BOOKS OF THE STRANGE

"Carlton Mellick kicked my ass, and I have the scars to prove it. Or should I say the scales? Mellick is an author who looks at the universe in fish-eyed wonder, but isn't afraid to throw his readers to the sharks. Read Fishy-fleshed and his teeth will be lodged in your brain forever." - John Lawson, editor of The Dream People and Raw Dog Screaming Press

Her warmth, a zombie shark's tear, the smell of time travel, an Irish drinking song, ugliness world, an underdweller's smile, the dirty ones, Jesus Christ's brain, the difference between Whyrie and her copy, an exploding head, and God whispering . . .

Fishy-fleshed is an illustrated collection of thought-logs from a child-like man living in the cartoonish future world of Ocean City, so technologically advanced that everyone possesses the ability to walk on water, cure diseases, clone food, and raise the dead . . . an entire civilization of Messiahs. When a team of researchers travel back in time to the days of the Real Messiah, they discover the past is a lot different than they imagined. It is an illogical flatland lacking in dimension and color, a sick-scape of crispy squid people wandering the desert for no apparent reason. Part science-fiction parody, part nightmarish absurdism, Fishy-fleshed is likely to leave a green-gray taste in your mouth.

This volume includes both the English translation and the original Ywellish language text.

Read Chapters 1-3.

Buy it at Amazon.com or special order it from your local bookstore.

Signed copies available at Shocklines.com

"Fishy-fleshed is one of those books that has such freedom of language, imagination, and ideas that once you begin reading it, you know you are reading not only fine writing, but a work of genius."
-Bruce Taylor, Kafka's Uncle.

