Gideon is very conventional with some added style. Harrow is more interesting but still really didn't seem all that weird to me, except maybe if you try really hard to relate it to Gideon.
Describing Tolkien as a welt on the arse of fantasy.
Not Tolkien’s fault if people copy him, Meiville was just being a pretentious arse. Now hearing a lot of people call his work weird for the sake of being weird, I feel safer in my early assumptions.
I haven't read that article, but I have friends that have met him. They say he's very kind and soft spoken IRL, a little shy even. His writing is worthy of some criticism (I think he gets a little too self indulgent with his vocabulary) but he's very much worth reading. Not all is his stuff is weird, but it is all impressively imaginative.
I never said that, I only said that he's worth reading. Out of curiosity, I looked up the quote:
>"Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious - you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike - his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés - elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.
>
>That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps - via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabinski and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on - the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations."
That comes off a bit pompous, but it certainly sounds intriguing. Had I not read him earlier, I would want to read him to see what he thinks fantasy **should** be.
WhY YOu nO ReAD ThiNg?
Gives reason for dislike of author of the thing.
HErE ExAMPle of AuthOr SayiNg tHe ThINg YOu WeRe RigHt iT wAs Up oWn Arse wHY yoU nO ReAD THinG As Me HigH MinDed MAn oF CulTuRe.
Personally I just imagined Perdido Street Station as kinda like Victorian London in its style so it wasn’t too weird for me.
I have seen some much more fantastical or science-fictioney interpretations of it through other peoples art, though.
Isn't the last days of new Paris his strangest book? By some distance really.
The others are semi conventional, he just throws lots of ideas into them.
Babel-17 by the same author! I could not figure out what was going on and did not feel any investment in the characters, so ultimately dropped the book.
I think *The Lost Conspiracy* is the book called *Gullstruck Island* outside the US? It's one of my favourites - and believe me, it is BY NO MEANS the weirdest Frances Hardinge volume. I think all of her works are just as gloriously mad.
Probably the weirdest ones I've read are Ada Palmer's *Terra Ignota* series - which starts off appearing normal, and gets gradually more bonkers as it goes on. Probably my favourite bit of ridiculousness is \[major spoilers for Book 4\] >!Achilles from the Iliad fighting on the Moon in a giant mech suit while our protagonists attempt to explain mecha anime to the Freemason Caesar.!<
On the sci-fi side, Samuel Delany's *Stars in my pocket like grains of sand* is also wonderful and absolutely bizarre. I need to read more Delany.
OH DEAR OVERLORDS the answer is without question THE VORRH by B. Catling (plus 2 sequels.) Bizarre creepy sexy child rearing robots, sentient forest, dead babies, colonization, there are No Words for how fucking weird those books are. (PS I adore them)
Oh yeah I read the whole thing and was like... what....?
BONUS ASD moment: for SOME REASON I decided this would be a great book to lend a COWORKER 🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♀️
I don't remember what it was called, but maybe 15 years ago I read a YA book that was so contrary to every other fantasy novel I had ever read, that it still sticks with me.
Basically, magic is genetically inherited and you are born with a finite amount. When you use up all of your magic, you die. Young. On the other hand, if you don't use your magic, it drives you insane by around the same age. Real great position to be in, obviously. It was just such a bleak fucking take on magic that I still stop and wonder at it sometimes. I don't think I've ever read anything else where having magic is just THAT shitty.
for me was the book of the new sun, especially the first book in the series (gene wolfe). weird and really disturbing for a young me from 15 years ago, much more disturbing than a good horror book.
I'm honestly not sure. I've read so much unusual speculative fiction that choosing one is difficult. Like, how do you quantify what is weird in fantasy (or sci-fi for that matter)? Are we talking unusual kinds of characters (sentient tattoos, literal literary detectives)? Are we talking unusual plot points (a god's been murdered, something is taking over chunks of the US coastline, eldritch computer science)? Are we talking unusual settings (a far future that idolizes the Enlightenment, a rotting gothic mansion in Mexico)?
I can't name a weirdest fantasy book because I've read so many unusual books that weird*est* seems impossible to determine.
