Lost in Cat Brain Land

by Cameron Pierce

Sad stories from a surreal world.

A fascist mustache. A desert inside a dead cat. The ghost of Franz Kafka. Primordial entities mourn the death of their child. The desperate serve tea to mysterious creatures. A hopeless romantic falls in love with a pterodactyl.

From a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where robotic gargoyles are law, to a blighted suburbia where the elephant god Ganesh seeks revenge on a man and his android wife, Cat Brain Land is a place of domestic despair and nightmare foreboding. Where sirloin steaks enroll in daycare and ex-lovers return as tiny dolls.

This is a land of camel people and the Lord of Meat. The farther into Cat Brain Land you get, the more difficult it will be to get out.

Genres: Bizarro Fiction, Horror, Short Stories, Humor, Science Fiction

136 pages, Paperback

First published June 2, 2010

About the author

Cameron Pierce is the author of eleven books, including the Wonderland Book Award-winning collection Lost in Cat Brain Land. His work has appeared in The Barcelona Review, Gray's Sporting Journal, Hobart, The Big Click, and Vol. I Brooklyn, and has been reviewed and featured on Comedy Central and The Guardian. He was also the author of the column Fishing and Beer, where he interviewed acclaimed angler Bill Dance and John Lurie of Fishing with John. Pierce is the head editor of Lazy Fascist Press and has edited three anthologies, including The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. He lives with his wife in Astoria, Oregon.

Reviews

[Danger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great little collection. Some of them are real gems, though they’re not all consistently hitting the mark with me with the same sort of gusto. Not to say they’re not all good (they are) but they’re not all EQUALLY good, if that makes any sense. Of course, that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to story collections/anthologies. Regardless Cameron Pierce has such an accessible yet elegant writing style that he usually leaves you little recourse but to get involved with a story within the first few sentences.

It’s weird going backwards in Pierce’s catalog. This is one of his earlier collections. His last book of short stories that I read, Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon, was PHENOMENAL! One of the best story collections I’ve ever read, actually. It is evident that Pierce’s voice and style have also matured a lot since Lost in Cat Brain Land.

This book is certainly steeped in what I would consider “traditional” Bizarro, in that it utilizes a lot of the dream logic that is an earmark of the genre. But whereas lesser writers can get lost in the silliness of it all, Pierce has a way of incorporating a kind of cosmic melancholia into his work that leaves a deeper impression than any of overtly peculiar elements of any given story. It’s a good read.

[Steve Lowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

UPDATE (11-21-11): This book took home the Wonderland Award for best collection of the year, among a very strong list of contenders. I read several pretty incredible Bizarro short story collections last year, but this one got my vote for the best.

Before randomly crossing paths with Cameron Pierce on Twitter more than a year ago, I had not been exposed to the term `Bizarro’ outside of Superman or Seinfeld re-runs. Then I learned that Pierce was not only a young writer, but he had a book coming out called `Ass Goblins of Auschwitz’. My (understandable) initial response was something along the lines of “What the hell is wrong with this freakin’ kid?” But then I ran across his name again in a horror anthology (Horror Library Vol. 2), with a story called `I Am Meat, I Am in Daycare’, and on other places like The Dream People. His stories were so surreal and wildly imaginative that I soon found myself looking for more. Cameron Pierce was my first exposure to a new brand of fiction that didn’t care what I thought about it, wasn’t trying to win my approval or pander to me or kiss my butt. In fact, it was more like trying to kick my butt. I loved it.

Fast forward to now, and after sampling much more of what Bizarro has to offer, Pierce seems to me to embody what this burgeoning genre is about. His stories are surreal and dreamlike, some whimsical while at the same time disturbing, and often in need of multiple readings to sift through and decipher the meaning behind the words. I’ll readily admit that I don’t always succeed in the latter, but I still enjoy trying because, simply put, Pierce can write his tail off.

