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Moldenke #3
The Pisstown Chaos
The Pisstown Chaos is the story of a family’s dislocation in the midst of chaos, disease, and forced-relocation. Political power seems to be solely in the hands of one Reverend Herman Hooker, an “American Divine,” who revels in the sufferings of others as he spouts platitudes to the ever-on-the-move masses. As chaos rages on and parasitic infestations spread, the Reverend rules with an iron fist from his Templex headquarters, utterly without mercy. This is the final book in the cult trilogy.
- GenresScience FictionFiction
196 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2008
5 people are currently reading
164 people want to read
About the author
David Ohle
22 books43 followersDavid Ohle is an American writer, novelist, and a lecturer at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. After receiving his M.A. from KU, he taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1975 to 1984. In 2002 he began teaching fiction writing and screenwriting as a part-time lecturer at the University of Kansas. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire, the Transatlantic Review, Paris Review, and Harper's, among other magazines.
While it remained out of print for over thirty years, his first novel Motorman (initially published in 1972) gathered a quiet cult following, was circulated through photocopies, and went on to become an influence to a generation of American writers such as Shelley Jackson and Ben Marcus.
His subsequent novels The Age of Sinatra (2004), The Pisstown Chaos (2008) and The Old Reactor (2013) take place in the same dystopian setting as Motorman. Ohle's fiction is often described as weird, surreal and experimental. His own influences include Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Flann O'Brien, and Raymond Roussel.
While it remained out of print for over thirty years, his first novel Motorman (initially published in 1972) gathered a quiet cult following, was circulated through photocopies, and went on to become an influence to a generation of American writers such as Shelley Jackson and Ben Marcus.
His subsequent novels The Age of Sinatra (2004), The Pisstown Chaos (2008) and The Old Reactor (2013) take place in the same dystopian setting as Motorman. Ohle's fiction is often described as weird, surreal and experimental. His own influences include Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Flann O'Brien, and Raymond Roussel.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 19, 2025
Trashy journey through the blind alleys of the absurdist dystopian future continues…
No fuel… Cars are moved by pedaling… Compulsory mating system… Citizens are being shifted randomly from place to place… Reverend Hooker is a ruler…
Every dystopia distortedly reflects reality… The greater is distortion the more it resembles a fun house… And The Pisstown Chaos is simply a grand dome of fun…
An acolyte who does’t know all of Reverend Hooker’s sayings by heart is prone to be punished by burning…
From the rational to the irrational there is just a step.
Victims of the Pisstown parasite were thought of as dead, but not enough to bury. Gray, haggard, poorly dressed, they lay in gutters, sat rigidly on public benches, floated along canals and drank from rain-filled gutters.
No fuel… Cars are moved by pedaling… Compulsory mating system… Citizens are being shifted randomly from place to place… Reverend Hooker is a ruler…
This week we celebrate Reverend Hooker’s sixtieth birthday Now, more and more facts have come to light about the American Divine: anyone who stepped on his shadow was given what he called a damned Russian punishment.
Every dystopia distortedly reflects reality… The greater is distortion the more it resembles a fun house… And The Pisstown Chaos is simply a grand dome of fun…
An acolyte who does’t know all of Reverend Hooker’s sayings by heart is prone to be punished by burning…
Ophelia lit her gel can and, as its shadows played across the ceiling, struggled to remember the Sayings. Even after pulling her hair and rapping herself on the head with her knuckles, she could recall only two: “The meek shall not inherit the Earth” and “Nothing is good that ends well.”
From the rational to the irrational there is just a step.
April 12, 2025
Right up my street. Ohle creates a totally unique dystopian setup. Pisstown is well named. The country is rife with parasites that turn their victims into a sort of zombie called stinkers. So-called because their bodies are decomposing over a period of years.
The book is rife with death and decay and yet Ohle infuses this with deadpan humour as the inhabitants try to live in appalling conditions
The book is rife with death and decay and yet Ohle infuses this with deadpan humour as the inhabitants try to live in appalling conditions
September 15, 2010
If you are the sort of person who would go into a library and pick up a dystopian phantasmagoria with a title like The Pisstown Chaos, if you've only heard of the author in passing reference to a novel he wrote in the seventies, if you intentionally check it out anyway and devour it in two days -- if you are this sort of person, it is difficult to imagine your not being fairly delighted with the results here. David Ohle (who wrote Motorman in 1972, the only thing I knew about him) composes his paragraphs with a deranged deft touch, vaulting through various narrative threads, weird anecdotes, non-sequiters, lapses, all in stupifying whirlwind details. His vision of the future is unexplained and simple: everything is gross and smells awful. Parasites, confering a zombie-like undeath, are rampant. Hagfish are on the move. Shit (literal, figurative) is all over the place. All food seems to be derived from three or four unappetizing solutions. The Chaos is never far from breaking out again.
