My Report About My Insanity Essay

This week I read a "story" by Jilly Jacks (if that's a real name then mine is really Blackhall, come on!) called My Homework About My Pets Essay.

(Link)

Here's a thing that describes why I chose to review this:
"Assigned to write a homework paper on a family pet, a young girl turns-in a moving essay of sadness... and of a not-quite-understood horror."

I had to read that twice because I didn't know what the hell it was talking about. Turns out the story is similar, but much, much worse--like if you wrote random words on a piece of paper then cut it up, then put that in a blender, then dropped it on the floor and left it for your mom to clean up.

At first I felt bad cause I was like, "What if some little girl actually wrote this?" No, it was just a lazy, lazy, horrible, fucking insane person. Spoilers for the end of this review--I'm just going to say it was the worst piece of shit I've ever read. And have you SEEN the shit I've read!?

Alright, I'll try to give you a plot synopsis. A schizophrenic person hallucinates that one day she finds a cat and this becomes a fixation that she repeats over and over until something happens and she stops seeing the delusion. Maybe the daily electric shock worked?

That's about it, except yeah it's supposed to be a little girl, but seriously if this is from the point of view of a little girl, this author either has never met a child or has only met extremely disturbed children. This reads like one of H.P. Lovecraft's characters trying to describe the terror of seeing Cthulhu while on cough syrup and suffering Alzheimer's on top of the normal Cthulhu-induced brand of insanity. Oh, and Cthulhu is a cat.

Here, I'll give you a sample paragraph so you can see:
"Well I don't know where he came from one fall he just came right out over there at my house after school on our front steps right there and came out to see us kids! And he was an orange and black little boy-type kittycat is what he was but he had some grey stripes on him too but mostly he was getting pretty much skinny for a kittycat and if you looked really hard on him right there you could see all those ribs of cats that they have in them sticking out right there on his sides on him right there! And I'm not even making up that part!"

And it gets worse. That was the first paragraph of the story. By the end I was seriously doubting reality. I mean, nobody could have just smeared shit onto a document like this and published it on Amazon, right? My brain is gone and I'm sitting in a nursing home right now imagining that i'm making clever jabs at people on the internet while I'm really muttering about cats to my nursing assistant while she wipes my ass.

I know this was supposed to be all cutesy and gimmicky and shit like when an autistic kid writes a book that is a best seller, but, see, the difference is that the autistic kid really wrote that book himself and had interesting insights, whereas this story was written by a full grown asshole and it comes off as if that asshole thought they could fool us by writing whole paragraphs like, "The cat, the cat, and the cat right there, the cat, he, he right there, he, the cat right there! and then my mom, and then the cat, the cat he did right there, the cat, and then the faces right there were screaming at me through the wall while I was trying to sleep." That's not cute, you're a lazy fucking dick, and I hate you, "Jilly Jacks."


GOD!



Ratings:

Having the Elements of a Story: 1 out of 5. If I really stretch and think about it, wading through the endless bullshit and giving unlimited benefit of the doubt, there is sort of a beginning, middle, and end. But seriously this is comparable to a full grown man purposely drawing like a child and attempting to sell it to me, but with none of the creativity of an actual child. There is almost no dialogue, no real conflict, no characterization, no- fuck, there's nothing. It's SO shitty. Trust me, don't read it.

Funny and Cute: 0 out of 5. I can't reiterate enough how badly this missed the mark. This is like finding a homeless guy and dressing him like a little girl to try to make him adorable. It's seriously disturbing and I'll tell you why:

Ending: 0 out of 5. Suddenly at the end the little girl finds the cat's collar and, well actually I'll just let you read it.
"Found his little red collar with no bells in it either.
Oh yes I did and it wasn't even red anymore it was partly brown like DRIED BLOOD BROWN and it was cut right through not ripped torn it was CUT RIGHT THROUGH like a CUT and I found it right in the trash behind the garage of our house back there."

Uhh what the hell? Suddenly we go full psycho. And those caps are the author's. The little girl just fucking finally lost her mind at the end there, and fuck subtlety, we need CAPITAL LETTERS to substitute for actual plot because up until this last paragraph there WAS NONE.

Overall: 0 out of 5. That's right, z-e-r-o. I already said it, but I'll say it again. This was the worst piece of shit I've ever read. There was nothing creative about it. It was like being fed an entire box of packing peanuts, one by one, without water.