And that brings us to his new collection, `Lost in Cat Brain Land’. I can’t recommend it enough. Pierce has a real talent for blending his nightmarish landscapes and characters together on the page like a painter covering a canvass. At times, it flows and the colors blend and complement each other; other times it seems as though they’re flung at the page in heaps and splatters and look like a jumble up close, but when you step back and see it as a whole, you recognize something more is there. His stories drift and flow and envelop the reader, like a fog. You feel lost, as the title suggests, and blinded by that fog, but still wrapped up in it, immersed and even trapped in his imagination.

As evidenced by these stories, which delve into subjects like a fascist mustache and a hunk of beef hanging out in a daycare, and touch on recurring themes like meat and loneliness, Pierce can write the weird, but he can also just flat out write, especially in the short form. Among my favorites were `Death of a Dog Eater’, the aforementioned `I Am Meat…’ and `How to Live Forever’. For a collection, this one earns its five stars, and now I’m looking forward to checking out `Ass Goblins…’

[Michael Sorbello · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the weirdest things I've ever read. It's like dark abstract surrealism paintings in literary form. The ridiculously outlandish concepts, the melancholy dread and disturbing bizarreness of it all is rich with fascinating detail. Even the stories I didn't like that much were still extremely creative and unlike anything I've ever seen before.

A desert of sentient brains inside the body of a dead cat. Earwigs with bats made of cheese that fly out of their cracked skulls. An elephant god seeking revenge on a man and his android wife. A disturbed woman adopting a misshapen angel fetus she found in her shower drain. These are just a small taste of what to expect in here.

Despite the often twisted subject matter, the author manages to make it feel fun and comedic at times. It's an imaginative collection of morbid surrealism.

My rating: 3.5/5

[Marvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read two novels by Cameron Pierce before this short fiction collection titled Lost in Cat Brain Land. Cameron Pierce's talent as a writer was instantly noticeable yet his two novels, Ass Goblins of Auschwitz (2 stars) and Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island (4 stars) were so purposefully shocking that it tended to disguise the immense talent he has. That may have been an unfair assessment but it was the first feeling I had upon tackling these two Bizarro novels. Yet they left me wanting to read more by this author and that is always a good sign.

Lost in Cat Brain Land is still often over-the-top weird and it is certainly a solid contender in the strange world of Bizarro Lit as one of the most Bizarro-ness. Yet it is also one of the best short fiction collections I have ever read and solidifies Cameron Pierce reputation, in my mind at least, as one of the most innovative writers out there. Short fiction is the perfect media for Pierce. It allows him to let it surrealistically all hang out yet keeps the story focused enough to tell you there is something odd and beautiful going on here. Some of these works are flash fiction being only a page or two long. They are little snacks of words that leave you wanting more. My favorite is "Flowers". It is so short that I almost just added the entire story to this review, but I think there might be some legal issues in doing that. So you will just have to read it elsewhere than here. Others are longer but so strange you wonder "WTF!" even as you enjoy it like "The Dead Monkey Exhibit" and "I am Meat, I am in Day Care". Every tale here is strange but in the best, such as the title story and "Tea for a Mysterious Creature" seems to have an overlying theme that centers it and keeps it precariously "down to earth". I don't think it is a coincidence that both of the mentioned stories feature a person who is basically being dumped and that may be a connecting note for the reader; something we can all connect with at one time or another.

Yet the best story in the collection is also the longest. It is at once the most horrifying and the most darkly humorous. "Drain Angel" is the story of a "cherub faced earwig" that crawls out of a shower drain and begins growing rapidly. The childless and emotionally neglected Joy accepts as her child and become oblivious to its repulsiveness and violence. The tale takes the saying "a face only mother could love" to its most horrifying extreme.

The story also exhibits Cameron Pierce' biggest strength. He is not afraid of extremes. Extremes simply open up vaster possibilities for his talent to tell a story and to play with our emotions. This collection, and his novels for that matter, are certainly not for everyone. But they are excellent examples of how a fearless writer can open up new doors. And if we are not careful we may turn around, discover that the door is locked, and there is no going back. What a delicious feeling!

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

LOST IN CAT BRAIN LAND is utter insanity, in a good way. There's so much weirdness crammed into this tiny book that it's hard to comprehend most of it after you finish. Someone laced this book with LSD.

