Vampire Strippers from Saturn by Vincenzo Bilof

by Vincenzo Bilof

Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke meets Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood meets an episode of HBO’s old, late night series Real Sex meets the movie Death Becomes Her meets Condoleeza Rice’s collection of unflushed tampons.Time is infinite, and so are strippers. The beautiful and sultry Rene leads her trio of vampire strippers from (around) Saturn to destroy Earth. Their demonic foes—the plots—have hunted them across time; Earth is the last remaining planet with sentient life in this version of the universe. Rene’s love affair with a man who is half-horse, half-boy in a future version of Earth threatens her desire to inspire the apocalypse; if the vampire strippers fail to destroy the world now, men will be nearly extinct, and women will be hunted for sport by the surviving males. True love, time travel, bad music, shapeshifting plots, and a brooding supernatural detective named Will decide the fate of Earth in more than two realities. Can Rene prevent an apathetic future while allowing Earth to survive? Time travel, it turns out, really isn’t all that complicated, and neither are women.

Genres: Bizarro Fiction

Paperback

First published March 30, 2015

About the author

"We already have Brautigan, Vonnegut, and Russ Meyer but who can claim to be Vincenzo Bilof?"
--The Novel Pursuit

From Detroit, Michigan, Vincenzo Bilof has been called “The Metallica of Poetry” and “The Shakespeare of Gore”. With a body of work that includes gritty, apocalyptic horror (The Zombie Ascension Series), surrealist prose (The Horror Show), and visceral genre satire (Vampire Strippers from Saturn), Bilof’s fiction remains as divisive and controversial as it is original. He likes to think Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Charles Baudelaire would be proud of his work. More likely, Ed Wood would have been his biggest fan.

During the day, Bilof repairs arcade machines in semi-operational billiards clubs, or he chases his children around the house in between episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
You can check out his blog here: http://vincenzobilof.blogspot.com/

Gonzo is his favorite Muppet.

Reviews

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel lived up to the spectacular promises of its title, which is quite a feat in itself. I've been longing for different reading experiences for some time and I gotta say this didn't even feel like reading a novel at times, but more like reading the script of a late night HBO series after smoking bad weed, in an alternate dimension where the sun is purple, the sky is yellow and the water is red. I might be a tad basic of a reader, but this was both fun and disorienting.

VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN is, I believe, a novel about the vice of men and the apocalypse. It's also a bizarro comedy about the inescapable nature of desire. It's hilarious, shocking and visually stunning at times. I'm a visceral reader at heart, so VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN was difficult for me as times get into a groove, given how unhinged the narrative can get. It doesn't change anything from the fact that it's a fun, creative and uniquely challenging novel. A very pleasant surprise.

[Auntie Raye-Raye · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received an e-copy of this book from netgalley for review purposes.

Bizarro, horror and sci-fi went to a b-movie drive-in and had a threesome. This is the book that resulted from that coupling. This not like any book I've read this year. It's way out there, and some of it I didn't quite understand. (Reader error, probably. I'm out there myself) It's fairly entertaining, and a decent first novel for Bilof.

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut in a three-way with Anne Rice drowning in a sea of splatterpunk and Russ Meyers movies.

That is a fair description of the craziness and raunch in Vincenzo Bilof’s surrealistic and Bizarro sex-gore tribute Vampire Strippers from Saturn. I am relatively sure my intelligent readers know who Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan are. I am positive you all know who Anne Rice is and adventurous enough to be familiar with splatterpunk, surrealism, and Bizarro lit. But if you know who Russ Meyer is, shame on you. The casualness of sex and violence in Bilof’s novel which is essentially a literary experiment of the surreal reminds me of those campy 60s skin films by the famed director. Bilof’s book does vaguely make me think of a Vonnegut version of Faster PussyCat, Kill, Kill. So much so that if I made Vampire Strippers from Saturn into a movie, I would need to get into my own time machine and bring back Kitten Navidad for the lead role. But now I think I have revealed more about myself than I would like…

Nonetheless, Vincenzo Bilof has a deft hand in juggling the visceral with the intellectual. Even in the strangest scenes, his very literary prose gives it fresh meaning and heightens your curiosity of what will follow. I often think Bilof’s plots are secondary to his prose even though Vampire Strippers from Saturn has a very unique and intriguing plot. Vampire strippers from Saturn, actually near Saturn, have come to earth where we Earthlings are the last sentient life in this version of the universe. Their leader Rene is inclined to save it despite the opposition from their enemy, the shapeshifting Plots. However she discovers from a time traveler that saving Earth will usher in an age where women become no more than hunted animals. Now this seems to be a strange concern coming from vampire strippers whose main occupation is drinking blood and ripping off heads. But what is a vampire stripper going to do?

