TV Snorted My Brain

by Bradley Sands

Artie Pendragon loves anarchy, pee wee soccer games, and midget wrestlers. He really hates high school, but his plan to blow up his school is interrupted when he is declared the king of TV Land. After taking the throne, Artie's pro-wrestling, non-midget uncle steals it from him and enforces a strict policy of censorship throughout the land. To defend himself against his uncle's piledrivers and take back what is rightfully his, Artie must go on a quest for the Holy Grail, which is the only thing that will make his Excalibur 3000 remote control work properly.

TV Snorted My Brain is a modern-day retelling of the King Arthur myth that happens inside your television set. Come along with Artie as he journeys through the various channels of TV Land and recruits knights along the way to help him overthrow his uncle and bring anarchy to the land.

Praise for the book:

“TV Snorted My Brain is (Sands’) best work to date. Call me crazy, but I think this generation has found its own Vonnegut.” - Verbicide

"TV Snorted My Brain is the funniest book I have ever read." - M.C. O'Neill, author of The Ancients and the Angels series

"There oughta be a law against Bradley Sands. Once again America's satirical arsonist sets pop culture on fire. TV Snorted My Brain ties the King Arthur legend to the tracks and runs it over with a TV-powered train." - Patrick Wensink, author of Broken Piano for President

Genres: Bizarro Fiction

142 pages, Paperback

First published September 23, 2012

About the author

Bradley Sands is an author of bizarro fiction. He wrote Dodgeball High, Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy, Rico Slade Will F*cking Kill You, and other books.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a perfect example of imperfect readers, not books. When I read this earlier this year I had no idea that the bizarro genre of contemporary literature fiction even existed. Without filters, I was worthless to read this book.

Thanks to meeting GR friend Arthur Graham this year and learning under his tutelage, I now have some bizarro under my belt. And having now re-read this book, I owe Mr. Sands an apology. Forgive me, good sir, for I am a work-in-progress reader, trying to get better, one book at a time. This book is an awesome addition to the genre.

I won't delete my original review below, because I don't want to forget my ignorant cheekiness, and I want to remind the future me to be very clear why a book doesn't work for me.

-------------------------------------

Original review, January 30, 2013

After the staggering (in a good way) experience with Mourning Diary, and wanting to take a break from the heady tomes from the likes of Proust and Schulz, I made the mistake of picking up the wrong book for some light reading. Its intended satire, parodic retelling of the Arthurian legend, and overall zaniness was lost on me. Am I getting too old? Perhaps. And it could also be that my palate just wasn't ready for the jarring effects of Mr. Sands' prose. For example, here's a sampling of sentences read before picking up "TV Snorted My Brain":

Proust: Whether it is that the faith which creates has dried up in me, or that reality takes shape in memory alone, the flowers I am shown today for the first time do not seem to me to be real flowers.

Schulz: It is strange how old interiors reflect their dark turbulent past, how in their stillness bygone history tries to be reenacted, how the same situations repeat themselves with infinite variations, turned upside down and inside out by the fruitless dialectic of wallpapers and hangings.

And then Mr. Sands, if you please, on page 7 of his book:

Sands: The mother of a girl who my little sister anally penetrated put a broken beer bottle through my real dad's brain.

Yes, I did finish the entire book. And now, back to our regularly scheduled program.

[Mykle]

OMFG! My ass! Where is it? Did I laugh it off? I think I did!

This is a Bizarro young-adult novel, which means a young adult novel with gross sexy parts and comic ultraviolence. Any Bradley Sands book you might have read will prepare you for that part. The story is a point-for-point retelling of the tale of King Arthur, except that Artie is a pre-teen anarchist who wants to blow up his school with a pipe bomb, Excalibur is a television remote, and Camelot is Castle Greyskull.

I think this is the best book Sands has ever written! Certainly it's the most carefully paced. The comedy is simultaneously subtle and outrageous, the rhythm is relentless, and the bizarro randomness that falls out of his skull flows perfectly from gag to gag. It's a perfect, biting burlesque of TV reality and teenage angst.

One does get the feeling that Bradley Sands' brain might be permanently dented by overexposure to pop culture. Just remember: he did it for us!

(NOTICE: As part of the Mykle Hates His Friends Anti-Nepotism Initiative, you may notice there are no stars. Just close your eyes and picture five of them.)

