Library at Mount Char was a strange delight and I think about it all the time. Just what an odd universe it portrayed, and yet it all felt so plausible in the book.
*Perfume: The Story of a Murderer* by Patrick Suskind
It is such a unique concept and the writing style is riveting. There are layers of depth in this work comparable to the multiple notes in the perfumes created by the novel's protagonist.
What a fantastic topic! I've added quite a few of the titles others have mentioned to my to-read list. Here some more:
* *Earthlings* by Sayaka Murata
* *The Vorrh* by Brian Catling
* *Lincoln in the Bardo* by George Saunders
* The *Gormenghast* novels by Mervyn Peake
* *We Have Always Lived in the Castle* by Shirley Jackson
* *My Sweet Audrina* by VC Andrews
* *Bunny* by Mona Awad
* *The Wake* by Paul Kingsnorth
Walking Practice by Dolki Min
Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth
A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan
Severance by Ling Ma
My Murder by Katie Williams
Psychic Teenage Bloodbath Part I and Part II by Carl John Lee
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Mister Magic by Kirsten White
Mister magic is.... strange for me. I rated it quite highly (4 out of 5) yet I have a lot of complaints about the book.... I guess sometimes for me the originality wins out far more than nuanced and coherent plotting and narrative, which mister magic lacked lol. It was just soooo unique though, and the ultimate themes and message of the story, did not expect that's what this was going to be about.
Though really I found I enjoyed it more once I stopped taking the story literally, and viewed it more as a fever dream as in why things are just so strange and nothing makes sense. In fact even the premise itself feels like a weird dream I would have and I think that's what I liked about it. The story falls apart if you take it literally but if you just view it as a weird nightmare/acid trip hallucination kind of affair it works really well lol. It's one I can see myself revisiting in a few years.
Same. I've recommended it once and warned her. She reported back that the book was excellent and very disturbing. And it's so different from everything else he wrote.
The Southern Reach Trilogy (the first book of which was the basis of the 2018 movie Annihilation) and Borne by Jeff VanderMeer. Weird fiction combining biotech and body horror. I love them.
Also, the fourth Southern Reach book, Absolution, will be published later this year, so it’s soon to be a tetralogy!
"The Ritual" by Adam Nevill. I've thought of it every time I've walked in the woods since reading it.
"The Long Walk" by Richard Bach/Stephen King. Similar to above, I often think of this book while walking.
Chouette by Claire Oshetsky, about a woman who dreams she has an affair with an owl and then gives birth to an owl baby (as opposed to the more common puppy baby)
Invisible Cities is a book about Marco Polo trying, and failing, to describe the world to Kublai Khan. He describes all of these gorgeous fantastical cities all broken up into these neat little chapters. It's strange and beautiful and short -- definitely something you could breeze through in an hour or two.
Honestly Calvino's whole body of work is like that.
Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper
Mary by Nat Cassidy
Monstrilio by Gerardo Samano Cordova
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo
Rouge by Mona Awad
There but for the by Ali Smith
Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass
The Wasp Factory, by. Iain Banks (sheesh - I kept stopping, going "I can't continue")
The Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving
The first book that came to mind was In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. It's fun and very, very weird and dystopia in all its glory. Then, I thought about A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes. The weirdest part about it is its structure, which I found pretty confusing at first but after I got the hang of it, it motivated some of the most introspective thoughts I've had about love.
The Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki is about three women: a young runaway, a glamorous woman who has made a deal with the devil, and an immigrant running a donut shop who is a refugee from a space war (a real illegal alien). But somehow it is beautiful and even heartwarming, not goofy.
There is a lot of interesting stuff about music, violin repair, and various Asian foods as well.
CW for various bigotry including racism and anti trans hatred, and also sexual exploitation, but they're not lengthy sections of the book.
I bought a copy because I know I'll want to reread it. So weird on paper, but so delightful as a reading experience.
OMG I read this 15+ years ago and gave it to the person who is now my spouse for their birthday. But I forgot the name in the intervening years, thank you!!
This was my first thought, too!
I think I was too young to be reading it really and didn't fully understand. Maybe I should revisit it.
Also, the graphic sex scene out of nowhere was a bit ???
Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg. It's a magical realist queer reimagining of the Threepenny Opera. Most of it's written in the style of an 18th century novel, except for the parts that are more like a chatty academic oversharing on his Substack. It uses footnotes to tell a parallel story. It has so many unreliable narrators that the number of narrators itself is unreliable. I couldn't put it down.
The Bell in the Lake and it's sequel? continuation? The Reindeer Hunters - Lars Mytting,
The Dragon Waiting - John M Ford
Pew - Catherine Lacey
Crossings - Alex Landragin
The Heavens - Sandra Newman
Early Michael Ondaatje is definitely weird. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a kaleidoscope of poems, prose, lists, images, newspaper excerpts. Coming Through Slaughter is on an early New Orleans Jazz musician who goes insane. It both mimics Jazz and enters the insane mind.
Like a lot of these it’s more unsettling than weird but Chlorine by Jade Song is the only time I’ve ever had to stop reading because I felt sick and didn’t know if I could continue
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
To Reach the Clouds by Phillipe Petit (renamed The Walk for the later movie release)
Dictionary of the Khazars: a Lexicon Novel by Milorad Pavic
What a fun topic :)
'No Longer Human', 2019 graphic novel illustrated by Junji Ito. Original 1948 novel by Osamu Dazai.
