Absurd, surreal, and Bizarro fiction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdist_fiction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_fiction

Okay, now that we're all caught up: this here's a topic for weird people who write weirdly about weird things, or some combination thereof, or something.

What do you do in a topic like this anyway? I guess you talk about your story? Okay well mine's about going to middle school.

All of the protagonist's classmates are figures from his past, and some of them used to be dead or are occasionally two people or are vampires. The school has this thing where it manifests strong emotions as objects or scenarios, which is a pretty shitty thing for a school to do. Also there are mutants, and LGBT themes, and school shootings, and a lot of dismemberment and creepy sex acts.
It's a romance, obviously; it's very loosely based on old shoujo anime, it's called The Absolute Destiny Apocalypse, and it's gonna be fucking sweet.

So tell me about your book, a'ight? Or whatever you wanna talk about is cool.

I think I'll be sidling over into the surreal, if my warm-up writing is anything to go by. The last time thing I wrote, the character's umbrella was yellow and black striped - so much like a bumblebee that it got excited when she walked past a flowerbed and leaned in for a closer look...

I blame Boris Vian, and too much hot chocolate.

My story is about murder, classical music, sexual deviance, Octopus relationships, hooks, and co-dependance

I think I'm going to take a plunge into absurdism this year. It's about two steps away from it in my head anyways, why not? (: There's no real synopsis yet as I'm going to have to rethink a few things first, but everyone else's sound amazing though. I'm really intrigued.

'kay, technically I claim horror as my genre 'cause horror has my heart but I think this year I'll wind up doing something between Bizarro and Absurdist with an erotic-horror twist.

It's about a mermaid who wants a soul, a serial killer who was born without a heart--literally--and an ex-surfer girl who's afraid to go back in the water.

There will be sharks. There will be sex. (Shark sex? Likely.) Blood, viscera, mutilation, torture and grotesques damage of every sort I can conceive of. And there'll probably be a nihilistic bent to the whole thing as I've been feeling rather nihilistic lately.

It's gonna be fun.

Okay, I think my very, very vaque idea fits best with absurd fiction. It'll most probably turn out as a fictional memoir (extremely loosly based on my life), filled with weird confersations (first choice in hanging yourself: a beam, staircase, tree?), morning grudges turning bad, lively fantasies about car accidents and a right arm that must be removed for it's in the way.... and just maybe some space travel, since it's 50.000 words so there's enough space to be filled! (she just goes on and on!)
Told you it's vaque! I think it will suit me just fine though.

oh and useless, random acts (no edit button!?!?)

Hi, I love reading and writing bizarro fiction (btw, http://bizarrocentral.com/ is the place to be).

I'm planning on writing a story called "Diary of a Weretarian". The story is set in a world where people only eat sausages, so as you can guess everyone looks and smells like a dinosaur. Male and female genders have morphed into a single gender, and people's social standing depends on their body type (mesomorph, then endomorph, then ectomorph). The world is ruled by fascistic leather bound librarians, and the only books are diaries made of fungus and meat that share a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with the writer. One day, people find that their houses are being destroyed and eaten by "weretarians", who cannot adapt to the meat eating lifestyle.

I'd describe it as a gross-out romantic coming of age murder mystery/psychological thriller.

Home sweet home?

Thank you so much for this thread. I think I may have found my genre - or at least, one flavour in my cocktail of genres. Reading through everyone's posts and fascinating synopses have given me the confidence to pursue the story I've been leaning toward but couldn't quite bring myself to commit to - that is, I want to write about the fantastic without spending narrative energy justifying its presence in an otherwise realistic setting. The fantastic, the bizarre - it simply exists and it simply happens.

So far, I'm hoping to write a story that falls somewhere between absurdist fiction and magic realism, about the trials and tribulations of two people who keep waking up in different bodies. I don't want to give this occurrence of daily reincarnation a specific explanation; I'm more curious about exploring how the characters deal with the situation. The various lives the characters are saddled with range from the mundane to the bizarre (a girl whose hair won't stop growing, for example, being stalked by some kid who wants to climb it Rapunzel-style).

