The Bizarro genre can be very diverse and equally polarizing. A book exploring the complex relationships of its characters will likely sit on the shelf against a plot-driven novel concerned primarily with eliciting shock. The former may satisfy the broad reading audience, while the latter may pride itself in keeping only the strongest stomachs satiated. It Came From Below the Belt is the latter, destroying just as many brain cells as it saves.
The story follows Grover Goldstein, a seemingly apathetic, accidental time traveler who must help his future self’s penis—a reincarnated Hitler—win a presidential election so that Grover may use Nazi technology to travel back to his own time. Though this concept is intentionally absurd, take comfort in the plot’s secondary nature. The wealth of one-liners, visceral images, and grotesque situations inform the novel more than the plot itself. It Came From Below the Belt is equal parts Steve Aylett, Adult Swim cartoons, and dick jokes.
The novel unfolds more as a series of tangents where each image builds upon the prior in effort to cram as much absurdity into the pages as possible. This effect is displayed most often through the use of lists, a technique which can saturate characters and plot points in a very economical way. The example below describes the symptoms of a rare virus “that can only be caught through handling the lung of an immortal”:
The symptoms started, including dry mouth, fatigue, priapism, gender confusion, full knowledge of acronyms used on the Internet, weakness to salt, depletion in confidence, sensitivity to embarrassment, resorting to name calling, a passion for golf, chanting in emoticons, and conversing with the Almighty. [pg. 88]
Though these lists do appear perhaps too often, they do, for the most part, encourage an appreciation of the novelist’s style.
Though the Bizarro genre is becoming more and more acknowledged as a legitimate category, there still stands a general dismissal of it among many readers. Sands capitalizes on the postmodern nature of ICFBtB by including a mock review of the novel within the text, penned by fictional professor, Arthur Papsmear. This review seems to let any hesitant readers know that ‘yes, this book is crazy. Yes, this book doesn’t make a lot of sense. Yes, that is why we like it.’ Knowing that this review is written by the author himself, the snide comments actually serve the genre well: by directly addressing potential antagonizers:
It is written in a manner that embraces style over substance, using an onslaught of wordplay, gimmicks, deconstructed clichés, and lowbrow humour as a sleight of hand trick designed to take the reader’s attention off the nonexistent plot and the author’s inability to write. [pg. 125]
The novel is a word-by-word bungee jump that finds its strength in just this sort of immediate satisfaction. This novel won’t be quoted in the halls of the academia anytime soon, but that is exactly what the genre expects of its books. No more, no less. As long as the reader approaches It Came From Below the Belt with adequate expectations he will happily take from the book a world re-imagined according to the processed reality of an author intent to turn a few stomachs and wrinkle a few noses. Isn’t a good book all about affecting its reader in some way, anyway?
Bradley Sands. It Came From Below the Belt. Seattle: Afterbirth Books, 2005. paper, ISBN: 0-9766310-4-0.
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