Brian Allen Carr

"Seventeen-year-old Riggle is living in rural Indiana with his uncle and uncle's girlfriend after the death of both of his parents. Now his uncle has gone missing, probably on a drug binge. It's Monday, and $800 in rent is due Friday. Riggle, who's been suspended from school, has to either find his uncle or get the money together himself. His mission exposes him to a motley group of Opioid locals--encounters by turns perplexing, harrowing, and heartening. Meanwhile, Riggle marks each day by remembering the mythology his late mother invented for him about how the days got their names. With amazing directness and insight, Carr explores what it's like to be a high school kid in in the age of Trump, a time of economic inequality, addiction, confederate flags, and mass shootings. A work of empathy and insight that pierces to the heart of our moment through an unforgettable protagonist"--

Opioid, Indiana

The black magic of bad living only looks hideous to honest eyes. Welcome to Scrape, Texas, a nowhere town near the Mexican border. Few people ever visit Scrape, and the unlucky ones who live there never seem to escape. They fill their days with fish fries, cheap beer, tobacco, firearms, and sex. But Scrape is about to be invaded by a plague of monsters unlike anything ever seen in the history of the world. First there's La Llorona -- the screaming woman in white -- and her horde of ghost children. Then come the black, hairy hands. Thousands, millions, scurrying on fingers like spiders or crabs. But the hands are nothing to El Abuelo, a wicked creature with a magical bullwhip, and even El Abuelo don't mean shit when the devil comes to town.

The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World

Ten stories. Three cycles. Fists and possums and gunfighters and penises and hookers and short buses and dead babies and fireworks. The stories in this collection originally appeared in: HOBART, FICTION INTERNATIONAL, KITTY SNACKS, TEXAS OBSERVER, NEW BORDER and THE PURITAN.

Vampire Conditions

"Motherfucking Sharks reads like it was carved into the floor of a sun-baked desert by an old testament prophet with a thirsty knife." - BEN LOORY, author of "Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day" "Where I come from, the children sing a song: Oh the motherfucking sharks Oh they're gonna come to town Oh they're gonna kill the babies Oh they're gonna make you drowned in your blood Oh the motherfucking sharks Oh they're gonna mince the flesh They're gonna swim up and surround you Don't you know you'll never pass the test it's over Oh the motherfucking sharks Oh they don't care about the gods And they don't care about the families And they don't care about the cries or tears they're killers. Motherfucking sharks Motherfucking sharks Motherfucking sharks Motherfucking sharks"

Motherfucking Sharks

A man named Cook has to inform people their houses are bound to collapse while attempting to keep his own home life from falling apart. He spends his days inspecting people's crawl spaces. He catalogs the filth and photographs the decay. Civilized life is a house that is rotting. High on legal weed and searching for answers, Cook works alongside similar riffraff to try and make money and save the future. That is until a bad sales month spirals out into a quantum stay at a surreal Ohio hotel. New friendships are made. Old curses are dealt with. And the local police force is put to the test. Bad Foundations is a comedic whirlwind of American Absurdism, we get to follow along and see what will and won't fall.

Bad Foundations

In the heart of Texas, an animal screams.

The Shape of Every Monster Yet to Come

Short Bus is a darkly humorous collection of linked stories set in the southern haunts of coastal Texas--near where the Rio Grande dumps its brackish water into the Gulf of Mexico. The stories in this book ponder deformity in all its forms. Fetuses twist their mustaches, feet float in jars, a special- education teacher aims to rob a bank with the aid of his students. But binding these stories is a gentle humanity. Brian Allen Carr moves his grotesque characters toward the hollows of hearts, heaving despicable actions toward tender outcomes. Short Bus is a book about understanding the worst of us, smiling at that which makes us shudder. “Brian Allen Carr’s brain must be a snarl of firing pistons, sizzling fuses, hoses leaking blood and tequila and hydraulic oil. How else can you explain the twisted machinery of his stories? Each of them is a disturbing journey that will thrill and educate you in the sunlit haze of the Texas/Mexico border—and the sometimes subterranean darkness of the human heart.”--Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh “Brian Allen Carr balances the harshness of his characters’ lives with beautiful and precise language, making parched land feel lush. Carr writes the best kind of stories--stories that only he could have written.” --Mary Miller (author of Big World) "Brian Allen Carr has written a short story collection that is everything hardworking--the characters, the scenery, the sentences--all form to build a machine crafted to break hearts along the border. A ridiculously strong first collection."--Shane Jones (author of Light Boxes)

Short Bus

Shane McKenzie

J. David Osborne

There's a new genre rising from the underground. Its name: BIZARRO. For years, readers have been asking for a category of fiction dedicated to the weird, crazy, cult side of storytelling that has become a staple in the film industry (with directors such as David Lynch, Takashi Miike, Tim Burton, and Lloyd Kaufman) but has been largely ignored in the literary world, until now. The Bizarro Starter Kit features short novels and story collections by ten of the leading authors in the bizarro genre: Brian Allen Carr, Violet LeVoit, David W. Barbee, Shane McKenzie, J. David Osborne, Kirsten Alene, Robert Devereaux, Douglas Hackle, Eric Hendrixson, and Nick Antosca.

The Bizarro Starter Kit (Red)

Fiction. After murdering his elder brother, Marlet must flee the broken town of Victory. With his sword, our low-hung handed hero maneuvers his way through a decrepit southern desert murdering blank-skinned men, being pursued by his illegitimate son, and deceiving those he encounters. All the while, Marlet holds on to his precious memories of Edie, the widowed wife of his brother. This is EDIE & THE LOW-HUNG HANDS.

Edie and the Low-hung Hands

Bad Foundations is a comedic absurdist novel about a home foundation inspector whose own home life is falling apart.

A lyrical, apocalyptic debut novel about addiction, friendship, and the struggle for survival at the height of an epidemic. The sickness started with a single child and quickly spread: you could get high by drinking your own shadow. Artificial lights were destroyed so addicts could sip shadow at night in the pure moonlight. Gangs of shadow addicts chased down children on playgrounds, rounded up old ladies from retirement homes. Cities were destroyed and governments fell. And if your shadow was sipped entirely, you became one of them, had to drink the shadows of others or go mad. One hundred and fifty years later, what’s left of the world is divided between the highly regimented life of those inside dome cities who are protected from natural light (and natural shadows), and those forced to the dangerous, hardscrabble life in the wilds outside. In rural Texas, Mira, her shadow-addicted-friend Murk, and an ex-domer named Bale search for a possible mythological cure to the shadow sickness—but they must find it, it is said, before the return of Halley’s Comet, which is only days away.

Brian Allen Carr

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