I've read one of the Bizarro starter kits...rather fascinating genre..rather like the result of David Lynch excreting ink onto paper. I'm writing a cyber horror novel about a theocratic sky city ruled by creatures reminiscent of mini-Cthulhus...most of the races are somewhat bizarre and Lovecraftian...involves necrophilia, bondage, bipolar disorder, and flashbacks narrated in a Bizarro Finnegan's Wake style. It's inspired by a combination of William Gibson's cyber-realms, Naoto Hattori's eldritch paintings (alongside numerous other surreal painters), and Lovecraft's nihilism and Elder Gods

I was told to come here with my novel from the "identify your genre here" thread and I have to say it looks very nice, and comfy. I'm not sure my novel will be as surreal as the stories you are describing, but it will be a lot more surreal than, well, anywhere else. =)

Kudos to you guys! This kind of fiction is one of the most fantastic and fun and sometime, brilliant, fiction I see sometimes. I would love to write a sort of bizarro fiction one day, so good luck to you all. And I'd love to read some of your works once finished, that I'm sure will be awesome :D

My story is about a little girl who remembers the dead and how they died. Oh, and her imaginary fairy-friend comes true and starts drinking the nectar from the flowers that are growing over the mass graves of genocide.

The links you guys posted are amazing. The ideas y'all have, even more so. Good luck for November!

My own story is about a seemingly well-adjusted family man who has memories of his 18-year old self who took care of a heavily bandaged, ambiguously aged man. This possibly old man tells our hero about his alleged experiences with demons, dancing with them, watching them play with each other, engaging them sexually, engaging possessed persons sexually, engaging with grinning, leprous creatures sexually...all told in excruciating detail to this young man. When the family man searches for the old man, he finds him and their relationship begins again. Later, there is a Son of Sam/Zodiac/Herbert Mullin-styled (the latter being a schizophrenic man in the 70s that shot a number of people for the purposes of sacrifice) murder spree. There will be poorly recorded cartoons, sickly talking rabbits that thrive in their suffering, dollhouses filled with twigs, nude sleepwalking hermaphrodites, badly recorded folk songs, male-male rape, secular demons that resemble decayed corpses mixed with crustaceans, and general pseudo-psychological hysteria.

My main character gets hypnotized and has to travel through seven darkly fairy-tale influenced areas meeting people who are her subconscious versions of real people, that she knows in the real world. Her companion is the Good Doctor, who can only follow her into hypnosis with her voice, and therefore she takes on different bodily shapes taken from the environments, depending on which area they are currently in. The real world is like ours - if it was steampunk. And I'm not sure my main character is actually in hypnosis, she might be in some kind of hypersleep, and only THINK she's in hypnosis (the details are still fuzzy).

She does all this in order to find out why she once tried to commit suicide.

Surreal and bizarre enough? ;)

I'm pretty much pants-ing my novel this year (minus any convoluted plans I can keep in my head) so I really don't know where I'm going with mine yet, but chances are umbral abominations and eldritch gods will end up in it somehow (don't they always?), which means reality is going to be broken very quickly.

The skeleton of the story involves a supernatural P.I. in a trenchcoat and utilikilt as the protagonist, with a sociopathic gay vampire (though any one of those three individual parts may be false) as the possible antagonist (or love interest, or both, or neither) and a haunted mansion that may or may not be built as a massive junction between tens of thousands of hellish un-realities. Adding in some Tea With Cthulu just seems like the next logical step.

I guess I'll just add in "surrealist/bizarro" into my working list of genres. (so far we've got horror, fantasy, adventure, and comedy. Think I can work in a few more?)

Ahhh, I love this thread.

Guys guys guys I just had the best idea and I need to tell you about it. Hold on, let me copy-paste the note I made:

holy shit holy shit holy shit. okay. she's obsessed with death and wants to kill everyone, right? because she's dead or whatever. but listen. she's also totes hot for her sister, which creeps _her_ out to no end, but like at the end when she actually _does_ kill everyone, or mostly everyone, it's really a happy ending because she can live happily ever after with her sister's corpse. yesssssssss what the hell is wrong with me

My hypnotherapist's first shape is a human with a fish-head. Just saying.

I plan on writing a book in the style of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and The 13and 1/2 lives of Captain Bluebear. Both very good books. I don't quite know if this is what you'd call the genre mine belongs in, but it's about a Mostly Immortal guy on the quest to acquire a Perfect Sphere.