Eric E.Olson created a neapolitan tale; weaving magical realist happenings, noir scenes of a Lynchian motif, and science lessons had Timothy Leary teamed up with National Geographic.

Eric E. Olson, The Procession of Mollusks, Astrophil Press, 2009.


If Fletch took Lovecraft to see a movie and it turned out to be a double feature—'Slugs: muerte viscosa' and 'The Monster that Challenged the World'--this post-genre romp is what might have been extracted from their post-movie dreams. This is a smart, funny, and (most importantly) irreverently weird book.—Brian Evenson

Murder is afoot, or aslither, in Newport Bay, the setting for Eric Olson’s bracingly odd, darkly infolding tale of a Pacific Northwest hamlet where the shellfish have come up to take the air, the townspeople are turning very strange and the television cameras are rolling. Twin Peaks meets The Living Planet (with a dash of Groundhog Day) in this brilliant debut — Olson is off to an exciting start.—Laird Hunt
 
 A Pacific Northwest, coastal town is seized by its passion for the phylum Mollusca as seen through the varying lucid eyes of an ex-reporter who believes he’s a reporter and a young boy coming-of-age in a docuphile society. Olson created a neapolitan tale; weaving magical realist happenings, noir scenes of a Lynchian motif, and science lessons had Timothy Leary teamed up with National Geographic.
I’m not ashamed to admit that this book gave me nightmares. Or feral dreams, rather. Olson convincingly sculpted a spiral illustration while tweaking the nerves that lead to those primal places once suppressed after agriculture and architecture were born. Stirring these neglected tidepools, left behind puddles teaming with its own isolated eco-system, disturbs some of the more unexpected imaginables. Olson explored this sticky territory and had the brass to record a map for others to find their way in and back out again. - oukamiotokonohoteru.blogspot.com/

It's the 49th annual March of the Mollusks festival in the Pacific Northwest town of Newport Bay and a strange murder has taken place: the body of Board of Supervisors Chairman Snodgrass is found hanging upside down, naked, drained of all blood, with a saucer-shaped wound on his back. The initial suspect is Dr. Roberto "Berto" Fiori, a malacologist with controversial theories about mollusks, in whose house the body is first found. But things become more complicated as the victim has trouble staying dead.
Olson's first novel is told through the narration of two characters: Torrence Haflek, a reporter with a fondness for parks who may-or-may-not actually be employed; and Jimmy Wilson, a 13-year-old fascinated with sealife and videography. Both discover they're suffering from an unexplained medical condition that gives Haflek waking hallucinations and Jimmy a voracious appetite.
The plot thickens as the two -- along with Berto and Angela Angraboda, Haflek's ex -- uncover Snodgrass' involvement in a plan to end the danger of red tide poisonings for shellfish consumers (and thereby promote the shellfish industry,) with a neuromodulator implant, now undergoing clinical trials in Newport Bay. And then there are the giant, seemingly-friendly snails that have begun to appear in the area by the thousands, bringing with them the attention of Sir Richard Attenborough.
Also, the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus plays a role in Dr. Fiori's research. I won't go into details, but if the sasquatch find out what humans have been doing to their food supply, there's gonna be some delimbings. Tree octopuses are watching from the woods and parks around Newport Bay, and they've taken an unusual interest in Haflek, whose relation to them is reminiscent of Tyrone Slothrop's relation to V-2 rockets.
The Procession of Mollusks is an enjoyably bewildering tale of hermaphroditic gastropodan sex, transhumanism (of a sort), and the existence of objective reality itself in a world mediated by nature documentaries. - Lyle Zapato

