Bad Foundations is a comedic absurdist novel about a home foundation inspector whose own home life is falling apart.Cook does not have an ordinary job. He spends his days inspecting people's crawl spaces, cataloging their filth and photographing the decay. At his other job, as a father, he has to learn how to bond with his teenage daughter, but that's hard to do when covered in spider webs.High on legal weed and searching for answers to life's mysteries, Cook works alongside similar colorful characters trying to make money and save for the future. That is until a bad sales month spirals out into a quantum stay at a surreal Ohio hotel.New friendships are made, old curses are dealt with, and the local police force is put to the test. Told in a stylized working-class voice, Brian Allen Carr is a true raconteur of the American Midwest.

The black magic of bad living only looks hideous to honest eyes.

Welcome to Scrape, Texas, a nowhere town near the Mexican border. Few people ever visit Scrape, and the unlucky ones who live there never seem to escape. They fill their days with fish fries, cheap beer, tobacco, firearms, and sex. But Scrape is about to be invaded by a plague of monsters unlike anything ever seen in the history of the world. First there's La Llorona -- the screaming woman in white -- and her horde of ghost children. Then come the black, hairy hands. Thousands, millions, scurrying on fingers like spiders or crabs. But the hands are nothing to El Abuelo, a wicked creature with a magical bullwhip, and even El Abuelo don't mean shit when the devil comes to town.

"Motherfucking Sharks reads like it was carved into the floor of a sun-baked desert by an old testament prophet with a thirsty knife." - BEN LOORY, author of "Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day"

"Where I come from, the children sing a song:

Oh the motherfucking sharks Oh they're gonna come to town Oh they're gonna kill the babies Oh they're gonna make you drowned in your blood

Oh the motherfucking sharks Oh they're gonna mince the flesh They're gonna swim up and surround you Don't you know you'll never pass the test it's over

Oh the motherfucking sharks Oh they don't care about the gods And they don't care about the families And they don't care about the cries or tears they're killers.

Motherfucking sharks Motherfucking sharks Motherfucking sharks Motherfucking sharks"

Ten stories. Three cycles. Fists and possums and gunfighters and penises and hookers and short buses and dead babies and fireworks. The stories in this collection originally appeared in: HOBART, FICTION INTERNATIONAL, KITTY SNACKS, TEXAS OBSERVER, NEW BORDER and THE PURITAN.

"Short Bus" is a darkly humorous collection of linked stories set in the southern haunts of coastal Texas--near where the Rio Grande dumps its brackish water into the Gulf of Mexico. The stories in this book ponder deformity in all its forms. Fetuses twist their mustaches, feet float in jars, a special- education teacher aims to rob a bank with the aid of his students. But binding these stories is a gentle humanity. Brian Allen Carr moves his grotesque characters toward the hollows of hearts, heaving despicable actions toward tender outcomes. "Short Bus" is a book about understanding the worst of us, smiling at that which makes us shudder.

"Brian Allen Carr's brain must be a snarl of firing pistons, sizzling fuses, hoses leaking blood and tequila and hydraulic oil. How else can you explain the twisted machinery of his stories? Each of them is a disturbing journey that will thrill and educate you in the sunlit haze of the Texas/Mexico border--and the sometimes subterranean darkness of the human heart."--Benjamin Percy, author of "The Wilding" and "Refresh, Refresh"

"Brian Allen Carr balances the harshness of his characters' lives with beautiful and precise language, making parched land feel lush. Carr writes the best kind of stories--stories that only he could have written." --Mary Miller (author of "Big World)"

"Brian Allen Carr has written a short story collection that is everything hardworking--the characters, the scenery, the sentences--all form to build a machine crafted to break hearts along the border. A ridiculously strong first collection."--Shane Jones (author of "Light Boxes")