Book Review: The Haunted Vagina

“I have been scared to have sex with Stacy ever since I discovered her vagina was haunted.”

Title: The Haunted Vagina

Author: Carlton Mellick III

Genre: Bizarro Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Horror

Publisher: Eraserhead Press 

Publication date: September 18th, 2006

Format: Bought for Kindle

Synopsis:  It’s difficult to love a woman whose vagina is a gateway to the world of the dead.

Steve is madly in love with his eccentric girlfriend, Stacy. Unfortunately, their sex life has been suffering as of late, because Steve is worried about the odd noises that have been coming from Stacy’s pubic region. She says that her vagina is haunted. She doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal. Steve, on the other hand, completely disagrees.

When a living corpse climbs out of her during an awkward night of sex, Stacy learns that her vagina is actually a doorway to another world. She persuades Steve to climb inside of her to explore this strange new place. But once inside, Steve finds it difficult to return… especially once he meets an oddly attractive woman named Fig, who lives within the lonely haunted world between Stacy’s legs.

Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone

Why I picked this book up:  I had been hearing about the Bizarro genre and I wanted to see if it was as weird as I had heard.  Long Story short?  Yes.  Short Story long?  More than you can even imagine.  If you read this genre, it really feels like the writers are really just trying to one up each other.  Some of it was predictable, the writing wasn’t the best but it was fun from start to finish and I liked it.

I’d also like to mention that I can appreciate the uniqueness of the premise.

Why I kept reading it:  Steve, the hero, has an eccentric girlfriend. She has all these “cute” quirks, like the fact that she stayed in college until she was thirty majoring in useless things, or the fact that she’s fluent in Russian even though she’s Thai because she was adopted, or that she goes to seafood restaurants and orders steak, or that she likes to lick– yes, that’s right, LICK– her glasses clean. . You’ve heard of manic pixie dreamgirls? Well, this is a manic pixie nightmaregirl.

One day, while Stacy and Steve are having sex, he hears strange noises coming from “down there,” and there’s a skeleton hand “down there,” and suddenly a skeleton climbs out of her. The whole thing weirds them out so much that Stacy decides that the thing to do is to have Steve go up “there” on the most horrible spelunking journey ever to figure out what’s really going on. Then it becomes a portal fantasy. Think The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe but the wardrobe is a vagina and the lion and the witch are skeletons and rubber people.

Well, he does… and it’s fascinatingly horrible. Like, the description of it is horrible and what goes on in there is horrible, but is intriguing at the same time. I don’t want to go into too much detail as at a slim 99 pages, the world building is a large part of the story.   I bought this on a whim because the cover and title just made me laugh, I definitely wasn’t expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. Behind the weirdness and horror and hilarity the writing is actually surprisingly good, which I wasn’t expecting because, let’s be real, it’s a story about a haunted vagina so I had pretty low expectations for the quality. Consider me pleasantly surprised.

Who I would recommend it to:  Anyone who likes weird

STARS: I can’t even begin to…