Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Two books this time, of which the Pinkwater is the less-weird:

Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater: This is a cheerfully surreal Pinkwater YA novel about a teenage boy whose parents don't understand that "just walk up and introduce yourself" won't get his classmates to be his friends. Things get more interesting, and weirder, when another new kid, Alan Mendelsohn, moves to the neighborhood and befriends the narrator; Alan doesn't fit in any better, but he's not interested in being liked by the classmates who pick on him. Things get weird when Alan tells everyone that he's not really from the Bronx, he's from Mars, and this somehow leads to everyone fighting over whether he's really a Martian. Then the two boys go into town and spend their book budget on a set of lessons that claim to teach telepathy.... This isn't exactly connected to Pinkwater's other books, except in the sense that it has another not-quite-Chicago as the nearby big city, Hogboro. I grabbed the kindle edition on a whim because Pinkwater tweeted that it was on sale for $1.99, and I hadn't already read it.

Discovering Scarfolk: for tourists and other trespassers, by Richard Littler. Here, the weirdness extends to the form of the book: it's part guidebook; part collection of drug ads, public service posters, newspaper articles, and other imaginary documents; and part narrative about a man who is trying to find out what happened to his twin sons. The whole presents an imaginary town in England, where the town council (if it exists) is xenophobic, casually homicidal, and hyperactive in pursuit of order, while the local pharmaceutical company specializes in psychoactive drugs with a sideline in poisons. There are dozens of footnotes by the frame-story compiler of the book, who suggests that while the explanation just given might be true, it's also possible that the incident involved, say, extraterrestrial visitors. The whole thing is funny, some of it in ways that would be horrific if the affect was less flat. Content warning for violence to children.

There's a connected blog, which I haven't looked at yet: I read alanro's copy of the book while on vacation in the Olympic National Park, in a hotel without wifi or cell phone signals.