Razor Wire Pubic Hair Paperback – June 29, 2012

I remember hearing about this book back in 2009. I had wandered out into the living room of the trailer I shared with my Mother and her Life Partner to read the last book in "The Dark Tower" saga. My Mom's partner was looking up books by Christopher Moore on Amazon and had happened to stumble on some Bizarro works hidden in the recommendations. As she explored the different titles and did some outside research on Bizarro at the same time, the name Carlton Mellick III popped up several times. I now own many of the books she read the cover blurbs of by Mr. Mellick and now thanks to the celebration of my 25th year of life I have got my hands on another work by this legendary underground master of the freaky.The premise of this book is this: A man made love doll is purchased by a sadistic dominatrix with the titular body hair for the purpose of having a baby. In this world men are now long gone and roving bands of rapists roam the barren landscape. Into this world, the love doll Celsia-2, who is named after her master, must try to find her purpose as the world begins to crumble around her and those around her fall into their own psycho-sexual hell.Right from the first sentence you automatically get sucked into this disturbing landscape. Like his other work of supreme unease "Ugly Heaven" Mellick strings together different parts of speech to describe things that do not go together. This is a staple of his early work and it may seem hard to get past or even off-putting to those who try to read it. Those people however, are not the kind of people who read Bizarro anyway and are probably better off reading the latest James Patterson or Daniele Steel. For those of us who are looking for fiction outside the limits of the mainstream, this is a perfect book for you.Besides being a quite sexually charged book, this is also a work of haunting and disturbing beauty. Mellick gives the narrator, Celsia-2, unique voice. She is both haunted by the world around her and fascinated by it, her innocence almost child like in the face of the depravity and savagery she faces on a routine basis. You kind of feel sorry for her and I think that is what CM3 wants us to feel for her. He also wants us to examine our own world, and it's its own repressed sexuality and the standards it places on women. He lays bare our social norms and presents it to us raw, bloody, and still breathing. This is a dangerous book and that's what makes it great.So if you are willing to take a chance, pick this book up. You'll come out covered in cuts, but that's par for the course. Besides, would you expect anything less from the Godfather of Bizarro? I thought not!

Is it outlandish sci-fi? Is it shabby porn? Or is it some new mixture of the two? Whatever it is, it's pure genius. This book is less a work of literature than it is a work of art. It is splendid. It is beautiful. It is freaking weird!I loved every word and wish that I could share it with the world.Update:The above is what I wrote about this book when I first read it. This was the first Carlton Mellick III book that I had ever read. It was the first Bizaro book I'd ever read. I'd never even heard of this kind of thing before. Now that I've read a fair sampling of Mellick's writing I can say that the man is a freaking genius. I've actually lost my copy of this book. (Long story. I actually lost about five thousand books, all at once!) But I will be buying a new copy. This is a book that belongs in my collection.

This is definitely one of the most strange tales I believe CM3 has ever written. It is disgusting, torturous, vile, sexy, and amazing all rolled into one. This is probably my least favorite of all of his books and yet I still highly recommend it. That is how well CM3 writes. You just have to check it out for yourself. You don't have any idea where the story is going or where you are going to end up. David Lynch would be impressed.

This is the 5th book I've read by Carlton Mellick III (if you count "The Baby Jesus Butt Plug" from the Orange Bizarro Starter Kit), and while the final 20 to 25 pages are excellent, the first 40 to 45 pages were difficult to get thru. It's slow to get started, and in reality, there really isn't much of a plot to this book like there is in some of his others, like "Apes***". It's an OK read, but I surely wouldn't try to use this book as a seller to someone who hasn't read Bizarro before to start taking up Bizarro. There are better ones out there by Mellick.

A post-apocalyptic what is going on page turning tale. Absolutely loved it.

Bizarro Lit is just not my thing. It is far too silly for me to take seriously. It tries too hard and often fails IMO

Carlton picked a particular lens through which to view reality and ran with it. He stuck with it even at the cost of losing the reader.There are several books I have read that use this particular technique; telling a story without a common frame of reference. Books like this let the reader drift for lack of gravity (or substitute whatever gravity the reader can provide). I'm not generally a big fan of this method. In the end, if you try really hard, what you wind up doing is putting your own framework in for the missing one. This is 1/2 a novel but Carlton did manage to keep me reading to the end and I do find some parts of the method appealing, so 4 stars.

Honestly my favorite book by this guy. It's short but it's dense and at times really difficult to get through. I can't see finishing this book in less than a few days, even though it's only about 100 pages. Just when you think it's as weird as it's going to get, it hits another plateau.Also, probably the strangest, most visually grabbing cover art and title of any book I've found by him, and that's saying something.