Review: The Baby Jesus Butt Plug

Title: The Baby Jesus Butt Plug
Author: Carlton Mellick III
Genre: Bizarro Fiction
Price: $9.95
Paperback: 104 pages
Publisher: Eraserhead Press
ISBN: 978-0972959827
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed By: Cheryl Anne Gardner

Book Description: WARNING: DO NOT MOLEST THE BABY JESUS

Step into a dark and absurd world where human beings are slaves to corporations, people are photocopied instead of born, and the baby Jesus is a very popular anal probe. Presented in the style of a children's fairy tale, The Baby Jesus Butt Plug is a short dystopian horror story about a young couple who make the mistake of buying a living clone of the baby Jesus to use for anal sex. Once the baby Jesus clone turns on them, all hell breaks loose.

I can’t really write a long drawn out review for this book simply because it is a short Aesop’s sort of fairy tale, illustrated and all. However, if you have no aversion to worlds where children are extinct, adults are photocopied into existence as adults, and everyone works mindless drone jobs at huge corporations in a viscous cycle of slave the day away and then spend your money on food, useless possessions, or pet babies -- because that is all the satisfaction you are going to get in life, and so you might as well shove it all up your ass -- then you will love this little absurdist allegory.

Our poor couple just feels so empty that they decide to go a backyard breeder to pick up a pet baby. You can even get a clone baby of someone famous, if you like, and the baby Jesus clones are all the rage. But there is a dark side to this pet trade: the heinous abusers who use the pet babies as anal sex toys, and our loving couple is no different than any of the other Joneses on the block, except their little pet baby Jesus turns out to be something like Chucky.

This book has been in my TBR pile for a while, and I had lost track of it until Emily recently reviewed Razor Wire Pubic Hair. I have been recommended several of Mellick’s books on Amazon, and I can say that as a writer of reactionary literature, he has a gift for using the dark, the disturbing, and the ridiculously offensive to state the obvious when it comes to drawing parallels to the ludicrous idiocracy of our modern world. Nothing in his writing ever seems gratuitous or all that shocking when you stop to think about what he is actually saying. This is conceptual art at its finest and its most deviant and its most perverse and subversive. It’s art with purpose, and I like that ... a lot. Not to mention the illustrations are just wonderful. There are a lot of psychological, theological, and sociological themes being explored here, like the feeling of insignificance we have as just one of the many amidst the masses, or how humans have an innate capacity to pervert and abuse everything we can get our hands on in order to either make a buck or get gratification, or how every human has the subconscious desire to submit to a narcissistic need to “love thyself, plus a whole lot more, and all of the exploration is done quickly, so you have to pay attention. The writing has a deliberate lack of finesse, as if an 8 year old adult wrote it -- oh yea, our main character *is* an 8 year old photocopied adult. My only gripe was with the huge font. I understand it was to mimic a children’s book, for obvious reasons, but I think a smaller book size and a denser font would have suited this story a bit better, say for instance a pocket size book, then the author could reduce the price to something more reasonable for its length. If it had been done as a proper children’s book with a hard-cover and colour illustrations then it would have warranted a $10-15 dollar price tag. As it stands now, 7.99 would have been more appropriate considering the page count for the actual story. As for the subject matter, if you think South Park is obscene you might want to pass on Mellick. But if you like dark satire, absurdist humour, with a shot of blasphemy thrown for good measure, then you will love and appreciate this book. Some reviewers likened the thematic approach to Cronenberg, Burroughs, and Lynch. I would have to agree with that. This is hardcore punk literature for sure: definitely intellectual and not for the overly sensitive. Do not molest the Baby Jesus, you have been warned.

9/10

This book was reviewed from hardcopy purchased at retail by the reviewer and will be donated to an upcoming free book Friday.