I will be honest with you. I wasn’t always able to follow the plot. It is an issue with Bilof’s style that it tends to overpower the plot and here is no exception. But the wildness of this idea is better suited to his style than the other two books of his that I have read and still recommend. Here he can disobey the rules and the craziness of the plot enables him to go with the flow, so to speak. And it is a rocky and wild flow. Bilof’s ideas was many and they are all over the place. That is one of the strengths in a weird way. A more philosophical reviewer than I could find tons of themes in here. The role of women in a man’s world, the greed of society, the consequences of our basic needs, the contradictions in the idea of free will, only to name a few. They are there if you are looking for them. But if you are not, you will still enjoy the brashness of this book with its sex, violence and all that bad rock music.

I do not pretend to know more than the writers I review. That falsehood seem to be a conceit that we reviewers appear to flaunt but don’t necessarily believe. However as much as I love Bilof’s style I sometime wonder what would happen if it was toned down a bit. There clearly is a Brautigan or Vonnegut amidst the splatterpunk and skin exploitation leanings. But I may be totally wrong. Perhaps the best thing Vincenzo Bilof can do is to give us is Vincenzo Bilof. Sex, gore and all the rest. I mean…we already have Brautigan Vonnegut, and Russ Meyer but who can claim to be Vincenzo Bilof?

Four and a half stars.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know what you're thinking. Another vampire novel? This isn't you're ordinary run of the mill vampire tale though. Bilof's has a knack for invading other genre's and blending them all together into something unique. With Strippers you have horror, sci-fi, and bizarro melding together with excellent results. As a writer you just need to take risks and Strippers is the kind of book that will at times seem to make no sense at all, but as the story progresses you begin to see pieces fall into place and the story overall is like an B-movie from the fifties force fed a bunch of really good drugs and allowed to run amok.

I loved the overall idea of the novel. The strippers are here to destroy earth but nothing is ever easy and this is where the book really shines. We encounter a variety of characters that give it a nice bizarro edge and I should point out that it has a kick ass sound track that you can cue up as you read the novel. Strippers is original and while the strippers may be called vampires we find out that they don't act like your traditional vampires and use a strip club for their coven.

If you like your novels quick paced and gory then this is the book for you, but if you like your stories to follow a clear cut path then you may not like this. What made this novel so enjoyable was the fact that you truly have to pay attention. It's a complexly written novel that requires patience. Bilof has written a novel that ushers in a great deal of chaos while being truly original. There isn't just one genre that this fits into, but that's why I'm a fan, I know that when I read one of his books all the rules simply disappear and you're given something that doesn't pander to just one type of reader.

Simply put Vampire Strippers From Saturn is a great novel when it's in the right hands. People will either love it or hate it and there are some that will get it while others simply won't. How much you enjoy this novel depends on what's sitting on your bookshelf. If you only read the latest best sellers odds are you're going to dislike this which is unfortunate because Strippers is a great novel. Bilof doesn't pander to styles or trends. He walks in and makes them his own.

[Made DNA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical and dream-like, the narrative is atypical, choosing to steer well clear of most plot devices and characterizations one might expect from the science fiction or vampire genres. Delightfully refreshing and imminently immersive.

Notably "missing" here, too, is the gore-filled splatter one might expect from a vampire novel. However, while the vampires do kill, it all happens in the background, and there is more humanity in the vampires than in the world around them. Trapped in a never-ending loop of time, the vampires must learn to escape their assumed fate while simultaneously promoting it.

This is not an action novel, it's not exploitation, and it's not horror. I would call it experimental literature bizarro.

[melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was painful. I absolutely wanted to love this based on the title and cover art alone. Kinda like the old school days of hitting the video store and grabbing the most raunchy, gore filled cover and getting it home to realize the contents themselves are horrid.

Yeah, that about sums it up. Took about a week and a half to read something I normally would have devoured in 2 days. Really not excited by stream of consciousness writing and while, yes, this has elements of science fiction & horror, there's a hell of a lot more WTF moments and writings that really need to put this into the bizarro category, but it honestly wouldn't really fit there either.

So, save yourself the agony. Look at the pretty picture. Giggle at the title and move along.

*Digital review copy provided by NetGalley & the publisher.

[Josef Hernandez · Rating 3 out of 5]

A wild and entertaining read. For a full review, please go to https://areviewerdarkly.blogspot.com/... and follow me on Twitter @josenher