Carlton Mellick III is one of the strangest, most shocking authors in existence. There is no question, nor any opinion in that statement; it’s cold, hard fact. With book titles like “Ocean of Lard,” “Sunset with a Beard,” and “Satan Burger,” you have to wonder what it is that inspires such deranged, though surprisingly coherent storytelling.
In one of his more recent tales, “Sea of the Patchwork Cats,” Mellick tells the tale of a hopeless alcoholic surviving the apocalyptic event of everyone in the world committing suicide at the same time. Conrad, the protagonist, was passed out on the floor of a bar at 11:34 a.m. PST, when the whole world killed themselves. Putting the reader in a hypothetical conundrum, Mellick makes the reader think hard about a decision to be made: to continue living in an empty world or to just follow suit and end one’s own life.
Conrad eventually decides to live out the rest of his days in a drunken stupor, an appropriate response given the circumstances.
However, the book takes a turn for the surreal. Conrad takes up habitat in a house that eventually floats off to sea for no apparent reason. He finds mutated, genetically altered women frozen in ice inside the house. When he runs into a structure in the middle of the ocean that looks like two women with their backs together, and the house he’s in starts to sink, he tries to save some of the frozen women, after realizing they’re still alive.
Surreal isn’t the word for what happens afterward. It’s almost as if the book is chronicling the descent of an otherwise normal man into madness due to the catastrophic beginning of the book.
The structure he runs into turns out to be a building constructed inside this statue of two women. This building seems to change as they explore it. They eventually find a room full of cats, finally explaining the strange title. Conrad and the three genetically altered women he saved from his sinking house experience some strange, dream-like happenings inside these walls.
Mellick takes this tale to the extreme at the end, as if taunting the reader to finish. It seems to turn into a stream of consciousness piece in the last pages, further evidencing Conrad’s madness.
All in all this tale is quite a ride through the mind of an eccentric storytelling genius. Mellick takes everything he knows about literature and the structure of a story and turns it inside out. An interesting read for those bored of conventional stories. However, unlike most of Mellick’s books, this one in particular has no zombies, a small let down for his growing fanbase.