Eric E. Olson’s novel The Procession of Mollusks begins with a quote from Ween’s The Mollusk. For those not initiated into the mindmeld fuzz-pop euphoria of the legendary underground band, being on the wavelength with a great Ween album is like either being part of the best inside joke you’ve ever heard or realizing that the inside joke isn’t even a joke at all (look no further than “Buenos Tardes Amigo” from Chocolate and Cheese in which the band puts on their silliest and most inane Cheech-Spanglish accents, yet proceed to deliver the best spaghetti western saga ever). I bring this up because part of me wants to wax eloquent about Olson’s affinity with Ween, about the elegant, indefatigably deep inspiration the band and their anomalous output has unavoidably brought the writer and his novel, but what quickly transforms The Procession of Mollusks from well-versed fanboy lit into a deliciously unique standalone debut – one of the best in quite some time – is that Olson doesn’t merely tap into a voice that fits snugly underneath the umbrella of the Ween ethos: He one-ups Dean and Gene by utilizing their evocative lyrics as bedrock, then granting The Procession of Mollusks a literary architecture of its own.
It’s the kind of novel that isn’t distinctly benefitted by humdrum synopsis – there’s a gross-out murder, a reporter and video-crazed 13-year-old who attempt to get to the bottom of it, as well as a Smörgåsbord of bizarre townsfolk, Dead Ringers-ish machines and a probably-antagonistic influx of the eponymous Mollusca – and this complexity is one of the novel’s boldest and most impressive merits. A review blurb on the back of the paperback’s first edition uses the term ‘post-genre’, which is potentially wildly pretentious, I know, but somehow the term works here. The Procession of Mollusks is by no means a minimalistic novel, nor is it narratively cut-and-dry, but (like the Ween records that infuse it) this jovial, labyrinthine rhetoric allows for postmodern accolades to be thrown at it without reservation.
Lynchian is an easy one (carve another notch in Olson’s esteemed study of popular culture and how it informs his work: The man knows his Twin Peaks), but there’s quite a bit of Ken Kesey in here, too (Mollusks seems to have a very Beat sense of nostalgic pull to it that Sometimes a Great Notion-era Ken would probably have been quite fond of), and it’s possible that even in the course of just one page of the novel, one feels evocations of, say, both Night of the Living Dead and Hitchcockian suspense – often simultaneously. “Today is the first day of the March of the Mollusks,” writes the author as the book careens into its last third, bringing with it the kind of ominous avowal that Jimmy Stewart would have delivered in a hushed tone in any number of Hitch flicks.
What it boils down to is that while some authors exploit postmodernism as an excuse to simply shoehorn older cultural sentiments into their own, Olson finds a way to throw his nuggets of various cultural approach into his writer’s bag of tricks (I can see a well-worn Ween concert sticker affixed to this bag) and I’ll be damned if he doesn’t pull a rabbit out of the thing. - MIKE RESTAINO

Duncan Barlow sent it to me a while ago so i guess it's not completely random

it's one of the books from his fledgling Astrophil Press
the likes of Brian Evenson & Laird Hunt say some nice things about the book on the back cover which are good people to blurb it because Eric E. Olson comes off [on the page] as a prodigy of the 2
or think the bastard offspring of Lewis Thomas & Raymond Chandler
& i can see why Barlow would want to PUBLIsh it as it's reminiscent of his Super Cell Anemia which i talk about at the end of this post & Hunt is spot on to compare The Procession of Mollusks to Twin Peaks—it has that campy made-for-TV feel to it but at the same time you know Olson [like Lynch] is capable of far more he just wants to hold your attention & entertain [which he does]
& cliché as it is Evenson is right to call it a «romp» because that's what it is
it's fun & sleazy & sleuthy but also cerebral
it getting me to thinking some about our spineless cousins the mollusks—perhaps the most overlooked phylum despite the fact that it is the best-selling marine phylum on this planet
& i'm not just saying all this because calamari are mollusks & Duncan Barlow has been in Sleepingfish & i dig his music
i don't know anything about the author Eric E. Olson but from reading his book so far it's like he's is a closeted marine biologist that had a lot to get off his chest in the name of art
it's no easy feat to incorporate scientific concepts into literature & still have it be engaging & not gimmicky
i TRY to do this but more often than not i tend to get carried away
Olson manages to stay focused & keep it relevant & readable whilst infusing his deep-felt love for MOLLUSK
at the appropriate times he sneaks conceptual content in—sometimes in the guise of actual scientific papers or ARTicles that characters in the book had written
here's the sorts of things you might expect:

& there's parading & murder & investigating & rehabilitating & comas & bone-popping sex
it takes place in a small town on the Oregon Coast that is obsessed with all things mollusca especially during their annual procession from which the book gets it's name
there's a «pet food store» that doesn't sell food for pets but sells pets as food for people to eat [after they're through being pets]
there's a mollusk museum & plenty of poking fun at west coast psycho-babble
there's symbiotic relationships [both in mollusks & their human counterparts] & there's dream sequences & severed tongues [as forms of therapy]
there's even a non-linguistic TEXT artifact of sorts:
«The central difficulty in translating the text stems from the fact that the Spiralis Text is not written in a language based on phonetic or cuneiform structures, but a chemical based language. Thus in order to transcribe the content, linguists and chemists have been collaborating on a system that can make sense of the meticulously constructed prose contained within the Spiralis Text.
[ ...]
Therefore, the author of the text was confined in his ability to record his story by a few simple mechanisms of communication; namely, a rudimentary sense of touch, and the ability to receive and interpret chemical signals. And here, by "interpret," it's safe to say that the author of the text could not process information the way in which we do today, mainly because he had no brain and only a simple central nervous system. Thus we come to one of the central themes of the Spiralis Text, that of the subjective individual disassociated from his surroundings.»
there's lots of such mollusk-related literature & kitsch that gets folded in like saltwater taffy
none of it is gratuitous though—he has a way of tying it into the human condition & the plot of the book which so far appears to be a mystery about some guy [Snodgrass] that gets murdered [sort of]
often nothing is what it seems
i'm halfway into the book & he's been murdered twice already
good stuff  - Derek White

from The Procession of the Mollusks: 

In one of my dreams I was tending an oyster bed corralled off from a wide bay by an enclosure of rocks stacked up to create a sea wall. I made my way around the enclosure, dipping a long vacuum hose into the water. The hose, attached to a loud, diesel-powered engine stationed a few yards up on the rocks, was grafted onto my hand at the handle, its tube melding with my skin in a stitch-work of flesh and plastic.
In the water, the rows of oysters, their shells slightly ajar, pointed upward toward the surface. The vacuum tip brushed along their calcareous lips, sucking away algae and seaweed. A cacophony of gull calls filled the air
As I worked along the edge of the constructed pool, head down, focusing the tube on each oyster with meticulous care, a loud splash of water behind me made my head jerk to see where the sound had come from. On the bay side of the rock enclosure, the tip of what was undoubtedly a long tentacle had slipped out of the bay, over the sea wall, and was rutting around in the pool, attempting to grasp a tentacle full of oysters. The long arm flexed and rolled as it fastened its grip, the suckers contracting and relaxing like the pupils of enormous eyes, each surrounded by a ring of what looked like teeth.
I attempted to drop the vacuum, but, of course, it was attached to my hand, so I settled for dragging the tube along with me as I scrambled over the rocks toward the tentacle.
When I was close enough to where the arm was still rooting around in my pool of oysters, I slapped at it clumsily with the end of the vacuum tube, missing several times before finally making contact. The arm flinched, and from behind the sea wall, the body of whatever enormous monster the tentacle belonged to, hauled itself out of the water, standing upright to confront me.
I was surprised to see that the tentacle was actually one of many legs that were attached to a humanoid creature that looked suspiciously like a medieval friar or monk. His hair was cut into the familiar ring around the circumference of his head, leaving the wet skull bald and gleaming in the sun. Around his neck hung a massive ornate cross, studded with jewels and inlaid with sparkling gold.
The monk smiled sheepishly at me, shrugging his shoulders slightly, then retracted the offending tentacle, trying to hide the five or six shells that were affixed to the suckers.
“Those are my oysters,” I said. “They are not yours to take.”
The monk’s smile disappeared, turning into a pathetic, imploring pout. I sighed and waved my hand dismissively.
“Alright, go ahead. But don’t come back looking for handouts. Go steal someone else’s oysters.”
His face broke into a satisfied smile as he returned the tentacle to the bay side of the wall. He bowed his head in my direction, then slipped beneath the surface and was gone.
I continued tending to my oyster bed.