A Swan Song to Get Your Hackles Up: The Ballad of TERROR TINY TIM and Other Tales of Unkindness by Douglas Hackle
Author Douglas Hackle has been working in the “Bizarro” genre for close to a decade. It’s difficult to describe his style to someone unfamiliar with that scene. I suppose “absurdist humor” would be the best thing to call his work, though that doesn’t quite go far enough. Think of an Adult Swim cartoon. Now think of a story written by an especially insane character from an Adult Swim cartoon. That’s roughly what the stories of The Ballad of TERROR TINY TIM and Other Tales of Unkindness read like.
The titular novelette sees a father watch his disabled son get beaten to death by a Little League coach after he costs his team the game. The father, however, is more concerned with squeezing the coach’s crotch rather than trying to save his son. He even tosses his baby daughter away to do so. This encounter ends with him being locked in the coach’s sex dungeon. In the sex dungeon, he discovers a horrifying secret hidden in one of the rooms. If you can call a zombie Tiny Tim horrifying.
This doesn’t even cover half the insane shit Hackle crams in the roughly fifty pages of this story. It does establish some of the running gags through the book like characters who break into goofy raps and songs, absurd names, and slang being used at strange or inappropriate times.
Hackle’s stories barely hang together by logic threads. For example, the narrator doesn’t realize he’s being raped by the coach in his sex dungeon because the letter “r” hasn’t been discovered yet. This is why he doesn’t attempt to escape until the end, when the “r” is discovered. The zombie Tiny Tim isn’t even close to the weirdest thing in this story.
Some of the stories take horror tropes and twist them into something completely alien. “The Chair” has a man encountering a mysterious being that never moves from a chair. When he shows his girlfriend, the being disappears and his girlfriend switches places with it. This could be a standard, if somewhat surreal, horror story if it weren’t for things like the girlfriend having a beehive for a head and the narrator having to stop at the hospital because his hearing aid has AIDS.
“The Wax Man” is the most obvious subversion of horror tropes for humor. It has a very standard set up for a haunted house story with a young law student being given a gig housesitting an empty house. He’s told by the owner that a wax man in the basement is the only thing in the house. He discovers the “wax man” is not a haunted wax statue, but a man who sells wax products. The story then goes completely off the rails, including the narrator counting to one thousand with each number written and a “credit sequence” at the end.
One problem with the book is it does repeat certain jokes a little too much. There are three stories here with shaggy dog jokes of numbers or lists going on for a four or five page stretch and two with “end credit” sequences. They don’t work quite as well the second or third time. This is probably less noticeable if you don’t read the book all at once, and I probably wouldn’t recommend that anyway.
My favorite story in the collection is “The Butler.” A group of friends visit an acquaintance and discover he has a butler. They make the butler perform a series of increasingly painful and humiliating tasks until he’s off the clock. At that point, they discover their acquaintance is set to become the butler’s butler as they trade the vast fortune they have between them to be each others’ servant. This is a hilarious story that also comments on the cruelty and absurdity of excessive wealth. I could easily see this story being written by an author like Donald Barthelme, though with less cursing and pop culture references. Which, of course, would make it inferior.
While you need a high tolerance for ridiculousness to enjoy it, I would certainly recommend this collection. It’s hilarious and no story goes where you would expect it to. If nothing else, it’s an experience you won’t have reading any other author.
Unfortunately, Douglas Hackle has said that after this book, he will no longer be writing under that pen name. He’s also said he won't be writing this type of absurdist fiction when he does return. If that turns out to really be the case, then this is a fine swan song for him.
Farewell, Douglas Hackle, my tiny little son.