I'll admit, Carlton Mellick III is probably my favorite bizarro author, so naturally I was looking forward to Sea of the Patchwork Cats.His books tend to be strange and funny, and I like strange and funny.

"Everyone in the world committed suicide at the same time." That's the opening line of this book, and as far as opening lines go, I'd have to say it's a good one. It sets the whole strange, dream-like, and faintly depressing tone for the novella.

The protagonist of the story is the only person in the world who didn't commit suicide--because he was too drunk to pull it off. The man tries to find a place for himself in the newly empty world, but one night the house he's staying in floats out to sea, and he eventually arrives at a strange building shaped like two giant, nude, conjoined women. Then he meets some very strange women (the snake woman on the cover image of the most recent editionis one of them). There are also a lot of cats and a monster.

This book was pretty cool. I'm really not much into cats, but that's OK because these cats are kind of creepy anyway. It's a very enjoyable read. ( )

Sea of the Patchwork Cats by Carlton Mellick III begins with Conrad, a drunk, lonely, wretch of a man failing to commit suicide along with the rest of the human race. It would appear he is cursed from the very beginning, yet instead of succumbing to failure one last time, he unknowingly embarks on a watery adventure with several frozen female stow-aways who aren’t completely human.

When from his vessel (a mansion stocked with some food and certainly not enough liquor) he sees a strange dwelling shaped like conjoined women mysteriously located in the middle of the sea, he steers the house into the strangest drunken dream-like experience ever imagined.

In the sea structure that is called Nerve Works Conrad starts to transform from the self-loathing drunkard, despite still being able to get loaded as the house offers whatever he desires. Having to put up with three, cross-species of rather tempermental women, countless cats, and a mysterious female figure with an ominous, ghostly presence, Conrad struggles with his new self, one who is only required to enjoy himself.

What begins as a story about a drunk becomes a story about a man who gets a very weird second chance, as well as a re-creation story from one of the finest authors the Bizarro family can provide. Any true lover of fiction that goes beyond all genres would devour Carlton Mellick III’s Sea of the Patchwork Cats. ( )

See, this is why I talk about the bizarros so much. Because in the midst of so much oddness, so much bizarro-ness, most of the novels present an intense look at the human condition. The purpose of these books may be to entertain rather than provoke thought or contemplation, but many of these writers do both far better than mainstream novelists who set out with those goals in mind. That there is no internal, at times interminable, dialogue wherein the narrator over-analyzes his failures makes it all the more real. You see it. The immediacy of his failure to act is visceral and you know the agony is there without it needing to be spelled out for you. You feel it with every drink the narrator takes after he flees the hospital district. The best part of bizarros is that of all the genres, this is the one where you will consistently find writers who genuinely know how to show and not tell. Read all of review here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/?p=381 ( )