Winner 1st Annual Ultimate Bizarro Showdown! Garrett Cook was born in Wenham, Massachusetts July 19th, 1982. There are other details, but they're depressing or banal, with the exception of his haunted birthplace, his struggle with bipolar and a brief, unfortunate cancer scare. Yawn. Garrett Cook's work is far more interesting. He examines crises of faith and conscience through a pulpy,surreal or magorealistic lens to create magical, paranoid worlds that he hopes will entertain, antagonize and endear you. His books Murderland part 1:h8, Murderland 2:Life During Wartime and Archelon Ranch and Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective are available on Amazon. He is one of the creators and editors of the magazine Imperial Youth Review. What people are saying about Murderland Part 1: H8 "Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps that meat cleaver is our best hope for salvation. Or maybe he belongs in an asylum. MURDERLAND is a brutally shocking book. Demented. Logical. Disturbing. It can be crudely powerful one moment, tenderly skillful the next, so the reader never knows what’s coming. There’s no way to prepare. No way to protect yourself. Garrett Cook’s work has an edge … and it’s at your throat."- Robert Dunbar, author of The Shore and Martyrs and Monsters "The offbeat brilliance of this book will freak your face off-" Gina Ranalli, author of Mother Puncher, Sky Tongues and House of Fallen Leaves "I have not read a debut novel this good in a long time (or as far as I could remember)"- Jordan Krall, author of Piecemeal June and Squidpulp Blues "An intense, satirical and above all entertaining read"- Andersen Prunty, author of Zerostrata and the Overwhelming Urge "A savage, very original satire that openly mocks the American demigod-like worship of worthless celebrity with a future where despicable murderers become our new focus of adoration. It's as farcical as Swift's "A Modest Proposal," yet no less poignant."- bravenewworks.com "Action! Explosions! Hot broads! Garrett Cook is two-fisted Bizarro pulp. I love his stories"- Jeff Burk, author of SHATNERQUAKE

Author of Splatterpunk award-nominated novel "Ring of Fire," (Deadite Press) "Flesh Trade" (w/Edward Morris) (Grand Mal Press) "Punk Rock Ghost Story" (Deadite Press), "The Vegan Revolution...With Zombies," (Deadite Press) "Amazing Punk Stories," (Eraserhead Press) "Boot Boys of the Wolf Reich, (Deadite) Wonderland award-nominated short story collection "Screams from a Dying World." (Grand Mal Press), the science fiction novel "Goddamn Killing Machines" from Clash books. Agranoff's latest novel is the Science fiction horror and crime hybrid Nightmare City (co-written with Anthony Trevino) from Grand Mal Press. Summer of 2023 will see the release of The Last Night to Kill Nazis a horror novel set on the last day of World War 2. Agranoff is also a co-host of the Dickheads podcast devoted to the study of Philip K Dick and related classic New Wave science fiction. You can find Dickheads on Soundcloud. On his own he host Postcards from a Dying World a podcast devoted to stuff David likes.

Kris Saknussemm is a cult genre bending novelist and multimedia artist. Born and educated in America, he has lived most of his life abroad, primarily in Australia and the Pacific Islands. His science fiction themed novel ZANESVILLE, published by Villard Books in 2005, was hailed by critics as a revolutionary work of surreal black comedy. It has attracted the devotion of outsider artists like the Legendary Stardust Cowboy and was the inspiration for Michael Jackson to want to have a giant robot of himself constructed to roam the Las Vegas desert. It has become a cult hit in Russia as well. Another novel, an erotic supernatural thriller PRIVATE MIDNIGHT is set in a noir crime world of jazz, junkies and shadows from out of time. It became a bestseller in France and Italy. He has now in total published ten books that have been translated into 22 languages. The Rumors Soon after the publication of ZANESVILLE, reports began circulating around Hollywood that the actor Kevin Costner was furious about being featured as the “voice” of Dooley Duck, one of several animated hologram characters in the story, who serve as advertising vehicles in the fictional world of the novel. Under the magical influence of the protagonist, Elijah Clearfather, Dooley not only comes to life and breaks free of his commercial masters (a monolithic children’s day care empire) he develops a penis and becomes an advocate for sexual enjoyment and the leader of a social and political reform called The Surprise Party. A second rumor that began making the rounds that ZANESVILLE had actually been written by the late David Foster Wallace under a pseudonym, while another related and more detailed story had it that Kris Saknussemm is not an individual author at all, but rather a name taken by a collective of writers who wrote the book as a collaborative experiment, in something of the same spirit as Nicholas Bourbaki phenomenon amongst mathematicians. This latter view gained some extended support as Saknussemm had written about the “Bourbaki Conspiracy,” and an earlier published story was based on the premise that the reclusive Thomas Pynchon was just a composite entity—an on-going project and artistic prank which such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger had participated in. Appearing at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle in 2006, Saknussemm fielded questions about the rumor, remarking, “As ZANESVILLE has much to do with the idea of the Conspiracy Theory as the folk religion of our time, I’m somewhat amused. But I’ve heard something similar about Poppy Z. Brite. I think we all just like hoaxes and rumors. They reassure us that we can actually participate in the manufacture of reality. But as one of my characters says, ‘I’m real enough.’” A series of readings in New York and appearances on public radio and at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers helped to dispel the rumor.

Russell Edson (December 12, 1928 – April 29, 2014) was an American poet, novelist, writer, and illustrator. He was the son of the cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson. He studied art early in life and attended the Art Students League as a teenager. He began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His honors as a poet include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, and several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935 and lived there with his wife Frances. Edson, who jokingly has called himself "Little Mr. Prose Poem," is inarguably the foremost writer of prose poetry in America, having written exclusively in that form before it became fashionable. In a forthcoming study of the American prose poem, Michel Delville suggests that one of Edson's typical "recipes" for his prose poems involves a modern everyman who suddenly tumbles into an alternative reality in which he loses control over himself, sometimes to the point of being irremediably absorbed—both figuratively and literally—by his immediate and, most often, domestic everyday environment... Constantly fusing and confusing the banal and the bizarre, Edson delights in having a seemingly innocuous situation undergo the most unlikely and uncanny metamorphoses... Reclusive by nature, Edson has still managed to publish eleven books of prose poems and one novel, The Song of Percival Peacock (available from Coffee House Press).

Athena Villaverde writes sexy and weird bizarro fantasy tales, often set in wastelands populated by colorful and magical characters. Part cyber-punk, part urban fantasy. Cute and disturbing. Her interests include Tarot, knitting, fetish fashion, kawaii noir, chaos magick, hair dye, drawing and painting, dancing, Japanese anime, cult films, genetic mutations, parasites, survivalism, cosplay, steampunk, gothic lolita, mythology, burlesque, body modification, new wave, ska, punk rock.