โ Scribed by D. Harlan Wilson
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
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.
"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
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
6 word scifi -- The movie that wasn't there -- They had goat heads -- Beneath a pink sun -- Monster truck -- Quality of life -- thot experiment wrtn on ifon -- The arrest -- Chimpanzee -- Victrola -- Whale, with a surprise alternate (happy) ending!!! -- Cape crusade -- Turns -- The womb -- Hence the
### Product Description 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
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