Storywise, this reads like a cross between Burroughs (as others often observe, some borderline Naked Lunch material here, albeit more steadily narrative) and Borges' Babylonian lottery: here the only order is more chaos, with citizens forced to Shift to new jobs, families, lives at any moment by whim of despotic spiritual leader Reverend Hooker. Prose-wise, it is grimily gem-studded (or gold-tooth studded, perhaps). Once the initial disorientation and disgust wears off, Ohle's blankly matter-of-fact presentation is drily hilarious. Soon, you find yourself accepting the characters' lack of affect in meeting whatever new indignities and atrocities the day might bring: the impression is that it could be much worse and frequently is; the alternative to any given situation is probably not an improvement. (Even so, interestingly, the acceptance is not fatalistic or completely resigned. Again and again, characters are offered choices between unappealing options and at no point do they surrender without offering a preference, even when the choice is not actually theirs. There might be some kind of commentary on American individualism here.)
In any event, once you get drawn into this mindset, the parade of grotesqueries becomes almost soothing in its way. New absurdities, rarely explained, shuffle by in unceasing sequence until even something like this seems reasonable, a complimentary part of the atmosphere:
Storywise, this reads like a cross between Burroughs (as others often observe, some borderline Naked Lunch material here, albeit more steadily narrative) and Borges' Babylonian lottery: here the only order is more chaos, with citizens forced to Shift to new jobs, families, lives at any moment by whim of despotic spiritual leader Reverend Hooker. Prose-wise, it is grimily gem-studded (or gold-tooth studded, perhaps). Once the initial disorientation and disgust wears off, Ohle's blankly matter-of-fact presentation is drily hilarious. Soon, you find yourself accepting the characters' lack of affect in meeting whatever new indignities and atrocities the day might bring: the impression is that it could be much worse and frequently is; the alternative to any given situation is probably not an improvement. (Even so, interestingly, the acceptance is not fatalistic or completely resigned. Again and again, characters are offered choices between unappealing options and at no point do they surrender without offering a preference, even when the choice is not actually theirs. There might be some kind of commentary on American individualism here.)
In any event, once you get drawn into this mindset, the parade of grotesqueries becomes almost soothing in its way. New absurdities, rarely explained, shuffle by in unceasing sequence until even something like this seems reasonable, a complimentary part of the atmosphere:
Holly Island had a lot of bailiwicks because of all the swimming pools down below to tap into. That's also where they were digging up a lot of frozen heads. It seemed like anyplace there were a lot of swimming pools, you'd find a lot of frozen heads.
August 14, 2008
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
As regular readers know, I am actually in the process these days of teaching myself to be a better reviewer and critic; and a lot of that, I've discovered, involves no more than trying to keep as open a mind as possible, to try to approach your reviews with intelligence and respect for the various different ways your audience might view that project themselves. That's why, for example, I now have the policy of waiting a week or two between finishing a book and writing its review; I find that the time spent with that book on the back-burner does good things, for example softens out the harshest moments of that particular reading experience, so that I'm not so harsh in my resulting review either. And it also sometimes makes me understand the book in a new way before writing my review; and it also sometimes actually convinces me to change my mind about a book.
But then there are other times when this is a negative-sum process; when I actually forget big parts of that book merely a week or two after putting it down, making me realize that it might not be as good a project upon reflection as it might seem when first inhaling it. Take for example today's book under review, The Pisstown Chaos by veteran weird author David Ohle; it is one of those weirdo, gonzo, Burroughsesque apocalyptic erudite black-comedy manuscripts, put out as you might expect by our weirdo friends over at Soft Skull Press. (And for the sake of disclosure, let me mention as always that I am personal friends with several employees of Soft Skull, so of course always enjoy seeing their books do well.) Ohle was actually one of the first authors of the postmodern era* to write one of these smartypants post-apocalyptic black comedies, his seminal 1972 work Motorman; and Pisstown is his latest, another bizarrely funny but horrific little futuristic nightmare, another one of those stories you can just imagine starring an eyepatched, scenery-chewing Dennis Hopper if ever made into a Hollywood movie.