Some of the stories that stood out to me:

Visitor Ganesh - A man with a robot for a wife is nervous because he hasn't seen his old friend Jack in years. Otherworldly things seem to be after him...or perhaps he's crazy...or maybe not... Madness ensues.

Drain Angel - Joy raises an earwig as a child convinced it is an angel. It grows up into this horrendous monster but that isn't enough for Joy to stop loving it. She sends him to Elementary School where he does some despicable things to the other children. Madness ensues.

I Am Meat, I Am in Daycare - A man drops a slab of meat off at the daycare. It's allergic to chocolate milk. The nanny gives it chocolate milk. Madness ensues.

My one complaint is that many of the stories are just too short and don't really have time to develop. I would recommend Cameron Pierce's ABORTION ARCADE over this collection simply for the fact that it is comprised of just three stories which are longer and really come alive.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

when I ordered this Book I thought it was about a dude stuck in cat brain land. Short stories are even better because I never read anything by Cameron.
I'm. hooked like a stupid salmon caught by a fake piece of bait. every story is four star worthy. Here is a few of my overall favorites.
Cat Brain Land, Death of a Dog Eater, Embryo Tree for Android & Dead Monkey Exhibit.

[Nobody · Rating 5 out of 5]

After this book, I knew I would never read another normal book. Very honored to have been able to republish "Flowers" as the first story out by Kafka Review. It's a black hole checking into your mental motel for tea, forever.

[Edmund Colell · Rating 5 out of 5]

My overall impression of Lost in Cat Brain Land invokes the image of Cameron C. Pierce dressed as Willy Wonka singing Pure Imagination, cane-swinging and all. Any and all references to paradise may be changed for Pierce’s cover, however, and given the tone of most of these stories it seems that Pierce would be singing it through bitterly-grinning teeth. Nonetheless, this collection of short stories should be picked up because going through the material to understand this aside is an intriguing experience.

Normally I don’t make a mention of how bizarre a work is -- at least not in those exact words. Cat Brain Land, however, has forced me to bring the subject up because it is the first work I have seen in a while which I feel has challenged me this strongly to maintain a sense of comprehension. Some stories herein, such as “Holiday Sings the Eggman Dilemma,” “Visitor Ganesh,” “How to Live Forever,” and “Embryo Tree for Android,” may require several readings. Otherwise, the most comprehensible elements of them are, respectively: A man is forced to be the last one to ever eat an egg, a man with a son and a robotic wife gets a visit by an old friend, a scientist is in California during a moment where time has stood still, and a creation story involving shadows and a monolith. “The Depressed Man,” on the other hand, generates its sense of weirdness from the confusion and sense of alienation associated with the titular man’s titular depression, and therefore succeeds in both being one of the “least” weird stories yet at the same time detailing a situation which most people would find weird or unsettling. Between the latter story and the former stories, in terms of Naked-Lunch-competing weirdness, the elements of alienation, dead animals, morphing meat, nameless figures, and dysfunctional relationships still make regular appearances. The titular story “Cat Brain Land,” for example, involves the main character struggling with both the recent death of his cat and the crumbling relationship with his girlfriend, which soon involves the morphing of his cat’s flesh to almost being completely of brains and the eventual induction into the desert watched over by cat brains among other things. The lengthiest story in the collection, Drain Angel, involves a woman with an abusive spouse adopting an angel -- whose appearance and mannerisms would be right at home on Neon Genesis Evangelion -- whose flesh transforms periodically, with later struggles including unnamed children and camel people as the angel grows and causes mayhem. While these tropes appear with some regularity, as there are other stories which use big groups of them, Pierce’s storytelling and fantastic situations prevent their use from growing stale. And before there can be any accusation that the repeated use of some tropes points in the direction of a mind on autopilot, the personal-sounding nature of most of these stories shows that there is definitely a beating heart behind the confusion and horror.

