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Synopsis:
He has a mouth in his gut. An obnoxious, toothy, foul-mouthed, pig of a mouth. Luckily, his girlfriend doesn’t seem to mind. Marie, the one-legged stripper and cyber-prostitute love of his life is very accepting of it. And then a little too accepting. What would you do if your girlfriend cheated on you with the voracious yapper under your belly button? If you live in Gutmouth’s world-a bleak city where gruesome, spontaneous mutations are no big deal, klepto-roaches take anything not tied-down, drugs turn pain into pleasure, consumers are tortured for growing food, and your best friend is a misogynistic rat-man-you might do something crazy. And what if you got caught?
Review:
By the time Gabino Iglesias became the well-known author of great novels like The Devil Takes You Home and House of Bone and Rain (and became one my favorite book reviewers), he has already published a half dozen novels and novellas. His very first novella from 2013 was published by Eraserhead Press as part of their New Bizarro Author Series. Many great authors have published their first book through this discovery series, and Gabino Iglesias’s first novella, Gutmouth, might be one of the best. The story is about David “Gutmouth” Dedmon, an employee of the single corporation that rules everything, MegaCorp, and someone who is living a normal life until a mouth with a nine inch tongue, a British accent, and a wicked sense of humor named Phillipe grows out of David’s stomach. When Gutmouth starts dating a one-legged, three-breasted prostitute, Marie, he feels like his life is going pretty good, despite the annoyance of Phillipe, or at least tolerable. But then he feels like Maire is being unfaithful and the best thing to do about that is to kill her in a way that will not get him caught.
What makes Gutmouth more interesting and entertaining than it should be is the skill of Iglesias’s writing. Each sentence paints a perfect scene, and there is not a single word that is not used to it’s full potential. Like the writing of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, or even Bruce Wagner, each sentence in Gutmouth is richly texture and meaning to the point where any of them could be the launching point of an entirely new story. A person could use this novella as a writing exercise book, opening a random page, picking a sentence, and making their own story from that sentence. Very few authors write like this, and fortunately Iglesias is one of them bringing those types of skills into a novella about a one-legged hooker getting killed by her lover with a mouth growing out of his stomach. It is no wonder that he has continued to grow and become a Shirley Jackson and Brom Stoker award-winning success.
With this being a bizarro novella, there is no scene that does not have something weird, absurd, or deviant at its core. Bizzaro fiction thrives on the idea that everything is possible, so the things that happen in Iglesias’s novella range from the silly, like the kleptomaniac roaches in Gutmouth’s apartment that will steal your things if you do not tie them down, to the grotesque, like the business below his apartment being the Genital Mutilation and Erotic Maiming Center, and the drug that turns peoples pain into orgasmic pleasure. This really displays the two sides of bizarro fiction, and it is ultimately shows what brought the genre down. These two aspects, the silly and the perverse, slowly steered away from the silly and more toward the disgusting and that is how extreme horror really evolved out of the genre. The silly aspect of bizarro evolved too, but more in the weird erotica, like the Chuck Tingle stories (before he published more mainstream horror novels for Tor Nightfire) and all of the weird erotica on Amazon Unlimited with humans having sex featuring dinosaurs, cryptids, aliens, doorknobs, snowmen, and whatever else a person can have sex with. There are still some bizarro presses and some presses that are ran by people who’s foundation is in bizarro, so the ideas of the genre are not completely dead, but it is not nearly as prevalent and relevant as it was in the first two decades of the 2000s. Reading bizarro novels and novellas have almost become a niche thing, and they are still really fun to find and to read. Some bizarro books and authors are required reading for any horror or weird fiction fan. Bizarro as a genre has an interesting and short but rich history with tons of short books to enjoy. Gutmouth is definitely one of them.
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