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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 57 > Reviews >Bradley Sands' My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said YES!

My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said YES!
Bradley Sands
Raw Dog Screaming Press
ISBN Number: 9781933293936

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          In Issue 46, I reviewed the Blue edition of The Bizarro Starter Kit, a compilation of novellas and novelettes assembled as a primer on Bizarro literature, a genre of speculative fiction that combines elements of absurdism, horror, B movie excess, cartoonish logic, and a healthy dosing of off-color, even scatological, humor. For the uninitiated, think of Franz Kafka on acid, or Waiting for Godot tag-team directed by David Lynch, Ed Wood, and Sam Peckinpah. It’s some of the most unusual, exciting, and blatantly refreshing genre fiction being written today.

          Of the stories in the Blue Book (the second of the kits, following 2007’s Orange edition), Bradley Sands’ Cheesequake Smash Up was the stand-out story for me. This tale of an absurd battle royale between fleets of airborne fast-food franchises was a gleeful and inventive take on the competitiveness of chain restaurants and the funniest novella I’ve ever read. This year, Sands is back with a collection of nineteen short stories and vignettes unforgettably titled My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said YES!. However, readers looking for a repeat of Cheesequake Smash-Up will be in for a surprise. For all of its bizarreness, ridiculousness, and grindhouse bloodshed, Cheesquake Smash-Up is nonetheless a traditionally-structured, linear story populated with characters whose motivations and goals—however morbid and weird they may be—follow a logical trajectory. For the most part, the stories in My Heart Said No eschew all but the vestiges of plot structure and character arcs. Rather, they are stories of dream- and nightmare-logic which sweep the reader along a course that can only be understood when the reader thinks like a dreamer; that is, through association rather than cause and effect, sharp image rather than sharp logic.

          Although it occurs late in the book, the story “Becoming Lucid” is an excellent guide into the illogic of Sands’ collection, and would have better served the reader, I think, by being placed as the second or third story in the collection. Here, a man name Carlos slips in and out of an ongoing dream, jerking from the mundane actions of waking in his bed to dipping back into a dream that becomes increasingly sexual, violent, grotesque, and strange.
     Not wishing to experience his life flash flooding before his eyes, Carlos carves his head into a digital clock, setting its alarm for the moment before impact.

     Fluttering his eyelids, he goes back to his bed and masturbates, falling asleep mid-stroke.

     The sewage creeps closer, revealing a mélange of surfers consisting of every person who has ever frightened Carlos for no good reason beside the fact that they waited to the last possible second to make him aware of their presence. They each wear a sinister mold of their face, frozen and removed from the time in question.

     He rouses and removes his stained and sticky boxer shorts. The renewed sense of comfort lulls him back into nightmareland.
          As the dream progresses, it becomes increasingly lucid and disturbing. Carlos fulfills a number of sexual fantasies, visits a chocolate factory, and declares world peace before realizing that he cannot wake up.
     And there’s just something about being force-fed a concoction of blood, tears, screams, and tooth fragments that suggests you’re no longer in control, that something is rotten in the realm of the phantasmagorical.

     He pauses—the body he’s been thrusting into doesn’t share his enthusiasm, his pleasure. It doesn’t seem to be having a very good time at all.

…

     An officer mentions she’s not the only one. And he realizes he cannot wake up.

     That his mundane world of pillows and bedsheets has only been a dream.
          This is the logic upon which most of the stories in My Heart Said No turn—that of a “nightmareland” where such basic, human actions as lying in a soft bed do not and cannot exist. This story thus unlocks the collection for the reader who may be baffled by page after page of heightened imagery apparently unconnected by causality. Seen this way, “Chase Sequence” becomes a strange and deeply funny take on the common dream of being chased; here, the unnamed protagonist is a contestant in a race, fleeing a refrigerator, a boom box, and a pack of cigarettes, assisted and sometimes hindered by a woolly mammoth. It ends, as many of the stories do, with the end of the world. “A Visitor’s Guide to Lawn Guyland” finds two men traveling, buddy picture-style, through a twisted and ultraviolent landscape in pursuit of a car that may be involved in the Montauk Project. Along the way, they flood a mattress shop, have “orgasmic bowel movement[s]” while channeling Elvis, and visit a laboratory that creates “experimental drugs,” partaking in a string of adventures that reads like an infinitely weirder take on Leaving Las Vegas.

          Readers who long for more “traditional” fare akin to Cheesequake Smash-Up needn’t worry, however. Sands thankfully intersperses the ongoing nightmarescape with stories more grounded in plot and satire. In “Gen Papa-Georgio,” a journalist bearing Sands’ name (and who shows up in several other stories) visits the volcanic home of a rock star and gets to experience the sensation of being blown to bits along with the musician's fans, who insist on milling around outside. The story is a gleeful take on the excesses of superstardom, mindless fan-worship, and even music journalism, complete with lyrics to a rock song that are laugh-out-loud hilarious. “A Performance” is a gristly monologue given by a sociopathic speaker who has arranged a symphony in which the instruments are humans submerged in vats of acid. One of the shortest pieces in the book, this exquisite tale is the closest to traditional horror that Sands has yet come, and, editors take note, perfect for inclusion in a year’s best-of anthology.

          My favorite tale, however, was undoubtedly “The Anals of Piracy,” admittedly, perhaps, because its characters and plot resembled Cheesequake Smash-Up in tone. The “Anals” take place in a surreal water park where the pirate queen of a filthy ship (and former theme restaurant) does battle with her archrival, a captain who wears a koala suit, while trying to find and kill a leviathan. The resulting story, in which she, Captain Koala, a series of resurrecting first mates, a lovesick pirate, and a mariachi band are intertwined is by far the book’s most memorable.

          Although Sands’ nightmare-logic is endlessly inventive and intriguing, it can, unfortunately, become both overwhelming and opaque, rendering a few of these stories inaccessible. The book’s weakest story, for example, is “Abusing My Interests,” which, as far as I can tell, follows a man who is half vagrant and half muddling police detective (literally, his body appears to be divided down the middle between both identities). The sequence of events, however, is so haphazard and disconnected that the story becomes frustrating long before it reaches its ending. Likewise, “Outside” suffers from an excellent set up for a joke—a hilarious parody of Isaac Asimov’s "Three Laws of Robotics"—that never reaches a punch line. Instead of a story where “automatonics” are woven through, even at random, the reader gets a meandering protagonist and another unfocused ending. While Sands’ dream imagery often carries a story well, it does so when and because he uses it to make a pointed satirical comment, or weaves these images together into a pattern that is a familiar imitation of a dream. When he relies on the strangeness of his imagery alone, however, the story suffers for it.

          These flaws aside, My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said YES! is a worthy book that seasoned fans of Bizarro, splatterpunk, and surreal literature will likely enjoy. I do not, however, recommend it for the reader who is entirely new to Bizarro as the stories’ dream-logic takes some getting used to. Instead, I recommend picking up one of the two Bizarro Starter Kits (of which I slightly prefer the Blue Book) before approaching this collection. When it comes to stories such as “The Anals of Piracy” and “A Performance,” the more homework one does beforehand, the greater the rewards one will reap.
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