Eraserhead Press, 196 pages, paperback, $10.95

With every new book, Wonderland Book Award-winning author and Lazy Fascist Press editor Cameron Pierce seems to become a somewhat different, better, and impossibly more imaginative writer. The feat is made even more impressive by the fact that all of his previous books are must-reads. With the release of Die You Doughnut Bastards, Pierce takes his writing a step further, clearly breaking away from any genre constraints while still proudly waiving the bizarro flag and establishing himself as one of the most creative short fiction purveyors working today.

With a mixture of 34 short stories and a few poems, Die You Doughnut Bastards offers something for everyone. Since discussing every piece would turn this into a time-consuming chore instead of a review, I’ll discuss a few of the stories that made my mental highlight reel:

• On the surface, “Death Card” is an entertaining narrative about a couple who face everyday problems. Emily and Tristan sit down inside a sex shop to play a card game they don’t understand. He pulls a death card and nothing happens. They later go home and have an argument about Tristan’s growing toy collection. As the narrative progresses, the reader is pulled into the minutiae of the couple’s life. They argue, reconcile their differences, go for a bike ride, eat some pizza, buy parenting books, share great beer, and listen to sad music. As the day comes to an end, Emily learns that her sister had an accident. After a brief squabble, Tristan books her flight home and rejoins her. At this point, the narrative is coming to a close and the reader feels the tale was a well-written account of a day in a regular relationship and an homage to the city of Portland. It’s a good story, but slightly underwhelming. Then Piece closes by dropping a dark poetry bomb that shatters reality and sends the story hurtling into that recess of your brain that houses the short stories you can’t forget.
• “Brief History of an Amputee” is a strangely graceful narrative about a man whose music becomes a cult sensation while he’s out of the country and he never finds out. Diabetes takes his legs away, he returns home, and later finds a woman in the gutter. Besides being both funny and a tad scary, this story is also the first one that mentions the amputee and the House of Agonies, both of which are part of a list of recurring themes/characters in the collection.
• “Disappear” is about a couple who has their unborn child stolen by Stephen King. For a long time, “Stephen King Steals My Ideas,” a hilarious short story by Mykle Hansen, was my favorite weird story about Stephen King doing awful thing. This one quickly achieved the same status. I won’t give away the ending, but between the bloody finale and the love of language that comes through in the last line, this one is not to be missed.
• While Die You Doughnut Bastards contains a few tales and individual passages that belong to that indefinable thing called literary fiction, “Skin Blossoms” is clearly the best example of literary fiction injected with bizarro and shaped with arresting, beautifully uncanny prose. Games, ceramic deer, two ghosts, loneliness, skin blossoms, aluminum owls, and the death of a sister and later a mother make this one a cheerless-yet-stunning piece that shows how Pierce can constantly reinvent his prose.

Die You Doughnut Bastards is bizarro, horror, romance, comedy, and poetry mashed together and served with a side of something great that’s yet to be named. The book is full of things like ghosts, killer guinea pigs, sex, horror movies, missing mothers, dismemberment, a touch of cropophagia, dead grandmothers with sinister grins, and screaming pancakes. However, you should read it simply because it’s packed with wildly entertaining short fiction from an uncompromising and truly inventive author at the top of his game.

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Gabino Iglesias is writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth and a few other things no one will ever read. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.