Cartoons in the Suicide Forest

by Leza Cantoral

Cartoons in the Suicide ForestWhen we’re deadYou know She’ll adore us"Lyrical and perverse, like a prostitute on acid in a poetry slam, this collection of the dark, erotic, and bizarre flirts with the heroin fever dreams of a William Burroughs and the horrific surrealism of Charlee Jacobs." - Wrath James White, THE RESURRECTIONIST and THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND SINS

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Bizarro Fiction, Fantasy

110 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 2016

Reviews

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a dark and dangerous mix of magic in these short stories. The landscapes are lush and filled with colors, but approach them with caution. Entities take on drastic forms and different shades within the blink of an eye. There is an underlying pull of both yearning and deception that warns the reader that not all enchantment is benign. Let the author transport you to the bottom of the ocean and then send you flying to the promise of a better planet. These stories glow in the dark and their lithe forms are mutable.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love how Leza Cantoral reappropriates the fairy tale in this collection. Too many adult people turn to them to entertain a false sense of comfort and Cantoral reimbues them with the necessary edge to transform them into cautionary tales for adults. Her writing is both bubbly and dangerous at the same time. I liked several stories in the collection but watch out for the title short, Planet Mermaid, Siberian Honeymoon and Suicide Pigs. Leza Cantoral is FUN. CARTOONS IN THE SUICIDE FOREST savantly mixes innocence and heartbreak, making the product 100% original.

Get on it!

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's take a little test.

"I feel dazed and hollowed to my core like someone took a melon baller to my soul. I am awake and I want to see the tangerine dream bleeding on the trees outside. I rub my eyes and look around to my melting lashes at all the drunken looking babies glittering in yesterday's glamour, drool caked on their painted tips, eyeliner smudged over raccoon eyes. Party animals snoring off yesterday's cocaine apocalypse."

How does that make you feel?

Are the words still swarming in your brain overpowering the senses. Is your head in the sand trying to forget it? Do you feel suddenly depressed and don't know why. Or are you swooning with delight over the emotional beauty of the paragraph?

The correct answer is any of them or more.

Leza Cantoral swings a powerhouse of a pen, so to speak. The above paragraph is typical of her gift of description but it is also one of the milder ones I could present. Cartoons in the Suicide Forest is a collection of twelve short stories of intense emotions, vivid imagery interplay, and disturbing imagination switch between fairy tale innocence and physical/psychological horror.. Some read like nightmares and others like psychedelic trips. In fact, I suspect one possibly autobiographically based piece of fiction was a psychedelic trip. To say the author's stories are full of sexual tension is like saying a rattlesnake bite tickles a little.

The twelve stories vary in type but all are loaded with emotional intensity. They all have a certain bleakness disguised in sensational imagery yet hints at experiences we all may have had at one point or another. The title story is typical, a coming of age tale wrapped in a Freudian Grimm fantasy of gruesome proportions. "Siberian Honeymoon" is one of the more straightforward horror tales with a dystopic political theme and a feline bent. "Beast" is a version of Beauty and the Beast that you will not see remade by Disney. I'm not sure even Cocteau would have touched it. I must say I get a twisted kick out of "Green Lotus " as it satirizes the new age holistic fads that keep popping up.

And that is just the first four works. Every tale has its surprises. There is much of the fairy tale in her writing but used in a way you may of not imagined. "Star Power" combined sexual exploitation with a weird archtype fantasy of the inanimate becoming animated. The last work, "Planet Mermaid" Is a deconstruction of a Hans Christian Anderson story complete with intense violence and a science fiction lean. Then there is "Suicide Pigs." I do not recommend you read it but you will and you won't forget it.

Suicide seems to be a returning theme here. So is the first sexual experience and the physical changes in growing up. Some of this qualifies as body horror. All of it is surreal or borders on it. Like many of the Bizarro Pulp Press writers , Leza seems to be a poet trapped in prose, at least for the duration of this book. Something tells me her poetry rocks too. But for now, this short collection will probably have enough emotion and intensity to hold you for a little while.

[Leo Robertson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I chatted with Leza about this book and more on Losing the Plot—listen here!!

A showcase of Cantoral's original aesthetic: pop culture and depression; drug-induced euphoria and self-harm; cartoons, colours and suicidal ideation.

Alive with the very absurdity of life, its plentiful joys and underlying darknesses, its bathetic bacchanal.

Join the dance!!