[Shamus McCarty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember when I was a 13-14 year old kid. Everything sucked, it sucked because all day people were telling me what to do and I had no choice but to do it. I hate being told what to do, to this day if my boss starts getting a little to bossy I’ll be like “Hey! Don’t tell me what to do!” He normally tells me what to do even louder after that, but the point remains.

Anyways, “TV Snorted My Brain” captured that 13-14 year old punk kid that was I with the main character. Although Sands took his teenage awkwardness and ideals to the extreme, I could really relate to the kid. I wish there were more books out there that spoke to 13-14 year old me the way this one did. Sands did a good job of taking me back through time and going on an adventure as a still-scared-of-girls-preteen, moments away from puberty. It’s an awkward time for a young man, a time I can reminisce about fondly even though I hated every minute of it.

[Emory · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's difficult to say much about "TV Snorted My Brain" without ruining the experience or spoiling the story. Author Bradley Sands has once again displayed a gift with bizarro fiction and its forms while also employing older methods in a strange synthesis of compelling literary modes. This is a fun story, short but evenly paced and in the same satirical vein of "Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You."

What can be said about the plot is this: our protagonist is high school student Artie. He is a self-professed anarchist who wants to do a lot of anarchist things like blow up his school, burn lots of money, and kill his stupid mom. He does none of this because the rest of the world has yet to descend into anarchy. Except the blow up school bit, but he doesn't get to that because in his quest for some double-"A" batteries to power the timer on his pipe bomb, he gets sucked into the family television along with everyone else in the house. What happens once there TV land you'll have to read.

"TV..." is similar to other bizarro tales that seek to rewrite, retell, or otherwise improve older well-known narratives like Gina Ranalli's "Chemical Gardens" or Vincent W. Sakowski's "Not Quite One of the Boys." Where it differs is in that instead of a straight rewrite, Sands has used the plot to make a really nice commentary about the state of entertainment media over the last three decades. This does date many of the jokes and precludes "TV..." from timeless status, but it is still funny.

More impressive than the social commentary is Sands' use of the classical hero's quest in a less than epic-length work while maintaining the import and urgency such a framework demands. Where recent modern uses of the quest such as the "Star Wars" saga, or the printed form of "The Lord of the Rings" can be a bit dry at times and require a significant investment of time to digest, "TV Snorted My Brain" asks only for a few hours of the reader's time but still delivers a sweeping story arc that crosses into irreality without a heavy-handed dose of suspension of disbelief. The story moves along effortlessly from one event to the next and sees our protagonist come into his own in a quick and humor-filled fashion.

"TV Snorted My Brain" may at first glance from chapter one seem to be a string of repetitive, foul-mouthed rambling from a teen-aged protagnist. However, given a chance and careful critical analysis a reader will find that "TV..." is far more than it appears to be. It shows a level of sophistication that is not often found in similar fictions, all while maintaining a facade of simplicity that is common to other examples. In short, like his other works, Bradley Sands and "TV Snorted My Brain" comes highly recommended.

[Anita Dalton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book you will either love or hate. I don’t think there can be much gray area. The reason for this is because this book relies on a teenaged narrator, a particularly stupid teenaged narrator whose brain is given to repetition. Lots of repetition. I suspect a real teenager would find this book interminable. But if you can remember yourself when you were annoying as the day was long, yammering about ANARCHY and hating everyone around you because they were norms, you may find Artie Pendragon as funny as I did.

This book is a retelling of the King Arthur story using ridiculous suburban schmoes in the place of heroic figures. Excalibur is a remote control and Camelot is inside a television. When Artie’s father dies and his mother marries his uncle, no one can work the television until one night Artie uses the Excalibur 3000 to navigate the TV and his entire family finds themselves sucked into a netherworld wherein actors really are inside the television. Artie has to engage in a struggle against his stepfather and little sister as he hunts for the Holy Grail. Can he save the land in the television? Can he achieve his goal of anarchy? Can he get his wife back from his stepfather and take his place as the rightful ruler? Will his struggles be so silly that it makes the mythos of Arthur seem like little more than the backdrop to a Bill and Ted film? The only question I will answer for you is the last one and I think you know what the answer is.

