Born To Be Weird

Description

A collection of demented fantasy and horror. A public restroom even more horrific than most, with a stained toilet that can swallow a man whole, sending him to a sewage-filled hell. A riverbank lined with swaying mops given faces and philosophies. A secondary school that seems to waver in and out of reality not only in dreams, but also upon wakeful visitation. An isolated grotto, home to trolls and the posthumous shadow form of Elvis Presley. These are all settings of peculiar, often unnerving events in How Not to Kill Yourself author Set Sytes's collection of short bizarro fiction. It features the longer story "The School of Necromancy," in which a school buried deep in the Catacombs of York teaches subjects much less innocent than math or language arts.

Set Sytes was born in the misty, Arthurian woods of England and was raised by bears. He grew up learning how to do and be many things at the same time, including slaying monsters, rescuing damsels in distress (who turned out to be neither in distress nor, in fact, damsels), and commanding great armies (the strategy involved inevitably being "everybody charge at the enemy"). As the Real World struck with a calamitous clang, Set was found wandering around in the desolate aftermath, completely uncertain about what was now expected of him. He faffed and stumbled around for an embarrassingly long time (sometimes failing quite spectacularly) and then finally turned his hand to the only thing he remembered being any good at as a kid: writing. He was relieved to break the curse of never having finished anything in his life, when he finished his first novel. Which was okay-ish. Set has since authored many stories of darkness and weirdness and flights of fancy, including the sci-fi/fantasy/western novel WULF, the YA pirate fantasy India Bones and the Ship of the Dead, the thoroughly twisted dystopian thriller Moral Zero, and the fantasy/horror short story collections of Faces in the Dark and Born to be Weird. Set requests politely that you don't put onions anywhere near his food.