[Rodney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cartoons​ ​in​ ​the​ ​Suicide​ ​Forest​ ​is​ ​a​ ​treat​ ​in​ ​its​ ​way​ ​to​ ​combine​ ​playful​ ​innocence​ ​with​ ​perversion and​ ​darkness.​ ​I​ ​am​ ​left​ ​with​ ​visions​ ​of​ ​cotton​ ​candy,​ ​mermaids,​ ​glitter, wet​ ​earth,​ ​decaying​ ​leaves, euphoria​ ​and​ ​sadness.​ ​There​ ​is​ ​a​ ​heartfelt​ ​resonance​ ​shining​ ​through​ ​each​ ​tale.​ ​Leza’s​ ​voice​ ​is both​ ​unique​ ​and​ ​exciting​ ​to​ ​read.​ ​I​ ​am​ ​looking​ ​forward​ ​to​ ​what​ ​she​ ​gives​ ​us​ ​in​ ​the​ ​future. Look​ ​out​ ​for​ ​these​ ​stories​ ​in​ ​particular:

Siberian​ ​Honeymoon
Eva​ ​of​ ​Oz
Cosmic​ ​Bruja
Suicide​ ​Pigs
Star​ ​Power

[Ben Arzate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full Review

Leza Cantoral's debut collection is a glitter bomb of a book. A mixture of colorful Bizarro, disturbing erotica, Sad Girl stories, and horror held together by Cantoral's masterfully crafted prose. She's a talented writer and I highly recommend this book. I look forward to what she comes out with in the future.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories are wonderfully imaginative, vivid and captivating. What I like best though is the dark dream undercurrent, the surreal yet still charged with pre-conscious meaning twilight landscape sort of feel. That filled the stories, each of them in different ways, with gravity and urgency. Some pretty strong stuff, delightful to read.

[Michael Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of strange stories; weird erotica, cosmic acid-trip bizarro, mutagenic body horror, and fractured fairy-tales. Author Leza Cantoral takes us through a shifting kaleidoscope of moods; playful and hallucinatory, sad and wistful, to venomous and excoriating. Each story is told with wit, humor, emotion, and features a perfect sense of pace and brevity. Stylistically they run the gamut of gritty realism to a level of almost pure psychedelia, some featuring layers upon layers of speculative invention, a hallmark of bizarro fiction, and some having an almost diary-page, real-world ring of truth to them. The best of them bleed those boundaries; fantasy & metaphor fusing with the confessional into something really unique and powerful. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys modern twists on classic morality-plays, scathing cultural critiques, and wonderfully inventive short-stories.

[Betty Rocksteady · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this. Very pretty, lyrical writing. Lots of raw emotion and colour. Standout stories for me were cartoons in the suicide forest and Serbian honeymoon.

[Charlene Elsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jumping between fantasy lands and raw truths of existence, Leza Cantoral’s prose will punch you in the gut with either emotion or absurdity, depending on the story.

[David Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another great release by Bizarro Pulp Press. This is my first time reading anything by Cantoral but I doubt it will be my last. This book contains 12 short, short stories that get better and better the further along you read. It is hard to find superlatives and adjectives that have not already been exclaimed about the book in its many blurbs by great authors. The cover is great and fits perfectly within the aesthetic of the book.

I truly enjoyed every story in the book, but my favorites are Siberian Honeymoon, Cosmic Bruja, Last Dance With Heroin, and Star Power. Siberian Honeymoon is a tale of two women hiding from the Russian Government after getting married in the Russia that has criminalized homosexuality. Cantorel puts the bizarre twist by adding the perspective of some feral cats in the frozen Siberian wilderness. Cosmic Bruja feels like a personal and relevant immigrant coming of age story on acid. Last Dance With Heroin snuggles right into the part of me that loves stories about addiction and recovery. Finally, hands down my favorite story of the book, Star Power is about a sentient murderous fortune teller machine, turned sex doll, turned cotton candy dispenser. It is an incredibly creative and surreal tale that reflects everything I like bizarro lit. It is transgressive, unpredictable, and hilarious. I was reading Star Power while waiting at my kid's gymnastics class and I know the other parents thought me odd giggling to myself like "oh shit" as I read it.

If you are an already established fan of Bizarro Pulp Press then it goes without saying that you should scoop this one up. I would also recommend this to fan's or Brian Allen Carr or C.V. Hunt's short stories. Cantoral definitely has my attention. Cartoons In The Suicide Forest is smart, dark, sexy and already has me looking forward to future releases from Cantoral. When I read a book like this it always makes me curious as to what the author can do in longer form as well. Great Stuff.

[Andrew Stone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cartoons in the Suicide Forest is a solid debut collection. All of the stories are intense, brutal, and sexual. Many of them have poetic undertones. The ones that stuck out most to me are: "Green Lotus," "Cartoons in the Suicide Forest," "Last Dance with Heroin," and the haunted retelling of The Little Mermaid, "Planet Mermaid."