Still, one issue in this collection has the possibility of making it polarizing. The images and events of these stories sometimes feel so high in new occurrences with the prose so densely packed that many portions can be easily forgotten after only a single read-through, and whether or not some of these parts are plot-important can be debated. The end of “How to Live Forever,” for example, ends with the line “Somewhere in Hollywood, a black hole checked into a motel.” While the story is short enough that it can be left on the line before it with no problems, it will probably take a second read-through with stronger attention from the reader to catch that the black hole was probably the scientist’s long-awaited invention. This after digging their buried attention out from time stuck on hands, cars eating drivers, police officers resembling gargoyles, the scientist now being a giant rubber hand, a dragon-faced semi, and an owl-shaped helicopter which all occur in the space of a page and a half.

Refreshing in its challenging level of bizarre-ness and in its inventiveness, Lost in Cat Brain Land still promises to be a must-read if one can get over the attention-flashing nature of some stories (let alone the graphic text). It is a kind of raw meat which can make some readers sick, though I personally found it very entertaining and deserving of an audience. So to give Pierce his Wonka moment: “We'll begin… with a spin… traveling in the world of [Pierce’s:] creation. What we'll see will defy explanation.”

[S.T. Cartledge · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s been a while since I’ve written a book review, so I figured I’d go right back to when I first started reading bizarro fiction. The book that started it all for me was Cameron Pierce’s “Lost in Cat Brain Land.”

It turns out that I actually wrote a review for this book way back then, and posted it to the book depository. So, to save me some time, I’ll copy and paste the review and then add my thoughts on the book now.

“This book is a quick read. At a glance it’s just a cluster of quirky short stories. The blurb on its own is just plain bizarre, however, what got me with this book, what really makes me adore it so, is how it works in its subtleties. Yes, it’s weird, but it takes a certain skill to build a connection between characters and reader, and I found numerous times that I actually cared about the little blue tea-thieving creature, or the thing that crawled up from the shower drain. It’s not weird for the sake of being weird. It’s weird pretending that everything is perfectly normal. And I guess that’s a strong metaphor in itself. Some of the short stories are better than others, but the overall quality is brilliant. As a first impression to Pierce’s work, and as a first impression to the bizarro genre, I’m thoroughly pleased with the book. If you like weird and if you like going somewhere entirely unexpected from one page to the next, and you don’t mind being disturbed (or in fact thrive on the awkward pleasure it brings) then I strongly recommend this book. I’ll probably order Pierce’s novel “Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden” very soon, as, quite simply, Lost in Cat Brain Land just wasn’t enough. I finished it and felt the need to read more of this guy.”

Now that I’ve read “Shark Hunting“, as well as a couple of his other books; “Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island“, and “Abortion Arcade“, I can quite safely say that my confidences in Cameron Pierce were well placed. I’ve even grown to respect him as an editor, putting out some fantastic books under the Eraserhead Press imprint, Lazy Fascist. Since writing that review, I’ve read a lot of bizarro in general, and I’ve come to the conclusion that my summary of the book is probably oversimplifying things a bit much. It’s not just weird pretending to be normal, it’s often of a different world altogether. No pretending. It has its own warped logic to live by. I still believe that the strength of this book, and some of Pierce’s other books, comes from his ability to make his strange foreign worlds feel close to home. We become attached to the characters. I would say his best work that I’ve read has been either “Pickled Apocalypse” or “Abortion Arcade” (and in particular from Arcade, the novella “No Children”). I have his latest book “Cthulhu Comes to the Vampire Kingdom” on order and I can’t wait. It seems he gets better with each book. Ever since I read this book, the one that introduced me to the bizarro genre, I haven’t looked back.

[Jeremy Maddux · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, reading a new Cameron Pierce book is an event! There's just something so understated in his work, like he is offering social commentary on something that just arrived and is quickly disintegrating before our eyes. The surreal, whimsical landscapes Cameron creates are so fragile that it is as if they are too wondrous to sustain themselves.