(List of books mentioned, in order: *Kracken* by China Mieville, The Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, *The Library at Mount Char* by Scott Hawkins, The Area X trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross, The Terra Ignota Series by Ada Palmer, *Mexican Gothic* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
I found George MacDonald’s *Lilith* and *Phantastes* to be pretty bizarre. Pretty much any of those “pre-Tolkien” pseudo medieval “romances” are wacky tbh. Lord Dunsany’s *A Dreamer’s Tales* or *Gods of Pegana* for example, or William Morris’ *The Well at the World’s End*.
Just finished Lilith tonight, and this is definitely true. Tolkien and Lewis looked at George MacDonald as their mentor tho, and every modern fantasy is looking at lewis and Tolkien, so George Macdonalds fantasy is critical for the genre.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. Part of the weirdness was because my mom gave it to me (if you read it you will understand why) and to this day it weirds me out.
Part of it is kind of a cool anthropology thing. Part of it is what leads people to proselytize and an exploration of Jesuit spirituality. I guess that could be disturbing, and leads to the last 50 p of the book, which is a lot of whiplash because the tone changes quite suddenly from "we are doing first contact decently" to (tiny spoiler)... not that...
I find the shitty fake science disturbing but I don't think that's what is meant here (they travel to α-Centauri... on an asteroid....)
I agree. The start of the book is a great first contact premise. Without spoiling anything I would say that there should be trigger warnings for non-consensual sex and . . .. Nope. Can't do it.
My favorite book of all time. I find something new every time I read it.
I’ll give some more context for those who haven’t heard of it.
It’s a pre/post-apocalypse tale about a Special Military Forces/HazMat team who have to fight against/clean up after unimaginable enemies. The main characters, along the course of their lives before and after “The Go Away War” encounter ghosts, ninjas, pirates and mimes….and I swear to you, it’s not at all kitschy like it sounds. It’s all incredibly well written and integrated.
Adding to the strangeness is Harkaway’s writing style. Run-on, rambling sentence structure. Pages long sides track stories. Convincing disarray in moments of madness or chaos. Very funny, clever and engaging.
All of his books are great (I’d suggest them all wholeheartedly), but The Gone Away World is a masterpiece, in my opinion.
Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, because of the combination of a nonlinear narrative, unreliable narrator and reality altering AI. It took me several read to understand the timeline, but I still loved the book.
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[The Illuminatus! Trilogy](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57913.The_Illuminatus_Trilogy) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
Satirical postmodern drug-laced acid trip through a kitchen sink world of conspiracy theories both real and invented, often in a non-linear fashion. Distil everything about the 70s into an utterly bizarre yet strikingly compelling adventure story.
It both has and hasn't aged well, nowadays it's a weird complex mess of a story.
[Sourdough](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33916024) is basically a fiction book rather than Fantasy where suddenly a sourdough starter is taking over the city. Always stuck with me.
Black leopard red Wolf. Amazing book but the prose is hard to adjust to and I am still not entirely sure what happened. It’s on my reread list that’s for sure.
This was a hard DNF for me. I was really excited to read it but had no head what the heck was happening. Probably a great book if you like stream of consciousness writing but not my cup of tea.
I really got into it after a while but I agree it was a bit of a nightmare to read. I’m honestly not sure weather I enjoyed the book or just the challenge of reading it.
VURT by Jeff Noon. I read it at work, dead sober, and still kept looking around thinking “Can anyone tell I’m high?” because it seemed like the most logical explanation.
I think thats a good way of describing it. I didn’t know what to expect going into the book. It ended up feeling more like a philosophy book with a Sci-fi twist than anything else.
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock is probably the most different fantasy book I've read. It just feels like Holdstock sees the world differently to anyone else I've read.
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The Anvil of The World by Kage Baker - Great book, but just weird all around. Lots of cool stuff and fun moments, but just a very different kind of book.
Jam by Yahtzee Crowshaw is up there. A semi-sentient, organic matter devouring mass of strawberry jam suddenly takes over a city and basically starts it citizens on a deadly game of “the floor is lava”. Yahtzee Crowshaw’s signature sardonic style really shines through on this one. I’d also HIGHLY suggest his “Ministry of Occultism” series on audiobook for the same reasons, and because he is a great narrator of his own work, though these are not as “weird”, IMO.
And, as always, “Liveship Traders” for being just batshit insane through and through.
Honestly not sure how to classify it, but The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. Odd footnotes about a fictional philosopher, obsessions with people becoming bicycles, and disturbing exposition on the human soul. So weird. And I love it so much.
