Party Wolves in my Skull by Michael Allen Rose is troubling, but probably not in any conventional sense. I'll have to explain that in a moment. But first...

Norman wakes up as his eyes are pushing their way out of his head to free themselves from his oppression. They've gained sentience and decided to free themselves and run off to get married. It's a little more complicated than this, involving freedom of the proletariat and such, but it's ultimately flavor without being that important to the plot. Anyway, Norman places a vacancy sign on his head, so the party wolves move into his skull, and they go with Norman to pursue his fleeing eyeballs. But the party wolves have a secret of their own. Along the way, they meet Zoe, a woman with a secret of her own who is being pursued by Walter, a giant talking walrus. Are you still with me?

Now for the troubling part: I don't know if it's because I've read too much bizarro fiction up to this point, but this novel makes a weird kind of sense. No, seriously! As I'm reading this book, I found myself stopping periodically and saying, “Yeah, I get that. It makes sense.” Or I just seriously need medication. I'll have to figure that one out at a later date and not while working on a book review that involves a man with a wolf pack living in his head falling in love with a woman who previously engaged in human-walrus relations.

At the end, though, what I walk away from Party Wolves in my Skull thinking is that this book was just plain fun. It's brain candy. It's short, sweet, and fun. And the reveals of the characters' secrets are themselves rather fun and add to the story and characters rather than detract from them. They don't disappoint and add a couple of nice twists to the story and to the character development. Yes, the author manages to get some significant and believable character development here.

Party Wolves in my Skull by Michael Allen Rose earns four and a half random pills out of five. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

As I've said here many times before, although I'm a fan of so-called "bizarro" or "gonzo" fiction, I also acknowledge that even under the best of circumstances, the subgenre takes some getting used to; after all, many of the stories that fit into this category are not much more than nonsensical dream transcripts with some random sex and violence thrown in for good measure, with not even an effort made to fit in a three-act plot but rather existing as a sort of literary form of a wacky old Warner Brothers cartoon. For example, take Michael Allen Rose's Party Wolves in My Skull, the latest title from Eraserhead Press's "New Bizarro Author Series;" its premise is not much more than that one day, a man's eyeballs stage a coup and run away from his body, leaving two holes to his brain that are promptly taken over by a series of microscopic, pot-smoking feral wolves (or maybe "frat-boy wolves" would be the better term), who essentially wreak havoc on our narrator because of him unable to see what kinds of nefarious things they're actually doing. Deliberately silly and gross, like many of the titles in this series, its fans already know who they are; but for the rest of you, a strong stomach and a high suspension of disbelief is encouraged.

Out of 10: 7.5 ( )