Take his longest story from this collection, "Drain Angel". It begins with a dysfunctional married couple whose lives are interrupted by something crawling up out of the shower drain. The wife treats the thing as her baby, while the husband cries that it is something conjured up out of the devil's gorge, something undigestible even in the bowels of Hell. Things do not end well for the husband, but you won't find any sort of police procedural or real world logic to interfere with the visually arresting narrative that follows. Despite signs to the contrary, Joy refuses to believe the creature is anything but an angel. When she finds coccoons full of children lining the walls of the school interior after the thing's first day, she deceives herself into believing it is merely his art project. Then, the camel people from the thing's favorite television show begin pressuring her to surrender the thing from the drain. It is a delicate situation Joy finds herself in, and we know from the beginning that the tone will not only remain bleak, but balloon in its bleakness.

Most of Cameron's stories are like that.

The book begins with a quiet slice of life where a man, grieving his failing relationship with his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, finds his cat dead on the bed he didn't sleep in the night before. He reasons that the cat must have been attacked by coyotes, and managed with just enough strength left to propel itself up on the bed, looking for his comfort in its dying moments. Again, we see Cameron's ability to wring the most out of a moment of sorrow, to take tragedy on a microcosmic level, and project it into the brain of every reader.

The best way for me to sum up the work of Cameron Pierce is that he's llke a really great party. You arrive. You mingle with friends. They share their regrets with no hint of melancholy, their hopes, drunken insights. Reality bends and dances with oblivion as the evening extends. Then, you wake up. It's over. Everyone has left. There's a horrid mess which no one moves to clean up. You return to the mundane, thinking about what great stories you will tell next time.

That is what Cameron Pierce offers with each new work!

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a fan of David Lynch and H.R. Giger, I certainly enjoy the surreal and weird, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found out about the niche genre of bizarro fiction. My first outing into this new territory is Lost in Cat Brain Land, which is a collection of short stories. The title, illustration, and summary all drew me in, as I expected compelling stories that would make sense in their own internal logic, no matter how much it required the suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately, this was accomplished only halfheartedly. The best short stories in this collection, including the titular "Lost in Cat Brain Land" craft stories that start off normal, then introduces one or multiple bizarre conditions, with examples such as a desert inside a dead cat, sirloin steaks going to daycare, raining shoe polish, etc., and then, using those established scenarios, which are often macabre, create compelling stories where the bizarre imagery causes a direct emotional impact. However, on the other end of the scale, the worst of the stories, which are abundant, are excessively short, and provide only sentences that give irrelevant detail or introduce crucial elements far too late in the story. In addition, there are often non-sequiturs without any sort of justification for their existence in the story, and the culmination of all these unnecessary nonsense statements is a slap to Chekhov's face. providing no sense of flow or pacing, often with little payoff at the end. These types of stories could have been made if you mishmashed a couple of of any random words and wrote about it as the prompt, with no real effort present except for attempting to elaborate on it as a high-concept story and then falling flat. I like surrealism and the bizarre, but it can't just be a series of random sentences like "I once had a dog that angered my soup bowl," and then do nothing with it. Overall, I feel as though my start into the genre of bizarro fiction was a bit rough and all over the place, but during the parts that work, if they were given more thematic polish, I feel like I could finally find the type of surreal story I'm looking for.

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am on a bizarro fiction kick. Didn't love all the stories here. The concepts/ideas/plots are fun. Sometimes the language is not interesting enough for me.

But def got me writing. Which is a sure sign that something is working for me here.

Good fun. I liked the story drain angel. I liked the final story in the collection the most. Whoaaa!!! Funny, strange. A lighter touch. Stuck with me for longer than the other stories. A bus going off the cliff and ends with:

"It's just you and the pterodactyl and if she doesn't have nest full of babies, and doesn't feed you to them, the two of you will hit it off."

And that's one of the obsessions here. The main one. Or maybe two: relationships and monster babies.

Rosmary's Baby. AHHHH!!


If you like the films of David Lynch and Cronenberg, esp Cronenberg's obsession with the body, then check out Lost in Cat Brain Land (and some other bizarro fiction).

I will read more bizarro (and perhaps Cameron Pierce). It is so called genre fiction but well worth checking out. A lot more interesting than the latest Iowa literary prize for short stories or other such nonsense!!!

