I won this from a Planet Bizarro Press giveaway celebrating 500 likes on Facebook. How they’re just reaching that milestone, I’ll never know. I love bizarro and I’ve loved every Planet Bizarro Press book I’ve read. Bizarro is such a niche genre, but I’m sure there are more than 500 people who are into it.

As much as I love winning giveaways, I also love supporting authors by doing things like writing reviews and buying their books. Songs About My Father’s Crotch was recently released on Audible and I snatched it up immediately. I think it’s important to include a quick note about the narration when reviewing a book. So here’s a quick note about Garry Messick’s performance. I found it quite enjoyable. Messick treats narrating like he’s a one man show, taking on different accents and cadences for each character.

This collection of short stories is great. Each story is stranger than the last and the progression is fast. It starts with a story about a guy who discovers that he loves wrestling with furniture and moves on to one about a couple who absentmindedly eat each other while watching movies. The story that stood out to me was Night Butterfly, a tale of a bromance between a guy and a moth. There’s some guy/butterfly sex, so if that squicks you out, maybe skip this story. The Unbearding tells the story of one guy’s beard causing a chain reaction resulting in a weird beard obsession in the whole town. Living houses with assholes and buttcheeks. Cloud people. Roald Dahl? There is so much packed into this small collection of short stories.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for me. This review doesn’t adequately describe the levels of weird in this collection of stories. I loved it. Super fun. Bizarro is one of those genres that some people just don’t get. That is apparent when you read Goodreads reviews of books like this and find a bunch of people asking what the whole thing had been about. In the words of the fictional Roald Dahl in Clouds and Feathers, “Some stories are just fun to read, y’know?” That’s how I feel about bizarro and why I always rate them so highly. They’re just fun to read. If you’re a fan of bizarro and you haven’t read Reade’s work, you should get on that. Don’t miss it. Or do. Whatever.

Big thanks to Planet Bizarro Press for sending me my copy of this book. You can get Songs About My Father’s Crotch on Amazon for a couple bucks. Also available on Audible.

To the author: Sorry for googling you after 2am. I do most of my reading and writing in the middle of the night. I hope I didn’t keep you up too late.