If you like your bizarro with hints of horror and lots of sex, then this is definitely the book for you.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The internet has been good for horror literature, it seems, both as material and as means of propagation for independent producers. That could be nonsense- horror, like video games and Star Trek, is one of those things that really defines the culture of much of my friend group but on which I basically missed the boat. But I think this collection of short surrealist horror fiction (by an old school pal! We once rescued another horror writer from central Pennsylvania. Fun story!) backs me up on this assertion.

That said, not all of the stories in “Cartoons in the Suicide Forest” are directly about the internet or computers- avoiding the literal-mindedness that dogs “Black Mirror” in its more pedestrian moments. There’s all kinds of weird shit packed into this slender container: mermaids fleeing a collapsing earth, Eva Braun in Nazi Oz, and some scathing realist material, too. Leza doesn’t stint on body horror, and there’s an iridescent quality to her prose in those moments of horrifying nightmare logic.

In the titular story, the main character makes reference to a “Queen in Yellow.” That might ring some bells from “True Detective,” who in turn borrowed the “King in Yellow” myth from turn of the century horror/fantasy writer Robert Chambers. This story, of a play (perhaps based in some older legends) that led to the death of anyone who saw or read it, encapsulates the major theme of that influential period in horror writing: the confrontation between the supposedly rational civilization of the turn of the twentieth century and its own knowledge of the vastness, oldness, and irrationality of the world and the cosmos.

Contemporary social and technological changes have brought us face to face with a whole new side of our irrationality and the world’s unknowability, and this is part of why horror has become as important as it has to a lot of people. Leza brings out the aesthetic and gendered elements of the ways in which the internet (well, the pedant in me insists on saying “the internet under capitalism” but let’s just take that as read) and the culture around it contributes to our situation. “The internet runs on women’s misery,” someone smart once said, and the difficulty of escaping gendered victim-victimizer dynamics animates most of the stories in the collection.

For Chambers’ generation, the vastness of the universe ruled out an escape from existential dread- build up “progress” as much as you like, you’re still a dying speck of dust on the cosmic scale, etc. In Leza’s work, there simply isn’t an outside, or if there is — like the suicide forest which makes its sad girl visitors into surreal, dancing, bloody cartoons — it’s just the logic of these bounded universes taken to their conclusion. That should sound pretty contemporary, I think. ****

https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leza Cantoral is a fantastic, amazing, magical, scary talented as (insert expletive here) writer. Cartoons in the Suicide Forest was an addictive scary magical effed up treat. Every single sentence in every single story was necessary, she managed to cut so deep and create so many different worlds and characters without any extrenious sentences. Some of my personal favorites were Siberian Honeymoon, Star Power, and Eva in Oz. (I really really want either a sequel or a prequel to Planet Mermaid). The title story is amazing and really shows how amazing Cantoral is at utilizing sensory details. If she wanted to, she could make you drool or cum with her words. One last thing: the cover art to this book is beautiful and I wish every book had a cover this perfect.

[Soph Barker · Rating 4 out of 5]

La cosa que tiene el Bizarro es que abarca tanto que es muy fácil que una historia de una autora te flipe y la siguiente te deje fría como un témpano.
La otra cosa que tiene es que independientemente de si el relato te llega, la narración y el argumento probablemente te vuelen la cabeza a nivel "técnico", digamos.
Esta colección de relatos tiene cierto hilo narrativo, porque la mayoría de las historias son reinterpretaciones de cuentos de hadas o historias de la literatura "universal". Leza suele imprimir su sello metiendo mucho body horror y sexo (con frecuencia no consentido, beware) y en ocasiones funciona para mí y en ocasiones no me filtra más que el aspecto estilístico.
Con todo, una experiencia interesante.

[Kelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories seem to spring from the subconscious like the best, weirdest folk tales and juxtapose elements from the farthest reaches of culture, literature, history, what have you, using their own kind of dream logic to turn the familiar inside out and back again.

[Austin Hatch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insane and finely-tuned prose smacks you in the face, rapes your imagination, and leaves you begging for more as it tosses you aside to cope with the emotional wreckage.

[Anaika · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[J. Gonzalez- Blitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is modern girlhood.

oh yeah, and disclaimer i know the author. But either way, this is 21st century razor sad girl psyche. 'kay?

[D.C. Haroldsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very Bizarre book to read. Every story was more unusual than the last. Most of the stories in this book had explicit content which is very different from the books I usually read. I knew this book was going to be strange based on the other reviews but it was not what I was expecting. I believe that's what makes it unique though. It definitely stands out from the rest of the books I have read.

[Devin M. Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really dig this book.

This book was an absolute gut punch, in the best way possible. It takes you out of your comfort zone and shakes you. Switchblade poetry and harsh social commentary, this book doesn't hold back. Every page elected an emotional response, from a smile to revulsion. I seriously dug this book.

[Alex Delogu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dream-like collection of vignettes and short stories that are equally sordid and spectacular.