And in fact, that's probably the biggest problem with Pisstown, is simply that this particular genre has gotten surprisingly big and popular within the last several years; after all, Cormac McCarthy's The Road is set basically within the same milieu, just being a lot more serious in nature, and that won the Pulitzer Freaking Prize back in 2006. There's nothing exactly wrong with this book, just ironically that its gonzo details are no longer guaranteed to automatically stick in the mind of the reader and stay there, and that's simply because there are so many other projects out there now like this -- see The Slynx, see The Pesthouse, see the insanely great Jamestown, ironically enough published by Soft Skull as well. Like all these others, Pisstown imagines a near-future America ravaged by some sort of unspoken apocalyptic event, where a completely insane religious idol slash warlord named Reverend Hooker has managed to take over the crumbling remains of society, turning all of the "civilized" US into a bizarre, cruel circus operating under random arbitrary laws -- a combination of Kafka novel, episode of "Jackass," and snuff film, as seen through the eyes of a veteran academic writer who just loves his delicately well-crafted paragraphs. Oh Lord does he love his delicately well-crafted paragraphs.
I have a feeling that this is no worse than his much-loved Motorman; in fact, I suspect now that Motorman is as well-loved as it is precisely because it came out at a time when almost no other books like this existed, right at the beginning of the postmodern period when this kind of stuff first stated catching on in the first place (think Philip K Dick, think Margaret Atwood, think Ursula K Le Guin -- all these novelists first got famous the same time period that Motorman came out). It's my sad duty to report that Ohle seems to have become the victim of his own success; Pisstown is certainly not a bad book, not at all, just simply not great or even particularly special. It's for sure something to pick up if you feel like it, but not something to rush out and get.
Out of 10:
Story: 7.7
Characters: 7.9
Style: 8.5
Overall: 8.0
*And a quick history lesson about artistic movements, for those who need it....What we call "Modernism" was first coined right after the death of Queen Victoria, at the beginning of the 20th century, and lasted literally over the next hundred years. The movement is split into four stages, each of them separate and unique but related: "early Modernism" ('10s, '20, and '30s, encompassing art deco and the Jazz Age writers and Dadaism and the like); "mid-century Modernism" ('40s and '50s, the age of Frank Lloyd Wright's ascendency, Ayn Rand, guys with horn-rimmed glasses and skinny ties smoking briar pipes); "late Modernism" ('60s and into the '70s, from Kennedy to Manson as they say, the period for example that the hit show "Mad Men" is set in); and "postmodernism" ('70s, '80s and '90s, where everything turned ironic and academic and theory-heavy, pop-culture-laced and philosophically imploded). Many people argue, in fact, that postmodernism itself officially died on September 11th, and that we're currently in a new stage of the arts -- the so-called "Web 2.0" age, for lack of a better term, a shiny and futuristic and optimistic look at the world, sincere and earnest, a direct backlash to the cold funny cynical ironic stance that was so embraced during postmodernism. But then, others say that's crap.
As regular readers know, I am actually in the process these days of teaching myself to be a better reviewer and critic; and a lot of that, I've discovered, involves no more than trying to keep as open a mind as possible, to try to approach your reviews with intelligence and respect for the various different ways your audience might view that project themselves. That's why, for example, I now have the policy of waiting a week or two between finishing a book and writing its review; I find that the time spent with that book on the back-burner does good things, for example softens out the harshest moments of that particular reading experience, so that I'm not so harsh in my resulting review either. And it also sometimes makes me understand the book in a new way before writing my review; and it also sometimes actually convinces me to change my mind about a book.
But then there are other times when this is a negative-sum process; when I actually forget big parts of that book merely a week or two after putting it down, making me realize that it might not be as good a project upon reflection as it might seem when first inhaling it. Take for example today's book under review, The Pisstown Chaos by veteran weird author David Ohle; it is one of those weirdo, gonzo, Burroughsesque apocalyptic erudite black-comedy manuscripts, put out as you might expect by our weirdo friends over at Soft Skull Press. (And for the sake of disclosure, let me mention as always that I am personal friends with several employees of Soft Skull, so of course always enjoy seeing their books do well.) Ohle was actually one of the first authors of the postmodern era* to write one of these smartypants post-apocalyptic black comedies, his seminal 1972 work Motorman; and Pisstown is his latest, another bizarrely funny but horrific little futuristic nightmare, another one of those stories you can just imagine starring an eyepatched, scenery-chewing Dennis Hopper if ever made into a Hollywood movie.