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THE BABY JESUS BUTT PLUG 104 pages ISBN: 0-9729598-2-3 $9.95 paperback (Avant Punk Books, 2004) Carlton Mellick III's bizarre chapbook with a cult following becomes a full-sized 100-page trade paperback! A surreal "fairy tale" from one of the genre's most twisted minds. "Reading Carlton Mellick III's Baby Jesus Butt Plug is like hopping onto an LSD-filled time machine with David Cronenberg, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and George Romero at the controls. This tale of office drones and disposable clones is a splatterspunk odyssey, a cautionary tale of corporate omnipotence, and a possible blueprint of the future of the nuclear family. Touching, poignant, horrorific, nightmarish, and beautiful all at the same time, Baby Jesus Butt Plug is the work of an uncompromising visionary who lances the boil of his seething imagination with the tip of his pen..." -- Trent Haaga, star of Terror Firmer and co-writer of Citizen Toxie Read Chapters 1-3. Buy it at Amazon.com or special order it from your local bookstore. "This is a headsquisher of a book." - Jeremy Robert Johnson, co-author of Siren Promised. STEEL BREAKFAST ERA 172 pages ISBN: 0-9729598-7-4 $13.95 paperback (Eraserhead Press, 2003) A nightmarishly absurd story that is like "RE-ANIMATOR" meets "NAKED LUNCH" during the zombie apocalypse. Plot: The living dead conquered the Earth almost a century ago, leaving only small isolated communities of survivors spread across the shattered-earwig landscape. One such community has been locked away in a New York City high-rise, breeding like cockroaches for many generations, their civilization almost completely deteriorated into a mess of insane ones and those infested with parasites that mutate flesh into steel-string sculptures. There is nothing to live for, no concept of hope. Except for one man, not yet effected by the parasites, who finds hope after he creates a wife out of the human body parts that litter the hallways and then meets a group of zombie-shredding warriors from Japan (where the citizens have evolved into anime-like mechazoid battle soldiers). This tattoo-illustrated avant-garde novel is rising cult author, Carlton Mellick III, at his darkest and most horrific. Featuring tattoos by Pooch and published back to back with Simon Logan's THE DECADENT RETURN OF THE HI-FI QUEEN AND HER EMBRYONIC REPTILE INFECTION. Buy it at Amazon.com or special order it from your local bookstore. "The Steel Breakfast Era is a feverishly bizarre journey through a world where flesh has taken on the quality of living poetry. Written in a first-person present-tense immediacy that gives you no time to question the strange events as they unfold, cmIII's style describes technology-as-magic in a straight-forward manner that hypnotizes as it informs. How he manages to infuse even the most grotesque imagery of twisted and broken limbs with a strangely erotic charge is something to be admired. Trippy in the extreme, compellingly told and resolutely modern in the storytelling, this is a book well worth owning if you want to keep an eye on the future of the genre." - Scooter McCrae, writer/director of Shatter Dead and Sixteen Tongues TEETH AND TONGUE LANDSCAPE 208 pages ISBN: 0-9729598-8-2 $13.95 paperback (Eraserhead Press, 2003) In a world made out of meat, a socially-obsessive monophobic man finds himself to be the last human being on the face of the planet. Desperate for social interaction, he explores the landscape of flesh and blood, teeth and tongue, trying to befriend any strange creature or community that he comes across. Featuring illustrations by Brian Doogan and published back to back with Richard Kadrey's illustrated psycho-sexual cyberpunk novel ANGEL SCENE. Read Chapters 1-3. Buy it at Amazon.com or tell your local bookstore or library to carry CM3 books. "Razor Wire Pubic Hair is freaky, funny, brutal, techno-noir, limit-situation stuff set in a bad-dream future that's ultimately a metaphor for a present-day journey into the relentless nature of desire and the delicious permeability of gender. Somewhere right this second David Cronenberg, H. R. Giger, a young David Lynch, and a wizened Doug Rice are smiling because they know something extraordinary has just birthed in the Arizonan Desert of the Real. Read this, duck, and cover." - Lance Olsen, author of Freaknest RAZOR WIRE PUBIC HAIR 176 pages ISBN: 0-9713572-3-4 $10.95 paperback (Eraserhead Press, 2003) "I would call this a happy world to live in, with only brute body modified women and hermaphroditic sex toys, but I suppose constantly fighting off hordes of murderous rapists and needing to deposit your womb in a machine to make an ugly squishy baby would be a drawback." - Jasmine Sailing, editor/publisher Cyber-Psychos AOD A psycho-sexual fairy tale about a multi-gender screwing toy who is purchased by a razor dominatrix and brought into her nightmarish worlds of bizarre sex and mutilation. Read Chapters 1-3. Buy it at Amazon.com or tell your local bookstore or library to carry CM3 books. "Carlton Mellick III takes readers on an ultra-bizarre sexual nightmare with his novella 'Razor Wire Pubic Hair.' He blends a surreal landscape into a dark, hopeless future, creating disturbing, yet thought-provoking sequences of events that ultimately delve into horrors of lust and sex. This novella is a page turner of strange proportions. Your mind will twist into the shadowy points between eroticism and insanity, quickly addicted to the author's avant-guarde style. Mellick is a bizarre visionary, and this novella showcases his talented prose and twisted imaginings." - Shane Ryan Staley, author of I'll Be Damned SATAN BURGER 236 pages ISBN: 0-9713572-3-4 $14.95 paperback, $5.00 electronic. (Eraserhead Press, 2001) "This generation's Vonnegut!" -- Vincent Sakowski, author of Some Things are Better Left Unplugged A collage of absurd philosophies and dark surrealism, written and directed by Carlton Mellick III, starring a colorful cast of squatter punks on a journey to find their place in a world that doesn’t want them anymore. Featuring: a city overrun with peoples from other dimensions, a narrator who sees his body from a third-person perspective, a man whose flesh is dead but his body parts are alive and running amok, an overweight messiah, the personal life of the Grim Reaper, lots of classy sex and violence, and a fast food restaurant owned by the devil himself. 2001, Approx. 