As I mentioned earlier, this book is told from the perspective of an irritating and somewhat uninteresting teenager, a teenager upon whom fate has thrust greatness of sorts. Through showing examples of Artie’s thought processes, I can demonstrate how simple and repetitive he is and, in my opinion, utterly hilarious. Here’s a scene wherein he is watching his younger sister playing in a soccer game:

I sit in a folding beach chair on the sidelines, watching my little sister play out on the field. The chair is uncomfortable. A strip of polyester fabric is poking me in the ass. I do not like to be poked in the ass. But it is worth being poked in the ass. It is a really great pee wee soccer game. It is total anarchy, super-retardo anarchy awesomeness. It is the most anarchist thing on Earth.

Oh wait, I forgot about riots in the streets.

But riots in the streets don’t have little girls picking up clumps of grass out of the ground instead of defending their goal, little girls chasing butterflies instead of the ball, little girls tripping over the ball, little girls kicking the ball into the wrong goal, little girls calling their opponents cuntbags, little girls screaming as they run away from the ball.

Riots in the streets don’t have soccer moms. Riots on the streets don’t have soccer dads. Riots on the streets don’t have riots between soccer moms and soccer dads over pee wee soccer games. Riots in the streets are over real world issues. Real world issues are fucking lame.

I say it out loud, “Real world issues are fucking lame.”

This is a long quote but I throw it out here because it’s a litmus test. If you find this particular style of writing annoying, you will want to stop reading here and give this book a miss. But if you find this strangely charming and exactly like the tiresome kid you sat next to in health class, the one who scrawled Anarchy! symbols all over his Trapper Keeper and quoted Metallica lyrics back before they “sold out” and totally did not give a fuck, you’ll enjoy the rest of this book. And this really is the bulk of the book – the Arthurian myth as filtered through the mind and life of a kid who will remind you a bit of Dermott from The Venture Brothers. There are the usual fantastic elements that accompany bizarro books but this book is quite simple in its execution – teenage dirtbag as King Arthur.

You can read my entire discussion here.

[Douglas Hackle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like much of Bradley Sands' work, TV Snorted My Brain is itself a sort an exercise in controlled anarchy: anarchy of plot, character, theme, and morality. So it’s appropriate that this insane parodic retelling of the Arthurian legend begins with the line, “Anarchy fucking rules.” This book is a must-read for fans of bizarro and absurdist humor and a great starting point for readers new to Sands' work, as it is more accessible than some of his earlier stuff.

[Peter Goutis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is exactly the type of story that I've come to expect when I dive into something that Bradley Sands has written. It's weird, yet there is a clear story here. It's super fun to read and keeps you wondering what he's going to do next. The characters aren't normal, but you find yourself really caring about them still.

They say that it should be a goal to learn and understand all of the classic story forms and plots if you want to become a writer. This story is a great example of what can be done when sticking to one of those story lines. It's something you have never seen or heard of for sure.


Bradley seems to just keep getting better and better with each new release. I can't wait to see what he does next.

[Karl Fischer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having a soft spot for YA adventure stories, I found this bizarro send-up (based on Arthurian legend) to be a treat. The tone is a flippant one, chocked full of expletives and repetition, like a foul-mouthed teenager trying to write epic poetry. The protagonist, Artie, feels very authentic, at times sympathetic and at others utterly childish. He grows as a character and we feel his victories when they occur. The world itself is a fun, ultra violent wonderland that only modern television could produce. It genuinely made me laugh out loud.

Not everything works, of course. Some of the repetitive language elements, particularly with one of the knights, began to wear on me. The biggest disappointment is Gwen's character because she doesn't have any real personality. The opportunity was there to create an interesting female love interest, someone as equally authentic and quirky as Artie, but she turns out to be vacuous and easily duped. After Artie leaves on his quest, her role is reduced to a mere, cringe-worthy refrain: "my girlfriend is being tricked into blowing my uncle" (paraphrased).

All told, TV Snorted My Brain is an energetic read that most can enjoy...assuming they aren't devotees of Proust who take themselves too seriously.

[NumberLord · Rating 4 out of 5]

TV Snorted My Brain is the latest literary offering from Bradley Sands. For those not familiar with the scene, Sands is the Randolph Mantooth of Bizarro Lit. And what could be more Randolph Mantoothy than a retelling of the King Arthur legend, set in the world of TV Land? (Actually, a good bizarro tale involving firemen would probably be pretty Mantoothy too.)

“My mortal enemies are the rules that govern society.”

Our protagonist is Artie Pendragon, a teen wanna-be anarchist--like a slightly mature Tucker Max. He has to put up with a widowed mom, an ex-wrestler uncle, and an annoying younger sister.