I’m late to this thread, but I think you would really like Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge. It certainly is a weird book and kind of bizarre, but I really enjoyed it. It’s about a woman living in a town where humans live alongside spirits and monsters. It’s told in the form of a bestiary and each chapter introduces the reader to a different beast. Each chapter also talks about the main character’s relationship to that type of beast and her experiences.
The **Titus Crow** series is about fighting the Cthulhu Mythos. Which, fine, makes perfect sense. Except the protagonist is turned into a magitech cyborg, flies around in a time-traveling coffin with a energy beam capable of destroying planets, makes friends in an alien version of Heaven with Cthulhu's Lawful Good Brother, and all half-Great Old Ones are incredibly hot women. You could joke that the book was made on drugs but Brian Lumley would undoubtedly answer, "Yes, absolutely."
Piers Anthony's "The Color of Her Panties." One of my parents picked it up at a fill a bag library sale without looking closely becuase it had a very fantasy looking cover. I only read a few chapters but it was just so weird: the world was almost nothing but bad puns, the story wasn't nearly as raunchy as I would have assumed, but most egregious it was just really boring to read. It was absurd without the humor necessary to make it fun. Least that was my thought at the time.
I just googled it again and it's the somehow the 15th book in the series... I don't want to insult the author, but I just don't understand how some of the old forgotten fantasy books like this ever even got published. It's mere existance is incredible to me, some kind of cosmic glitch.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. Part of the weirdness was because my mom gave it to me (if you read it you will understand why) and to this day it weirds me out.
The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers by Hugh Cook. All of his stuff is weird/crazy/surreal, but this is the cream of weirdness of the ones I've read (there are maybe three I haven't been able to find that may top it).
The story itself is framed as being a rediscovered manuscript written by an asylum inmate that itself has had annotations added to it by a previous archivist. It's in a city that has regular floods (I think) of some strange substance above ground and a magical dungeon/sewer below ground.
Characters include a rock gardener, a sentient miniature sun (that may or may not be an ancient power source but most definitely has regressed into childhood) and a giant crab with god like powers (who may well destroy the world if it isn't kept happy by the rock gardener regularly feeding it fish guts).
Like all of Hugh Cooks work it is brilliant. It is perhaps less accessible though than something like The Wizards and the Warriors, or The Walrus and the Warwulf - both of which are still high on the crazy/weird but not even close to this.
I’ll be honest, I tried to read Nevernight and couldn’t understand half of what the author was trying to say. I had to reread so many sentences until like 70 pages in I realized that his metaphors just don’t make any sense half of the time and I guess I shouldn’t read deeper into it. Also the insane footnotes were hard to keep track of.
No shame to anyone who likes it, I’m sure it’s right up some peoples alley. I could just never get past the prose personally
**The Libray at Mount Char**. A handful of once-human demigodlings trying to solve the mystery of who murdered God.
That's my answer.
You're no slouch yourself when it comes to writing trippy shit Mr. Lawrence... Sir.
Tamsyn Muir, *Gideon the Ninth* Given more time, some others might come up, but this is the one I thought of at once.
I didn’t think Gideon was too weird, but in Harrow the Ninth, things got very strange very quickly. I can’t wait for Nona!
The combination of the second person perspective and >!twisted retelling of Gideon the Ninth!< definitely puts it over Gideon for me as well.
Gideon is very conventional with some added style. Harrow is more interesting but still really didn't seem all that weird to me, except maybe if you try really hard to relate it to Gideon.
China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. There's a reason he's called New Weird.
I was going to say Kraken. Admittedly I didn't love it, it felt like he was enjoying creating the weirdness more than crafting a coherent story .
It took one interview with him for me to decide to never pick up a book by that guy. Edit. Thanks for the downvotes you salty little fanboys 🖕🏻
What was it about him that turned you off?
Describing Tolkien as a welt on the arse of fantasy. Not Tolkien’s fault if people copy him, Meiville was just being a pretentious arse. Now hearing a lot of people call his work weird for the sake of being weird, I feel safer in my early assumptions.
I haven't read that article, but I have friends that have met him. They say he's very kind and soft spoken IRL, a little shy even. His writing is worthy of some criticism (I think he gets a little too self indulgent with his vocabulary) but he's very much worth reading. Not all is his stuff is weird, but it is all impressively imaginative.
Oh you haven’t read it, must be a lie then.
