Order THE NIGHT'S NEON FANGS here
I've only started reading bizarro fiction a couple months ago and it's been pretty great. It's a pretty groundbreaking "genre" that calls itself bizarro for lack of a better term because surreal, hypnagogic, genre-bending, not-bound-by-narrative-logic-or-realism is way too long. Sometimes the stories are really strange though. Bizarre if you will. David W. Barbee's collection of long short stories The Night's Neon Fangs is an enigma shrouded in colorful candy wrapper with a fleeting and intangible meaning.
There are four stories in The Night's Neon Fangs and all heavily feature David W. Barbee's obsession with the animal kingdom. The title story is perhaps the most conventional of the collection. It's a werewolf story set in a cursed America where it's raining mummies from the sky. The narrator Buster Wade is also cursed with electric lycanthropy or elektrolycanism, like Barbee calls it. It's obviously an original and colorful story, but it's also deceptively bleak. It's about reconciling yourself with what you've lost and find solace with in what you have. That life is about making and breaking connections all the time. It's bleak, but it's oddly deep and moving.
It was not my favorite story in the collection, though. Batcop Outta Hell featured a bat person policeman thing making a deal with the devil to come back to life and avenge the murder of his family. The characters of this stories are sentient bats living in a sprawling metropolis called Guano City. It's another story where David W. Barbee explores the concept of belief. What makes it more interesting in Batcop Outta Hell is that Barbee does it through the idea of manifest destiny. Officer McNulty (I love the name) basically is a superhero with a karma tab looking to resolve a murder. Think damned Batman meets Matthew Scudder. Once again, this story is deceptively bleak as it's about the price to pay to be a hero.
I guess there are several ways you can read The Night's Neon Fangs. I thought it read very much like an existential late night cartoon featuring a lot of animals. The stories are quite long for short stories, but aren't novella length (40 to 50 pages each), which is oddly uncomfortable to read because they end just as you're getting acquainted with them. Batcop Outta Hell is a little better wrapped, but for the most part the stories of The Night's Neon Fangs are visions, short bursts nightmares in bizarro worlds that are both extremely surreal yet anchored in the reality of the author's subconscious. They're a bit of a gymnastic to read because they are more than meets the eye, but it's always fun to read something so far off the beaten path.