If you want something more on the level of a box of crackers without water, visit amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall

Eternal Discomforts

I just read Eternal Needs, and boy do I feel weird now. It's by Anne Connery (no relation).

(Link)

Here's a description which will immediately make clear why I decided to read this:

"A lone survivor adapts to a zombie-filled world where the Undead possess hunger of a different sort. 

A short story that's part erotica, part horror and ALL Anne Connery."

As I was reading this description I was all like, "Another zombie story, yaw-WAIT, erotica? Someone really wrote this and it's not a joke? Let's do this!"

But on a side note, Amazon keeps suggesting erotica to me ever since I did that review of the sexy cowboy story, which makes me sort of uncomfortable. I want to like write them a letter like, "Hey, I just got that one story so I could make some jokes. And the zombie one too, same reason. And the lactation erotica. And the animal one. Okay, the three animal ones. But seriously stop suggesting- what's this? Mermaids? Okay, this is the last one though, only because I think it will be funny. Seriously."

But if you want some more where that came from, the author of this story is also the creator of The Erotic Shakespeare: The Tragedy of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. But I mean, check out her picture:

I know, right? It's like, "Now THAT is a lady that likes, you know, cats and stuff." And apparently Shakespeare and zombie erotica. I am VERY surprised this lady hasn't written a vampire one yet.

Alright let's get to it. This story immediately had me guessing because the first line is, "Even the LAST MAN ON EARTH has needs." Caps included, each and every time she uses the phrase LAST MAN ON EARTH. Haha what the hell? Now I'm stuck in this weird limbo between funny, sexy, and...horror?

She does an alright job though, I pretty much immediately forgot a woman was writing it because she does a good job writing for men. It's just a little weird how apologetic the main character is.

If you hadn't already guessed, he has sex with zombies. But of course these are cleaned up zombies that don't decay and have some body heat and are super not dangerous. So he goes and catches zombies with a collar and epoxies their mouths shut and rapes has sensual sex with them.

But it's super not sexist in any way, she really wants you to know, because he feels super guilty (and super turned on) by the whole thing. Actually when she keeps pointing it out it really calls attention to it and makes you wonder what kind of person this story is written for.

Like, what's the message, or the fetish, or whatever you want to call it here? Because she is obviously really conscious of misogyny and keeps mentioning it. The main character also carefully showers the girls and houses them and painstakingly finds clothes for them and applies their makeup.

And she wants us to know that he really likes talking to girls, it's just a necessity that these ones can't talk so that he can force seduce them into consensual sex. But while I'm reading about all these ways he makes up for his seemingly weird fetish that he would totally not participate in if there were any real live girls left, I'm like, "Wait a minute, I thought she said this was erotic? Maybe she won't put any actual sex in and I won't have to do an awkward blog post today."

But it gets very much fucking awkward, dear reader, because he does have sex with them, and they like it because of zombie instincts or something, and when they have an orgasm their eyes clear up and they are brought back to a life long enough to respond to him saying, "If you can hear me, nod!"

And if you used this story for its intended purpose during that part, you have some explaining to do to your now totally messed up moral compass. Enjoy!

Ratings:
Making You Question Your Entire Belief System: 5 out of 5. I am not convinced this is a bad story. It might actually be a fucking great story, because obviously this lady wrote this due to the fact that it's a fetish. She was fully conscious of that, but made the narrator reluctant and guilty about treating dead people like this and making it clear that his drives made him do it. But the reader willingly reads this story, presumably to get off. So what does that say about the morals of someone turned on by it? She is literally shaming you while you jack off. (And personally that pushed me over the top.)

Sexiness: 2 out of 5. Seriously though, this story had very little of the erotic or the zombie categories that are supposed to make this "zombie erotica." But again, that phrase is intended for humor. I was actually very much reminded of people that are obsessed with real dolls when I read this. The guy loves to dress up near inanimate girls and do their makeup. There is most definitely a niche for people that think that's sexy, but it's almost certainly a larger group than even those interested in Shakespeare erotica.

Ending: What_the_fuck out of 5. So if the story didn't cause a huge enough cognitive dissonance, the guy hears at the end that there is a camp of survivors three days walk away. Yes, as you might expect he looks at his padded rooms filled with pet zombie girls and realizes that he has been fucking zombies this whole time and getting off on the flashes where they come back to life mid coitus with a stranger. He realizes this, and he is sad that he has to leave. He goes to the store to get Viagra, vibrators, and Gatorade for a three day zombie sex marathon because he feels sorry for them, and no I'm not making this up. Just imagine for a sec nearly dying of exhaustion having sex with zombies, and then rocking up to a survivor colony. What the hell!?