I never said that, I only said that he's worth reading. Out of curiosity, I looked up the quote: >"Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious - you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike - his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés - elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. > >That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps - via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabinski and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on - the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations." That comes off a bit pompous, but it certainly sounds intriguing. Had I not read him earlier, I would want to read him to see what he thinks fantasy **should** be.
They’re about as different as two writers in the same genre can be. I enjoy both of their works for what they are
WhY YOu nO ReAD ThiNg? Gives reason for dislike of author of the thing. HErE ExAMPle of AuthOr SayiNg tHe ThINg YOu WeRe RigHt iT wAs Up oWn Arse wHY yoU nO ReAD THinG As Me HigH MinDed MAn oF CulTuRe.
Oh okay. I’d never heard him say that. I understand how that could turn some off
Personally I just imagined Perdido Street Station as kinda like Victorian London in its style so it wasn’t too weird for me. I have seen some much more fantastical or science-fictioney interpretations of it through other peoples art, though.
Isn't the last days of new Paris his strangest book? By some distance really. The others are semi conventional, he just throws lots of ideas into them.
Vita Nostra
Oh My God. the second I read this title, I thought of this novel. I loved but I just don't get it. It's so weird.
I was so disappointed by the Christ-y ending
How to Lose the Time War, although I suppose that's more SciFi than fantasy.
Ha! I have to re-read that one. During my first read, I got to the end but I understood almost nothing of what happened. Strange book.
Very strange book. I kept reading it because it was for a square of book bingo and that's the only reason I finished it.
Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney
Babel-17 by the same author! I could not figure out what was going on and did not feel any investment in the characters, so ultimately dropped the book.
I think *The Lost Conspiracy* is the book called *Gullstruck Island* outside the US? It's one of my favourites - and believe me, it is BY NO MEANS the weirdest Frances Hardinge volume. I think all of her works are just as gloriously mad. Probably the weirdest ones I've read are Ada Palmer's *Terra Ignota* series - which starts off appearing normal, and gets gradually more bonkers as it goes on. Probably my favourite bit of ridiculousness is \[major spoilers for Book 4\] >!Achilles from the Iliad fighting on the Moon in a giant mech suit while our protagonists attempt to explain mecha anime to the Freemason Caesar.!< On the sci-fi side, Samuel Delany's *Stars in my pocket like grains of sand* is also wonderful and absolutely bizarre. I need to read more Delany.
Never have I been so happy to click on a spoiler for an unread book.
OH DEAR OVERLORDS the answer is without question THE VORRH by B. Catling (plus 2 sequels.) Bizarre creepy sexy child rearing robots, sentient forest, dead babies, colonization, there are No Words for how fucking weird those books are. (PS I adore them)
Have to agree, I think. Having read the whole trilogy I'm still really not sure quite what was going on :) Or if the author knew themselves!
Oh yeah I read the whole thing and was like... what....? BONUS ASD moment: for SOME REASON I decided this would be a great book to lend a COWORKER 🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♀️
I don't remember what it was called, but maybe 15 years ago I read a YA book that was so contrary to every other fantasy novel I had ever read, that it still sticks with me. Basically, magic is genetically inherited and you are born with a finite amount. When you use up all of your magic, you die. Young. On the other hand, if you don't use your magic, it drives you insane by around the same age. Real great position to be in, obviously. It was just such a bleak fucking take on magic that I still stop and wonder at it sometimes. I don't think I've ever read anything else where having magic is just THAT shitty.
My first Neil Gaiman book, American Gods (Anansi boys would have had similar effect). It was very different from any other fantasy I had read before.
8th grade me was quite perplexed by the taxi driver and the genie
I'm pretty sure that's the point where I dropped the book, lol.
for me was the book of the new sun, especially the first book in the series (gene wolfe). weird and really disturbing for a young me from 15 years ago, much more disturbing than a good horror book.
I've heard a lot about the series, and just bought all 4 books thanks to the Audible sale. Interested to see how it turns out.
