Quicksand House by Carlton Mellick III

★★★★★

Carlton Mellick III deals in bizarro fiction - a contemporary & emerging literary genre that blends the grotesque, the surreal, and - of course - the downright bizarre. Bizarro plots are on a sliding scale from “a woman on the run from the mob in a world where robo-dinosaurs are used instead of cars has armadillos for fists²” to “a convention for fans of William Shatner suffers an attempted terrorist attack by a cult of fans of Bruce Campbell which is thwarted by a movie projectionist who accidentally summons every William Shatner character ever, all intending on one thing: to kill the real William Shatner”.

They’re often profane, gory, and downright insane. Quicksand House, however, is Mellick’s foray into… something a little easier to digest. That’s not to say it’s not weird, but compared to books like Every Time We Meet at the Dairy Queen, Your Whole Fucking Face Explodes and The Cannibals of Candyland it’s a veritable bedtime story.

Tick and Polly have never left their nursery. Raised by their nanny, they await the day their parents will come and claim them. Both of them are going through the turbulence of growing up - preteen Tick is navigating a schoolyard crush, and teenage Polly is growing antlers and experiencing apoplectic fits of rage.

Everything seems to be shaping up to continue the same pattern of tedium they’ve known their whole lives until the power goes out. With their nanny dead, Tick and Polly must venture out of the nursery with their newborn sister - a grublike infant with an unpronounceable name and a thirst for blood - in search of the parents they’ve always loved and never known. What horrors lie beyond the nursery? How big is their house? Where did their new baby sister actually come from?

Mellick finds a way to wrap everything up in a way that’s narratively satisfying and manages to make the weirdness of the plot actually make sense. The main issue in bizarro fiction is that you have to somehow get the reader to believe and follow everything you’re throwing at them - if the story doesn’t make internal sense, it will all fall apart.

A good (non-bizarro, but still weird) example is Christine by Stephen King. If you’re unaware, the basic plot overview is a red Plymouth Fury car named Christine is possessed and possessive, much to the detriment of her new owner - a nerdy high-schooler called Arnie. By the end of the book you’ve sort of forgotten that cars can’t actually be jealous or commit murder, and you’ve come to accept the story’s universe as something that Just Makes Sense.

This, I think, is Mellick’s strong point. I’m the kind of person who has to turn off a movie if it doesn’t seem to make sense - that’s autism for you - but Quicksand House had me nodding my head and going, “oh, yeah, that’s reasonable”. I fully believe Carlton Mellick III could sell a trampoline to a kangaroo.

Get your hands on the book here

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¹ This depends on what sort of person you are. If you’ve read a weirder book pretend you haven’t to save my ego. Thanks!

² Armadillo Fists, also by CM3. He has a monopoly on bizarro at this point.