Genres
Bizarro fiction
A contemporary literary genre using absurdism, satire and the grotesque, mixed with pop-surrealism and genre staples to be weird and entertaining.
Bizarro fiction is a contemporary literary genre which often uses elements of absurdism, satire and the grotesque, combined with pop-surrealism and the staples of genre fiction, aiming to create subversive, weird and entertaining works. Its first Starter Kit anthology described it as "literature's equivalent to the cult section at the video store". Small presses adopted the name in 2005 (Eraserhead Press, Raw Dog Screaming Press and Afterbirth Books), with the publication era usually dated from 2001 and Carlton Mellick III and Kevin L. Donihe as early standard-bearers; Dazed & Confused called its writers "the bastard sons of William Burroughs and Dr. Seuss".
It is a deliberately fringe, self-promoting genre, but it shares more with speculative fiction than with the avant-garde: in publisher Rose O'Keefe's working rule, if an audience enjoys a work primarily because of its weirdness, it is Bizarro. For writers it sits past weird fiction's dread on the dial, the way grimdark pushes genre darkness to its extreme, and its craft test is keeping the strange readable.