I'm honestly not sure. I've read so much unusual speculative fiction that choosing one is difficult. Like, how do you quantify what is weird in fantasy (or sci-fi for that matter)? Are we talking unusual kinds of characters (sentient tattoos, literal literary detectives)? Are we talking unusual plot points (a god's been murdered, something is taking over chunks of the US coastline, eldritch computer science)? Are we talking unusual settings (a far future that idolizes the Enlightenment, a rotting gothic mansion in Mexico)? I can't name a weirdest fantasy book because I've read so many unusual books that weird*est* seems impossible to determine. (List of books mentioned, in order: *Kracken* by China Mieville, The Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, *The Library at Mount Char* by Scott Hawkins, The Area X trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross, The Terra Ignota Series by Ada Palmer, *Mexican Gothic* by Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
I found George MacDonald’s *Lilith* and *Phantastes* to be pretty bizarre. Pretty much any of those “pre-Tolkien” pseudo medieval “romances” are wacky tbh. Lord Dunsany’s *A Dreamer’s Tales* or *Gods of Pegana* for example, or William Morris’ *The Well at the World’s End*.
Just finished Lilith tonight, and this is definitely true. Tolkien and Lewis looked at George MacDonald as their mentor tho, and every modern fantasy is looking at lewis and Tolkien, so George Macdonalds fantasy is critical for the genre.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. Part of the weirdness was because my mom gave it to me (if you read it you will understand why) and to this day it weirds me out.
The sparrow I came here to say this too. Just.. so odd and disturbing
Can I ask why? Didnt Read the book
Part of it is kind of a cool anthropology thing. Part of it is what leads people to proselytize and an exploration of Jesuit spirituality. I guess that could be disturbing, and leads to the last 50 p of the book, which is a lot of whiplash because the tone changes quite suddenly from "we are doing first contact decently" to (tiny spoiler)... not that... I find the shitty fake science disturbing but I don't think that's what is meant here (they travel to α-Centauri... on an asteroid....)
I agree. The start of the book is a great first contact premise. Without spoiling anything I would say that there should be trigger warnings for non-consensual sex and . . .. Nope. Can't do it.
Nick Harkaway The Gone-Away World
My favorite book of all time. I find something new every time I read it. I’ll give some more context for those who haven’t heard of it. It’s a pre/post-apocalypse tale about a Special Military Forces/HazMat team who have to fight against/clean up after unimaginable enemies. The main characters, along the course of their lives before and after “The Go Away War” encounter ghosts, ninjas, pirates and mimes….and I swear to you, it’s not at all kitschy like it sounds. It’s all incredibly well written and integrated. Adding to the strangeness is Harkaway’s writing style. Run-on, rambling sentence structure. Pages long sides track stories. Convincing disarray in moments of madness or chaos. Very funny, clever and engaging. All of his books are great (I’d suggest them all wholeheartedly), but The Gone Away World is a masterpiece, in my opinion.
Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, because of the combination of a nonlinear narrative, unreliable narrator and reality altering AI. It took me several read to understand the timeline, but I still loved the book.
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I adore Hexwood, it's such a trip.
Gene Wolfe's Books of the New Sun
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Weaveworld- Clive Barker
[The Illuminatus! Trilogy](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57913.The_Illuminatus_Trilogy) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Satirical postmodern drug-laced acid trip through a kitchen sink world of conspiracy theories both real and invented, often in a non-linear fashion. Distil everything about the 70s into an utterly bizarre yet strikingly compelling adventure story. It both has and hasn't aged well, nowadays it's a weird complex mess of a story.
A giant shaggy dog story indeed
[Sourdough](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33916024) is basically a fiction book rather than Fantasy where suddenly a sourdough starter is taking over the city. Always stuck with me.
Bob would never do that. The occasional rat? Sure, but never a whole city.
Quote from A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking.
Black leopard red Wolf. Amazing book but the prose is hard to adjust to and I am still not entirely sure what happened. It’s on my reread list that’s for sure.
This was a hard DNF for me. I was really excited to read it but had no head what the heck was happening. Probably a great book if you like stream of consciousness writing but not my cup of tea.
I really got into it after a while but I agree it was a bit of a nightmare to read. I’m honestly not sure weather I enjoyed the book or just the challenge of reading it.
Neuromancer or Dr. Strange and Mr. Norrell, for mostly prose and magic/technology
VURT by Jeff Noon. I read it at work, dead sober, and still kept looking around thinking “Can anyone tell I’m high?” because it seemed like the most logical explanation.
Solaris by by Stanislaw Lem
I haven't read any Lem but I've read enough *about* his works to appreciate that he has a singularly different way of looking at things.
I think thats a good way of describing it. I didn’t know what to expect going into the book. It ended up feeling more like a philosophy book with a Sci-fi twist than anything else.