“Extra hot mustard is not very anarchist. Extra hot mustard is the tool the overlords use to keep down the proletarians. It is what they threaten us with whenever we speak our mind.”

But upon finding that he (and he alone) can work the Excalibur 3000 to change TV channels, his life begins to change.

“He who worketh this remote control is the true king of all TV Land.”

He and his family end up in TV Land. And he’s king. Isn’t it good to be king?

“Homeless people smell really bad. I believe smelling really bad is the most anarchist scent in the universe. The second most anarchist scent in the universe is Obsession for Men.”

Not with his family, it isn’t. But once in TV Land, he meets up with magical Merlin, pretty Gwen, stylish Lance, and Gawain, one of those observation-based comedians.

“Why do zombies always want to eat people’s brains.? Brains must taste awful. If I were a zombie, I’d yell ‘General Tso’s Chiiicken!’ while I attacked people. That stuff is delicious.”

And what happens? Things get weird. Because that’s what happens in Bizarro. And it’s what happens in a Bradley Sands book. Go on, read it. Because reading Bizarro is totally anarchist!

[Jeremy Maddux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Artie Pendragon is a Hot Topic anarchist who lives with his mom, sister, drunk uncle and his wrestling buddies until one day, the Excalibur remote control transports him to a magical realm inside the television. His uncle soon follows suit and takes over the magical realm Artie Pendragon was destined to inhabit. His first official duties are to marry Artie's girlfriend Gwen and impose stringent censorship on everyone in tv land, so that every utterance of profanity is covered by a beeping sound and their mouths fogged out.

Determined to reclaim his throne, his girlfriend and his life, Artie sets out to stop his uncle and, in the process, befriends an unlikely cast of characters including an insecure barbarian, a gay stand up comedian and living internet memes.

This isn't my favorite work of Sands' (that honor goes to Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy), but it's a wild, unrestrained ride into the mind of someone we may never understand. Some of the hallmarks of Sands' style include hyperbole, conceptual apparatuses coming to life, a fierce need for characters to repeat themselves until what they're saying almost becomes a mantra and the minutiae of everyday life being enshrined by corporation, such as Telling People To Do Ridiculous Things For Our Own Amusement Co. I'm wanting to say Sands is an outright flirt with dadaism in style. He has the unique ability to drag his tales tirelessly through different plot constructs. He can transform a text into a Choose Your Own Adventure story for a few chapters, then before you even have time to tire of the joke, he can morph it back to a regular text, then just as fast it can become a bildungsroman or exercise in stream of consciousness.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember when TV was in my daily routine now I could go without. Before it snorted my brain.

Plastic zombies, talking thingabobs like a Marilyn Monroe ass hair, an adventure with a remote control and more smunnies you could shake a carrot at. Its all tied together with Bradley Sands laugh out loud romp.

Kinda reminded me of Stay Tuned with Jack Ritter (RIP). Was waiting for his appearance at some points as the story unfolded.

A boys farther dies and leaves behind a remote control that controls TV Land. The becomes King and New Dad takes over the adventure for the holy Grail and a little sister with a pink Magic wand. "Little bunnies playing with squeaky toys" beware of those magic words.

More laughs from the man who brought us Rico Slade, the man who ruins orgies the one and only Bradley Sands.

[Jess-i-ca]

[Jason Schmit · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like a 3.5. Glad I have some other bizarro under my belt. Sometimes it was genius, random, LOL funny..., strange.... Everything you would expect. Ultimately, it is is difficult to rate a piece of work like this next to some of my all time favorites... It was great, I enjoyed it... But will it stick with me? I think in some way it will, but because there just isn't anything like it.

[Nicholaus Patnaude · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deeply in love with the cover art of this one–I wonder if this artist actually does comics? This one did not have the same emotional depth as some of the other bizarro writers I’ve been reading lately. Nonetheless, you will find some imaginative absurdist mayhem within these pages. Check it out if you feel like some lighter/consistently slapstick and scatological bizarro fare.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this "retelling" of the King Arthur story to be an interesting concept, but I just wasn't really into the writing style. I felt like everything was getting said 3 times and that this book could have been about 10-20 pages shorter and you wouldn't have lost anything.

[Booked podcast · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hear our complete review here: http://www.bookedpodcast.com/2012/11/...

[Christopher Mattick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bradley Sands's best work yet.