I am writing some slipstream/bizarro fiction now. 60 pages in!!! Feels refreshing after all those boring so called literary collections of stories and poetry!

Think I might try this fella J. Bradley next. He is a book coming out with one my fav mags/presses. Housefire. This J Bradley memorizes all his stories and performs them lookin right into the eyes of his audience. Holy cow!!!

long live Bizarro!!

TWO MONTHS LATER:

I like this book more. I re-read it. I came at it with "literary" ideas. Well not straight literary. More the idea of language. The language is mostly transparent but the story and ideas are fab. Which is more than enough. I want to read more of Cameron Pierce!!!

[David Agranoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a word you will hear over and over when talking about this short story collection and this author. Imagination. That is because Cameron's weird as hell imagination bleeds through every page with a syrupy thickness like no other author I've read.Culled from the pages of various Bizarro and horror zines, websites and such Pierce tells stories that are surreal, aburdist and sometimes disturbing. Unlike some authors that are just trying so very hard to be weird the strength of Cameron Pierce as a bizarro author is that he is excellent writer and most important it's natural.

Nothing feels forced in this collection. It doesn't have the "Look at me I'm weird and different feel that alot surreal fiction suffers from.

Take the title story Cat Brain Land or my favorite a flash piece A Scorpion in A Calfornia Town. the later story's opening paragraph made me laugh out loud and never did I feel like Cameron was writing with a neon sign flashing over his head that said "look at me I'm so weird." That is not to say that Pierce doesn't know what he is doing because he certainly does. A good example was a a sad little tale called the depressed man that really was a sad story to read and evoked sorrow for narrator in it's two and half pages.

I am sold on Pierce's skills as writer and not enough can be said about his imagination. I am interested in seeing if these types of stories can be extended into a novel. If anyone wants to find out he already has three novels, after this book they are on my list.

[J.W. Wargo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't cried this much over a book since I read Shall We Gather at the Garden? by Kevin L. Donihe back in 2008. Coincidentally, the author of that book appears as a character in this one.

This book is a set of sad, surrealist short stories that contain themes of loss, betrayal, depression, fatalism, and loneliness. You will find very little redemption or optimism here. I think that's what makes these stories so good for me, in that there is no false hope presented. Sometimes the stark realities of life are harsh and that's that.

Of particular note are the stories Tea for a Mysterious Creature and Drain Angel. The former a break-up story where the protagonist meets and invites this strange, morphing creature in for a spot of tea. I saw the creature as being everything the protagonist couldn't deal with taking physical shape.

The latter is the longest short story in the book, nearly a novella, broken into 15 parts. A woman, Joy, find an insect-like infant angel in her shower and adopts it. What follows is possibly one of the most weirdest descents into solitude I have ever read.

Every story in this book is solid, which is a very difficult task to do in a collection. Each one, even the half-page flash stories, stand on their own as representations of that burning/gnawing feeling inside us all. The feeling that sometimes grows so heavy it takes every ounce of strength we can muster to get out of bed in the morning.

[Krellyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pierce shows with this compilation of short stories that he really knows how to write in his genre, bizarro. All of the stories are entertaining and you mostly can't figure out where they're going, and all are read-in-one-sitting quality - meaning the longer ones are enthralling enough for you to not put it down until you're done.

If I have to give some criticism it'd be that I wanted some stories to be longer than they are. Some ideas could've been expanded on, like the one page story "The Green Monster and his Loneliness" and "I am Meat, I am in Daycare". They're fine the way they are, but personally I would've liked them a bit longer. But this is just nit-picking.

The stories I enjoyed the most are "Drain Angel", "The Dead Monkey Exhibit", "Visitor Ganesh", "I am Meat, I am in Daycare" and "Drain Angel". All are deliciously absurd and disturbing, "Drain Angel" in particular, as well as "I am Meat, I am in Daycare". I found them hard to put down because I was enjoying myself too much.

Pierce is an inspiration among us would-be writers of "different" literature and I am happy to have more of his creations to read. Next up is Abortion Arcade!