Overall: 2 out of 5. I'm too confused about what the goal of this story even was to give it more than two points. But if her goal was to try to turn peoples' worlds upside down, to destroy my conception of reality, I would say it gets a 5.


If you want to read some guilt free zombierotica, visit amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall

Just Well Robbed

Today I read Just Well Loved by Rebecca Brae.

(Link)

I just want to point out that all of her book covers look exactly like that. YOU might think it's boring, but I think that her appreciation for pastel nature scenes and Victorian narration styles are really9238fu   

Sorry I passed out on my keyboard.

Here's a description:
"A chance meeting brings new hope to a beloved character trapped in a literary classic."

Fair enough. I am a fan of the short and sweet description. I mean, it's a short story, just freaking buy it and you'll find out what it's about! But that doesn't give me much to make fun of.

I was trying to figure out what the literary classic was, until I realized her description is backwards. Way to go, you had ONE sentence and you messed it up! Actually if you take this description literally it should mean like a beloved character, let's take Homer Simpson for our example, is trapped in a literary classic, like say Jane Eyre.

But what it really means is one of those short stories where a literary character is put in. Except, instead of putting Spock in the present day or something, this story is just in the same setting as the character was in before with the same plot as before and it's not stealing because...

It took me a couple of seconds to guess it was Quasimodo, and the annoyingly formal main character and her daughter see past his ugliness to the kindhearted and intelligent man inside and befriend him. Which is different from the theme of the original Hunchback because...

The story really points out that most people are shallow and, uh, I'm having trouble putting this into words because it's such a rare theme. If only there was a common saying or comparison I could apply in this situation, but I'll just have to settle for making my own, so here goes: It's like, you can't decide whether a movie is good or not just from its poster, you know?

Anyway, Quasimodo makes friends with these people and they make a picnic date for the next day and we all learn a lesson about acceptance of other races and his whole life is solved (except he's still horribly deformed), the end. 





Seriously I got nothing else to say because this story is as utterly unsurprising and bland as tofu that has been boiled for far too long by a British chef who was blinded in a terrible accident involving a spice-throwing ninja in a salt mine. Oh yes, I will torture the hell out of that simile and force it to happen sooner or later and you will take it!


Ratings:

Annoyingly Good Grammar: 5 out of 5. The whole experience was horrible because I felt like I was reading something from the early 1900s but with far more stick-up-the-assery, like if H.P. Lovecraft was forced to edit out all the jokes in The Importance of Being Ernest while Nobokov whipped him every time he used a word that sounded too relaxed, like "amidst."

Lessons Learned: 0 out of 5. There was literally no conflict in this story. Both the lady and her daughter were immediately like, "We accept you for who you are," and were not at all scared by the hunchback's ugliness. Not only that, but he also wasn't described at all and it was impossible for the reader to be startled by him because it is taken for granted that we'll be like, "Oh yeah, Quasimodo. I saw that Disney movie." The themes and metaphors that could be drawn out of his ugly ass are all ignored too. The Goonies did a far better job with the befriending a freak thing. There was also no internal conflict in any of the three characters, despite the author setting up the mother as the clear narrator, then skipping to the little girl for a second before ending with Quasimodo randomly thinking, "F-friends?" Yeah, way to make him smarter than he looks, better leave that to your summarize-someone-else's-story style descriptions next time.

Stealing Someone's Story: 1 out of 5. I would give it more, but the key here is she didn't successfully steal someone's story, I was onto that shit like immediately. She could have changed his name and gotten more points here, but she took some creative writing class where the teacher was like, "Take a favorite fictional character and juxtapose them into your story, and let's try to stay away from, uh, weird narrative styles from the turn of last century *cough*Rebecca*cough*," and she completely missed the point. What she heard was, "You can just steal other peoples' shit, plot, characters, and all and if you put your name on it, it counts as a different story." Even fan-fiction is a step above this because the characters are put into different situations, dumbass!

Overall: 2 out of 5. The writing was very coherent and it had a sensible, chronological progression. The only things this story lacks are plot, voice, logical narration, original characters, original themes, conflict, character arcs, and any entertainment value whatsoever. Small fixes, really.



If you want to read something with characters that aren't necessarily original, but are at least have names that are changed to things like Parry Hotter, go to amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall