Every summer night deserves a really grotesque campfire story, but that one about the man with the hook is probably getting a little stale. Chewing On Tinfoil, Joe Ollmann’s collection of illustrated short stories, has some new ones for you.
Of course, they’re not immediately recognizable as horror stories. In fact, these stories might even seem friendly and innocent, dotted as they are with strawberry theme parks and chubby naked deities. Guess again. They’re full of the most lurid cast of monsters ever conjured up: other people.
Ollmann, whom some will know from his work in Exclaim!, has a fondness for the bizarre, and his characters keep winding up in situations whose very idiocy makes them weirdly plausible. In a world where a Vanilla Ice feature film is possible, why not a gangsta-themed café where the coffee comes in “blunt or fatty” sizes?
The characters themselves are unsettling in the same way, freakish and familiar at the same time. We know these people: the surly, unkempt hermits who run used-book stores, feverish-eyed office lechers, loutish, pimple-encrusted teenage brothers. But reading this, it’s easy to feel you’ve never really noticed them before.
Horrible stuff is also often pretty funny, and this is no exception. In “C.O.P.S.,” two semi-comatose drunks valiantly attempt to beat the shit out of each other in the narrator’s parking lot, their ineptitude matched only by that of the cops who (eventually) arrive to break them up. Ollmann also crams his panels full of little parenthetical riffs on everything from the Toronto Sun to chain convenience stores. It’s a good time, in a masochistic sort of way.
But on second thought, a campfire retelling might not do justice to the looming menace of a giant fibreglass strawberry. Better let Ollmann do it himself.
