saw blade in Point Blank.

From the introduction: "I began this anthology to dispel the illusion that we are in a famine age of literature and the result surprised even me in how powerfully it shattered that misconception."Words are slippery things and though we have bridled them with grammar, feel at ease in the presence of a common turn of phrase, they have not been completely tamed. And there are still writers who are both brave and foolhardy enough to let words out of their cages, feed them despite the signs that clearly state not to and prod them with sticks to see what they might do.Editor Forrest Armstrong has gone in search of these experimenters, alchemists of verbiage, who wrestle with words in dark places and return with something newly minted, transmogrified and fresh for us to puzzle over."Avant-garde is by definition work on the front line of art, and I accepted every single piece of writing in this anthology because of how fresh it is, how differently the writer approaches his or her art."