238 min., Color, Hi-Fi Stereo, Rated R. Read Chapter One. Buy it at Amazon.com or tell your local bookstore or library to carry CM3 books. "Bizarre, twisted, and emotinally raw--Carlton Mellick's fiction is the literary equivalent of putting your brain in a blender. You'll laugh while you squirm. Highly recommended!" -- Brian Keene, Author of The Rising and No Rest for the Wicked SUNSET WITH A BEARD 132 pages $11.95 trade paperback, $9.95 CD, $5.95 disk, $3.95 download. (Silverlake Publishing, 2002) A collection of fourteen stories that attempt to blend two opposing genres: surreal fiction and science fiction. The resulting journey through dark and desperate futures of aliens, diseases, and humanity's own madness is brain-bending and utterly bizarre. Contents: The Earwig Flesh Factory, A Soulless Man, City of New York, Fist World, Scrows, Plastic Storming, Drunk and King, Venus' Triangle, Multiple Personalities, Between Midnight and Tomorrow, High-Strung Heroes, Creatures of the Heavens, Kiss the Sun, and An Era of Liquid Streets. Read Sample stories: Fist World, The Earwig Flesh Factory, City of New York Buy it at Silverlake Publishing "If any living person is set to pick up where Nostradamus left off and tell us what the future might hold, it's Carlton Mellick III. He has a wickedly fertile brain and I suspect he has a few extra-sensory organs. Maybe a pineal gland that registers psychic vibrations. The truth is out there and Carlton already knows it." -- Mark McLaughlin, co-author of The Gossamer Eye and editor of The Urbanite ELECTRIC JESUS CORPSE 384 pages ISBN: 0-9713572-8-5 $17.95 paperback (Eraserhead Press, 2002) A twisted and surreal version of the story of Jesus Christ set in a bizarre modern day Earth that has been ravaged by war and cannibal zombie plagues, where the landscape is slowly mutating into meat and human flesh is transforming into machine. The novel follows Christ's twelve apostles. However, in this world the apostles are pimps, necrophiliacs, skinheads, and other assorted freaks. And they have no desire to follow Jesus Christ on his crusade to save humanity whatsoever. So this novel follows the lives of these never-been apostles on their separate epic journeys into the bizarre. An awkward and chaotic work of art that is like nothing you've ever seen. Read excerpts from Book One: Thaddaeus and the Green Tamata Tree... Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Four Buy it at Amazon.com or tell your local bookstore or library to carry CM3 books. "ELECTRIC JESUS CORPSE is one of the most odd, strange, weird books I have ever read, and enjoyed every minute of it. If you are a Terry Prachett fan then this is the book to read." -- D. M. Yorton, Top Site PORNO IN AUGUST A dreamlike micro-novel about a cast of porn stars floating in the middle of the atlantic ocean for some strange reason. It has been published in two different anthologies: RANDOM ACTS OF WEIRDNESS 224 pages edited by Brian Knight ISBN 1894815513 $16.00 paperback (Catalyst Press, 2002) An anthology of very weird horror stories by: Charlee Jacob, John Urbancik, T.G. Arsenault, David Whitman, Gord Rollo, Diana Price, Everette Bell, Donn Gash, Sephera Giron, Michael T. Huyck, Jr., Regina Mitchell & Brian Keene, Carlton Mellick III, Trent Zelazny, Dennis Latham, Trace Edward Zaber, M.J. Euringer, Sheri White, J. Newman, Gene O'Neill, Ed Cain, E.C. McMullen Jr., Weston Ochse, Jack Fisher, and Kathryn Ptacek. Purchase this at amazon.com THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR: SIXTEENTH EDITION Edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling 672 pages ISBN 0312314256, 0312314248 $19.95 paperback, $35.00 hardcover. (St. Martin's Griffin, 2003) Besides a story by Carlton Mellick III, this year's anthology features work by Lucy Taylor, Graham Joyce, China Mieville, Ramsey Campbell, Bentley Little, Neil Gaiman, Kathy Koja, Kim Newman, Brian Hodge, and others. COMING AUGUST, 2003 Pre-order a copy at Amazon.com "Carlton Mellick's stories invade your mind like a murder outside your window. Following in a direct line from Lautremont through William Burroughs, his stories combine absurdist landscapes with a cannibalistic, sexual unease. If there's a barcalounger in hell, Carlton's already got his feet propped up and his pen draining flames for new ink." -- Ron Dakron, author of Hammers, Newt and Infra. THE WIRE MESH MONGOLOID $1.00 (BizarrEbooks, 2002) An electronic collection that features 11 very short early works that regurgitate plastic snowflakes when turned upside-down. Dark, imaginative, and irresistable. Buy it at bizarrEbooks.com THE INFANT VENDING MACHINE $2.50 (Rational Skies Books/Eraserhead Press, 2001) OUT OF PRINT Surreal landscapes and cultural molestations . . . Carlton's first collection of experimental fiction, originally published as an e-book by Rational Skies. Stories include: The Infant Vending Machine, The Stray, Knife, Hamburger Clock, Visit to the Spiraling Manor, Bucket of Gross, The Dream People, Salvation Morning, Night House, and Miserable Crotchless Girl. SAMPLE STORIES: Hamburger Clock, Bucket of Gross, The Stray "Carlton Mellick III is becoming known as one of the most insanely imaginative authors in the cult fiction underground. His writing style is described as darkly surreal punk fantasy, but when you get down to it his style can (and should) only be described as BIZARRE. It is completely different than anything anyone has ever seen before. His books are twisted, intelligent, perverted, colorful, and even . . . cute. He is surely someone who will change the literary world forever." -- Rose O'Keefe, Eraserhead Press UNPUBLISHED SHORT NOVELS THE MENSTRUATING MALL - 120 pages (publisher undetermined) - Ten stereotypical consumer victims find they are unable to get themselves to leave an evacuated mall, trapped for weeks eating food from the food court and sleeping in the Dillards bedroom display. The characters begin to die off one by one as reality slowly twists and mutates into the bizarre. Written for this year's 3-day novel writing contest. THE COCKROACH PEOPLE - 100 pages (publisher undetermined) - An exploration of the fetish of vore, where miniature cockroach-like people struggle to survive in a house where the giant overdwellers find it sexually exciting to swallow them alive. OCEAN OF LARD (co-written with Kevin L. Donihe) - 150 pages - (publisher undetermined) - A perverted and twisted version of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, about derranged pirates on a sea of animal fat. Novels in the works - Skinhead Girls, The Cranky Dildo, The Eyeball Wizard's Toy Cunt, Ugly Heaven, Sex and Death in Television Town, Vaginas that Eat People, Young Adolf Hitler, and 1.5 billion others.