“As the 18th century clashes with the 21st century by means of a kidnapping, an elixir of youth, an old manuscript, several murders, and many grisly incidents, a macabre tale unfolds that leaves everyone changed. The eccentric author of Goldsmith’s Return presents a Florida gothic fable that both amuses and horrifies as its gruesome story takes shape. VERDICT: Readers fond of dark comedy and the macabre may get a kick out of this oddly compelling (and sometimes disturbingly graphic) tale.” —Library Journal…

“Lurid and grotesque, this darkly comic tale revels in depravity and decadence; arcane knowledge leads to horror and ambition leads to destruction.” —Publishers Weekly…

“A crazy, bawdy world of surrealist absurdities brought to life with a dazzling literary palette.” —Shelf Awareness…

“If you are a serious reader of literary novels and value truly great invention in style and narration, then I cannot recommend this great novel more highly. There’s genius in this writing and it has literary legs which appreciative readers will value for generations to come.” —David Lentz, review for Goodreads…

“Lizard World is the best novel I’ve read in eons. It feels more like a found manuscript than a work of the imagination. Indeed our protagonist discovers the diary of a 17th-Century nobleman who travels to Florida, where he encounters a tribe of naked “salvages” who worship “crokadells.” This might seem a retelling of “Heart of Darkness,” if only Joey Conrad were a humorist, and Kurtz a man entirely without scruples. But it is not the exotic locales that render Lizard World a treasure. Like all great fiction the novel takes the reader home; this journey leads into the darkest caverns of the self. The story will make you weak with laughter. But it will also make you whole.” —Ben Cheever, author of Strides…

“Lizard World opens with Josiah Fludd, a disenchanted character from the Early Modern World, exhuming a female corpse for a customer, whose interest in the carcass is presumed by the gravedigger to be a sexual one. Fludd’s blasé attitude vanishes when, on delivery of the corpse, he watches its feet sawed off, and he learns that they are meant to replace his patron’s nether claws. From this startling introduction Terry Richard Bazes pushes us into a bizarre world that vacillates between the past and present—and is told by a writer whose imagination seems to have no bounds.” —Barney Rosset, publisher of the Evergreen Review and founder of Grove Press  …

“The command of the language of the period is astonishing and the prose manages to be racy and vivid as well as convincing.” —Charles Palliser, author of The Quincunx…

“In a sane world, author Terry Bazes’ imagination would be quarantined like nuclear fuel. A small benefit of living in our disordered and crazy world is that his imagination is loose in it. It has delivered this pungent, genre-mixing, spicy and steamy omelette of a novel. Oscillating (in style and form) between a late-17th century world of grave-robbing surgeons who make “splicers” out of body parts, without regard to species—and their toxic, degenerate descendants in contemporary backwater Florida swamps, who prey on tourists for eyes, kidneys and livers, Bazes has created a hilarious and provocative fantasy world, ‘splicing’ Pynchon and Hiassen, Dickens and Defoe into the kind of fun we wish for but often miss between two covers. Read this wild book!” —Peter Coyote, actor/author, Sleeping Where I Fall  …

“Imagine if you can Erskine Caldwell and the John Barth of The Sot-Weed Factor collaborating on a tale that careers like runaway horses back and forth across three centuries and you might have something approaching Terry Richard Bazes’ Lizard World. This is a novel that will intoxicate you with its mad invention and breathless hilarity even as it slaps you sober with its dark vision of human desire and the depredations of time.” —Steve Stern, author of The Angel of Forgetfulness  …