And in fact, that's probably the biggest problem with Pisstown, is simply that this particular genre has gotten surprisingly big and popular within the last several years; after all, Cormac McCarthy's The Road is set basically within the same milieu, just being a lot more serious in nature, and that won the Pulitzer Freaking Prize back in 2006. There's nothing exactly wrong with this book, just ironically that its gonzo details are no longer guaranteed to automatically stick in the mind of the reader and stay there, and that's simply because there are so many other projects out there now like this -- see The Slynx, see The Pesthouse, see the insanely great Jamestown, ironically enough published by Soft Skull as well. Like all these others, Pisstown imagines a near-future America ravaged by some sort of unspoken apocalyptic event, where a completely insane religious idol slash warlord named Reverend Hooker has managed to take over the crumbling remains of society, turning all of the "civilized" US into a bizarre, cruel circus operating under random arbitrary laws -- a combination of Kafka novel, episode of "Jackass," and snuff film, as seen through the eyes of a veteran academic writer who just loves his delicately well-crafted paragraphs. Oh Lord does he love his delicately well-crafted paragraphs.
I have a feeling that this is no worse than his much-loved Motorman; in fact, I suspect now that Motorman is as well-loved as it is precisely because it came out at a time when almost no other books like this existed, right at the beginning of the postmodern period when this kind of stuff first stated catching on in the first place (think Philip K Dick, think Margaret Atwood, think Ursula K Le Guin -- all these novelists first got famous the same time period that Motorman came out). It's my sad duty to report that Ohle seems to have become the victim of his own success; Pisstown is certainly not a bad book, not at all, just simply not great or even particularly special. It's for sure something to pick up if you feel like it, but not something to rush out and get.
Out of 10:
Story: 7.7
Characters: 7.9
Style: 8.5
Overall: 8.0
*And a quick history lesson about artistic movements, for those who need it....What we call "Modernism" was first coined right after the death of Queen Victoria, at the beginning of the 20th century, and lasted literally over the next hundred years. The movement is split into four stages, each of them separate and unique but related: "early Modernism" ('10s, '20, and '30s, encompassing art deco and the Jazz Age writers and Dadaism and the like); "mid-century Modernism" ('40s and '50s, the age of Frank Lloyd Wright's ascendency, Ayn Rand, guys with horn-rimmed glasses and skinny ties smoking briar pipes); "late Modernism" ('60s and into the '70s, from Kennedy to Manson as they say, the period for example that the hit show "Mad Men" is set in); and "postmodernism" ('70s, '80s and '90s, where everything turned ironic and academic and theory-heavy, pop-culture-laced and philosophically imploded). Many people argue, in fact, that postmodernism itself officially died on September 11th, and that we're currently in a new stage of the arts -- the so-called "Web 2.0" age, for lack of a better term, a shiny and futuristic and optimistic look at the world, sincere and earnest, a direct backlash to the cold funny cynical ironic stance that was so embraced during postmodernism. But then, others say that's crap.
April 29, 2020
The Pisstown Chaos is the final installment in Ohle's loosely-connected dystopian Motorman saga. Whilst lumped together as a trilogy, the three books actually have very little in common, bar a few disconnected frames of reference and recurring characters. Sadly, neither this nor The Age Of Sinatra hold a candle to to the original Motorman, which Ohle wrote in the 1970s. In many ways, The Pisstown Chaos is the most straightforward and least bizarro of the three. It is also perhaps the least original; I've read plenty of dystopian, post-apocalyptic stories and rather disappointingly this leans heavily on familiar plot devices, themes and tropes.
The loose story follows several members of the Balls family as they are 'shifted' around a post-apocalyptic American landscape blighted by a highly transmissible parasitic plague which has created an ever-growing underclass of 'stinkers' - leprous, necrotic humans whose entirely biology is gradually altered by the parasites that infest them. Enforced shifting - constant relocation to new jobs, which are selected at random - occurs at the whim of Pisstown's cultish leader, the Reverend Hooker, whose counter-sensical decrees and inane proverbs are the very definition of Orwell's newspeak. This is a disjointed and chaotic civilisation in terminal decline, where nothing works as it should. Whilst vestiges of modern technology and social norms remain, societal organisation has reverted to something akin to wild west townships. It's a violent, unfair world where there are very few winners.