[Kirsten Alene · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Lost in Cat Brain Land" is a step away from Pierce's earlier books. But that's not to say that fans of his previous Novels, "Ass Goblins of Auschwitz" and "Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden," renowned for pushing the limits of Bizarro readers everywhere, will be disappointed. There is no shortage of unnatural decapitation, tongue severing, corpse violation, or mutant children.

A lot of authors of longer fiction have trouble pulling off a strong short story collection, especially as early in their writing careers as Pierce, but in "Lost in Cat Brain Land" he has created a new universe of fiction. There is a pervasive sadness in Pierce's writing, often lost in the bizarre and surreal scenes of his longer works, that is at its strongest in this collection fraught with stories that capture true anxiety, depression, and madness.

His masterful writing, odd and fantastic images of destruction and other worldly beauty, and his powerful understanding of the mechanics of story construction make "Lost in Cat Brain Land" a strong, compelling, and cohesive collection.

[Andrew Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I do not think Pierce's first collection of short stories is as good as his newer one (Die You Doughnut Bastards), it is definitely a wonderful and enjoyable read. My favorite stories were "Lost in Cat Brain Land," about a man who gets sucked into his cat and is trapped in a desert world, and "Drain Angel," about an earwig that crawls out of the shower drain and quickly grows into a monstrous angel. Many of these stories deal with failing relationships and all of them are positively bizarro.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's not a whole lot I can rightfully say about this collection of stories. But a single word does come to mind, morbid. Morbid, and confusion, and sickness. So okay, 3 words.

I read a bit of Pierce a while back (Ass Goblins of Auschwitz) and was immediately sick to my stomach, but completely unable to put the book down.

I'm fairly new to the Bizzaro genre, but I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a quick and grossly inappropriate read.

[KAFKA REVIEW · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew from the Joy Division quote at the beginning I would enjoy this book. Stories like Broom People and The Depressed Man will stick with me forever. Pierce's writing carries its own atmospheric tone in this collection, each story peeling at the layers of various realities I thought I knew.

Great read for Bizarro and Weird Fiction fans.

[R.A. Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some real weird stuff in here, I really liked the story involving a man being forced to eat the last egg on television. The illustrations of the fetus developing were also cool. I'm no good at reviews.

[Don Traverso · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the most part I enjoyed this collection. A few stories, such as the title story, felt half-baked, like they could've used a little editing, but these were in the minority. Overall vivid & thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bizarre, but entertaining. Not sure if I would purchase any more of Mr. Pierce's books though.

[Damion Postlewaight · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Camerons stories! Simple.

[Hannah (The Book Snek) · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Lazy Fascist was a 900 page epic, I'd read it.

[Marko · Rating 2 out of 5]

I haven't yet read a lot of bizarro fiction, I really liked Fungus of the Heart, but Cameron Pierce's style seems often to be just randomness for the sake of being random. Many of the stories feel like he just came up with it as he went along, especially with the longer stories. There are a few good ones here, but the bad ones outweigh them and there are a few that are pretty terrible.

[Josh · Rating 2 out of 5]

i am a fan of bizarro, carlton mellick III and jeremy robert johnson are two of my favorite writers. however, i don't think any of the stories in this collection are bizarro, they're just stupid. i only gave it two stars because the title story is vaguely interesting. other than that, this was an utter waste of my time.

[Padre · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I didn't 'get it', but it was much less enjoyable than other stories by Cameron Pierce. Most pieces seem too random. I even caught myself hoping a story ends soon (too bad it was the longest one in the book).

Hit and (mostly) miss.

[Brett Grossmann · Rating 1 out of 5]

A variety of nouns and verbs must have been scattered on the floor..then the author strung them together based on which ones the cat pissed on. Short stories that take the unusual and do strange things with them . It's impossible to get attached to any character when nothing relatable is discussed.

[Eric Dodson]

Sounds interesting.

[natercopia · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some interesting ones that I wish the stories were longer: Broom Girl, Embryo Tree for Android, A Scorpion Town in California.