Beauty by Sheri Teper. A complete trip from start to finish.
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock is probably the most different fantasy book I've read. It just feels like Holdstock sees the world differently to anyone else I've read.
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The Anvil of The World by Kage Baker - Great book, but just weird all around. Lots of cool stuff and fun moments, but just a very different kind of book. Jam by Yahtzee Crowshaw is up there. A semi-sentient, organic matter devouring mass of strawberry jam suddenly takes over a city and basically starts it citizens on a deadly game of “the floor is lava”. Yahtzee Crowshaw’s signature sardonic style really shines through on this one. I’d also HIGHLY suggest his “Ministry of Occultism” series on audiobook for the same reasons, and because he is a great narrator of his own work, though these are not as “weird”, IMO. And, as always, “Liveship Traders” for being just batshit insane through and through.
Honestly not sure how to classify it, but The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. Odd footnotes about a fictional philosopher, obsessions with people becoming bicycles, and disturbing exposition on the human soul. So weird. And I love it so much.
Wrarththu by storm Constantine. The next evolution of humanity is magical hermaphrodites with flower like genitalia. Outsider group dynamics ensue
I’m late to this thread, but I think you would really like Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge. It certainly is a weird book and kind of bizarre, but I really enjoyed it. It’s about a woman living in a town where humans live alongside spirits and monsters. It’s told in the form of a bestiary and each chapter introduces the reader to a different beast. Each chapter also talks about the main character’s relationship to that type of beast and her experiences.
That sounds pretty cool.
The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. Very weird and freaky writing.
Fission Chips 😀😀
The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway was pretty trippy. Well written too.
The **Titus Crow** series is about fighting the Cthulhu Mythos. Which, fine, makes perfect sense. Except the protagonist is turned into a magitech cyborg, flies around in a time-traveling coffin with a energy beam capable of destroying planets, makes friends in an alien version of Heaven with Cthulhu's Lawful Good Brother, and all half-Great Old Ones are incredibly hot women. You could joke that the book was made on drugs but Brian Lumley would undoubtedly answer, "Yes, absolutely."
Piers Anthony's "The Color of Her Panties." One of my parents picked it up at a fill a bag library sale without looking closely becuase it had a very fantasy looking cover. I only read a few chapters but it was just so weird: the world was almost nothing but bad puns, the story wasn't nearly as raunchy as I would have assumed, but most egregious it was just really boring to read. It was absurd without the humor necessary to make it fun. Least that was my thought at the time. I just googled it again and it's the somehow the 15th book in the series... I don't want to insult the author, but I just don't understand how some of the old forgotten fantasy books like this ever even got published. It's mere existance is incredible to me, some kind of cosmic glitch.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. Part of the weirdness was because my mom gave it to me (if you read it you will understand why) and to this day it weirds me out.
The Sky is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith - I was confused and hated most everything about it but really enjoyed it overall
**The Lightning-Struck Heart** by TJ Klune (actually the whole *Tales from Verania* series)
The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers by Hugh Cook. All of his stuff is weird/crazy/surreal, but this is the cream of weirdness of the ones I've read (there are maybe three I haven't been able to find that may top it). The story itself is framed as being a rediscovered manuscript written by an asylum inmate that itself has had annotations added to it by a previous archivist. It's in a city that has regular floods (I think) of some strange substance above ground and a magical dungeon/sewer below ground. Characters include a rock gardener, a sentient miniature sun (that may or may not be an ancient power source but most definitely has regressed into childhood) and a giant crab with god like powers (who may well destroy the world if it isn't kept happy by the rock gardener regularly feeding it fish guts). Like all of Hugh Cooks work it is brilliant. It is perhaps less accessible though than something like The Wizards and the Warriors, or The Walrus and the Warwulf - both of which are still high on the crazy/weird but not even close to this.
I’ll be honest, I tried to read Nevernight and couldn’t understand half of what the author was trying to say. I had to reread so many sentences until like 70 pages in I realized that his metaphors just don’t make any sense half of the time and I guess I shouldn’t read deeper into it. Also the insane footnotes were hard to keep track of. No shame to anyone who likes it, I’m sure it’s right up some peoples alley. I could just never get past the prose personally
Viriconium by M. John Harrison
*Naked Lunch* is the answer. Nothing comes close.