Ohle eschews conventional exposition. We are dropped into his world without a map and little to go on in the way of context or background information, which only comes in snippets. There is next to no physical description beyond the naming of the unfamiliar actors (imps, stinkers) and consumables (Jake, urpmilk, starch bars, willywhack, grasshopper pie) that he introduces and revisits frequently. Much is left to our imagination, which I appreciate, and I think the disorientating effect of this augmented the overall feeling of confusion and dislocation.
Ohle's writing is straightforward and easy to read. It is characterised by extremely flat dialogue and a conspicuous lack of tension that is often at odds with the dangerous situations unfolding. There is a kind of humour underpinning everything, but it's as dry as a desert. The plot meanders along, unfolding with a kind of Brownian motion. The journeys and fates of the Balls family members are arbitrary and random, which makes sense within the context of the story. Shit happens... often literally, with faeces and bodily functions featuring heavily throughout.
Sadly, whilst it all works together on an intellectual level, as a package I didn't find it particularly exciting or engaging. The deadpan delivery means the characters feel distant and hard to care about, even when we are briefly allowed to glimpse their emotions. This is likely deliberate: it makes us complicit with the callous, unfeeling reality of the world we're presented with. I get it, but I felt no emotional investment. That made it a far less gripping read for me than something like The Handmaid's Tale, which has superficial similarities to this both thematically and tonally but made me feel far more engaged with and invested in its characters.
The loose story follows several members of the Balls family as they are 'shifted' around a post-apocalyptic American landscape blighted by a highly transmissible parasitic plague which has created an ever-growing underclass of 'stinkers' - leprous, necrotic humans whose entirely biology is gradually altered by the parasites that infest them. Enforced shifting - constant relocation to new jobs, which are selected at random - occurs at the whim of Pisstown's cultish leader, the Reverend Hooker, whose counter-sensical decrees and inane proverbs are the very definition of Orwell's newspeak. This is a disjointed and chaotic civilisation in terminal decline, where nothing works as it should. Whilst vestiges of modern technology and social norms remain, societal organisation has reverted to something akin to wild west townships. It's a violent, unfair world where there are very few winners.
Ohle eschews conventional exposition. We are dropped into his world without a map and little to go on in the way of context or background information, which only comes in snippets. There is next to no physical description beyond the naming of the unfamiliar actors (imps, stinkers) and consumables (Jake, urpmilk, starch bars, willywhack, grasshopper pie) that he introduces and revisits frequently. Much is left to our imagination, which I appreciate, and I think the disorientating effect of this augmented the overall feeling of confusion and dislocation.
Ohle's writing is straightforward and easy to read. It is characterised by extremely flat dialogue and a conspicuous lack of tension that is often at odds with the dangerous situations unfolding. There is a kind of humour underpinning everything, but it's as dry as a desert. The plot meanders along, unfolding with a kind of Brownian motion. The journeys and fates of the Balls family members are arbitrary and random, which makes sense within the context of the story. Shit happens... often literally, with faeces and bodily functions featuring heavily throughout.
Sadly, whilst it all works together on an intellectual level, as a package I didn't find it particularly exciting or engaging. The deadpan delivery means the characters feel distant and hard to care about, even when we are briefly allowed to glimpse their emotions. This is likely deliberate: it makes us complicit with the callous, unfeeling reality of the world we're presented with. I get it, but I felt no emotional investment. That made it a far less gripping read for me than something like The Handmaid's Tale, which has superficial similarities to this both thematically and tonally but made me feel far more engaged with and invested in its characters.
October 22, 2014
The book has a lot to recommend it: published by a smaller indie publisher, full of chaotic social upheaval and absurdist reinventions of all our extant social ills. These things appeal to me. (See: George Saunders’ CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.) Alas, even those selling points were not enough to carry me through to the end of the book. Not that I didn’t finish reading it, but that I finished with a certain plodding resignation instead of the real pleasure I’d had when I started.
In searching for a fair way to describe the reading experience, I hit upon the realization that it’s a good thing the book is short (196 pages), but it would be better had it been about fifty pages shorter. I think I might have maintained my low-grader reader’s pleasure if the story had ended before 150 pages. To read anything longer of this genre would be like surviving on a steady intellectual and entertainment diet of The Onion and Church of the Sub-Genius Propaganda.
Amusing enough in small doses, it produces no lingering after-effects on your brain or heart, either positive or negative. In stretching for maximum oddity and absurdity, Ohle’s story is mostly empty of characters to care about. Like Borges or Vonnegut books stripped of humanity or pathos. The characters as a result are dolls: moved about and contorted for passing amusement and discarded when no longer needed.
Still, it’s short and mildly amusing. When it’s cold and snowy out, that’s adequate.
In searching for a fair way to describe the reading experience, I hit upon the realization that it’s a good thing the book is short (196 pages), but it would be better had it been about fifty pages shorter. I think I might have maintained my low-grader reader’s pleasure if the story had ended before 150 pages. To read anything longer of this genre would be like surviving on a steady intellectual and entertainment diet of The Onion and Church of the Sub-Genius Propaganda.
Amusing enough in small doses, it produces no lingering after-effects on your brain or heart, either positive or negative. In stretching for maximum oddity and absurdity, Ohle’s story is mostly empty of characters to care about. Like Borges or Vonnegut books stripped of humanity or pathos. The characters as a result are dolls: moved about and contorted for passing amusement and discarded when no longer needed.
Still, it’s short and mildly amusing. When it’s cold and snowy out, that’s adequate.
May 23, 2015
Well, it wasn't my favourite thing I've ever read, mostly because of the sparse style, but it was still interesting and enjoyable and quite, quite peculiar. Absurdist. I didn't realize when I bought it that it's part of a trilogy. I would say that it's actually fine as a standalone novel, although I might have more context if I pick up the other two in the trilogy, which I will probably do at some point in the near future. I was certainly happy to have stumbled upon this in Lawrence, KS, a few weeks ago. I'll have to go back and snatch up the other two.
It's a strange little post-apocalyptic dystopian tale mostly focusing on the Balls family and what happens to them once they are shifted to new places. I would say their endings, with the exception of Mildred's are opened-ended, but many nonsensical, dreadful, weird things happen to Mildred and her two grandchildren throughout the book. The setting was vague to me, since I haven't read the other two (although, reading them might make no difference), but it all seemed to be run by this totalitarian religious wacko named Reverend Hooker. And I would say there is definitely social commentary. But I'm usually a little confused after reading a novel like this, until I've processed it. Anyway.
It's a strange little post-apocalyptic dystopian tale mostly focusing on the Balls family and what happens to them once they are shifted to new places. I would say their endings, with the exception of Mildred's are opened-ended, but many nonsensical, dreadful, weird things happen to Mildred and her two grandchildren throughout the book. The setting was vague to me, since I haven't read the other two (although, reading them might make no difference), but it all seemed to be run by this totalitarian religious wacko named Reverend Hooker. And I would say there is definitely social commentary. But I'm usually a little confused after reading a novel like this, until I've processed it. Anyway.
November 19, 2018
i like what David Ohle tried here, the underlying idea is good, but for me it comes across as too discoherent, too muddled. It's mechanically-separated pork instead of hand pulled pork. Tagged as 'meh'
December 9, 2013
Started off strong. Had some wonderfully funny and memorable characters, but lost my attention less than halfway through.
May 2, 2020
Reality is a pill best swallowed when it’s indistinguishable from molly
May 9, 2010
The nature of the world Ohle describes, with its frequent shiftings, forgettings, and outbreaks of chaos, precludes the kind of plotting that would allow this third novel to somehow provide a conclusion to a trilogy. Instead he offers us another ride into Bum Bay, Permaganate Island, and Pisstown itself. Stinkers, those near-dead who wander the landscape, play as large a role here as do the bowel movements of Ohle's characters. Very funny, very grim, and frequently repulsive. Excuse me, I have to check my stool for parasites now.
May 23, 2008
haven't read yet, but will soon
July 18, 2008
The most scatological, perhaps excessively scatological, part of the "Pedal-Punk Anti-Utopian" (c) trilogy. If I wasn't stuck in the middle of the woods of Western Mass, I doubt I would finish it.
January 5, 2009
Pisstown Chaos served as my guidebook on a recent trip to Bangkok.
http://5cense.com/Siam/1_Pisstown_Ban...
http://5cense.com/Siam/1_Pisstown_Ban...
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