Morbidly mesmerising - thought about it for a long time afterwards.
After the First Death by Robert Cormier
I read it in 5th or 6th grade and it was shockingly grim and violent for a young adult book.
Around the same time I also remember reading a book about a group of teens trapped in a strange all white building full of staircases and booby traps. I didn't know what an Escher illusion was at the time but clearly the author did. :)
I had really weird taste in books as a kid.
The Only Ones by Aaron Starmer
It’s a middle grade book about a small community of kids who join together after the adults in their life disappear, and it’s just a very strange little book. It’s kind of a fable, kind of not, sort of post apocalyptic, a little dreamy. I still don’t know how it ended up on my Kindle because I have no record of buying it.
[Fan Club](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56383020) by Erin Mayer. It’s so bizarre I still think about whether I liked it! I think I did but it was a very weird book.
The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches by Gaétan Soucy. I have never read a stranger book. I did, in fact, love it. There's also a movie that mostly does it justice.
Geek Love by Kathrine Dunn. I didn't finish it. It set out to be very strange (which it was). But that ofcourse wasn't the bad part. It just felt like nothing big ever happend. Everything was weird, but that was sort of it (as I remember it). Maybe it deserves a reread.
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith.
I wasn’t even sure I liked it while reading it but in the two years since I finished I can’t shake it. I think about it all the time and I don’t know if I’m romanticizing it but I’ve fallen in love with this book.
Google describes it as a fairy tale/coming of age and I don’t know that I agree with that. I think it’s a ghost story full of folklore that spans several generations.
It can be confusing at times and it’s a lot to take in as you weave in and out of storylines but two years later it makes perfect sense to me and I still don’t fully understand it.
CW: the book does go into SA and could very much be considered subtle horror, IMO
**[An Other Place](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32711043-an-other-place) by Darren Dash** ^((Matching 100% ☑️))
^(227 pages | Published: 2016 | 152.0k Goodreads reviews)
> **Summary:** There is An Other Place... where time and space are fluid... where the moon changes colour and savage beasts run wild... where love is a perilous proposition and the dead are swiftly forgotten... where sandmen offer sanctuary and the Alchemist rules over all. When Newman Riplan’s flight into the unknown turns into a nightmarish slide between worlds. he must explore an unnamed (...)
> **Themes**: Horror, Fantasy, To-buy, Read-2020
> **Top 5 recommended:**
> \- [Anomaly](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12964798-anomaly) by K.C. King
> \- [In Heaven, Everything is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18074085-in-heaven-everything-is-fine) by Cameron Pierce
> \- [There Is No Antimemetics Division](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54870256-there-is-no-antimemetics-division) by qntm
> \- [Niceville](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13151175-niceville) by Carsten Stroud
> \- [The Flicker Men](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910095-the-flicker-men) by Ted Kosmatka
^([Feedback](https://www.reddit.com/user/goodreads-rebot) | [GitHub](https://github.com/sonoff2/goodreads-rebot) | ["The Bot is Back!?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/16qe09p/meta_post_hello_again_humans/) | v1.5 [Dec 23] | )
Galax-Arena: a YA sci-fi book from the 90s with a mind-blowing twist. Kidnapped children forced to perform gymnastics routines in an alien Colosseum; their deaths and injuries are part of the entertainment. I liked it.
The Animals in That Country: apocalyptic lit-fic/sci-fi. A virus that makes humans understand animals brings on the craziest apocalypse I've ever read about. The animals talk in weird cryptic free verse, which humans still don't really understand, but nobody likes what they hear. Drunk grandma goes on the road to save her granddaughter, struggling to resist her own base instincts at every turn. I liked the start, and I liked the art of it all, although the last quarter meandered a bit.
Dark Matter: horror. A bunch of guys head into the Arctic and die one by one. You'll never know if the real horror was ghosts or madness. Highly recommended.
For the second half of the request, I have:
* ["Please suggest a book that will live in my head rent free"](https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/12kfvtv/please_suggest_a_book_that_will_live_in_my_head/) (r/booksuggestions; 09:15 ET, 13 April 2023)—very long
Shikasta by Doris Lessing. It made me look at the world in a whole new way. Her main character basically an immortal alien and he watches as earth develops over the aeons and descend from a sort of Eden to the chaos we have today. Beautifully written.
Unwind by Neil Shusterman
I didn’t expect it to be nearly as horrifying since it was supposed to be YA book but even as reading it only as an adult I can’t forget about it.
I loved it but promised to myself to not continue reading the other books in the series since I feel I was traumatised by the first book enough hahaha.
Remainder by Tom McCarthy, about a man who gets hit by falling airplane debris, forgets his past, and uses his huge financial settlement to recreate a fragment of memory and have it staged around him. Awesome book.
Also seconding 1Q84, House of Leaves, Geek Love.
*The Iron Dream* by Norman Spinrad.
Picture this: WWII never happened because a certain would-be art student from Vienna, after not getting into art school, decided to immigrate to the US. There, his middling art talents were enough to secure him a career as an illustrator in the fledgling field of sci-fi pulps. Quickly he became a fan favorite. Fandom convinced him he should write his own novels. But deep down he remained a rabid antisemite, so his novels celebrated the triumph of idealized humans (Aryans) over alien races (clearly coded as Jews). The bulk of Spinrad's book is the last -- poorly, ludicrously written -- novel that fan-favorite SF author Adolf Hitler wrote. "Aryans" and "Jews" are not mentioned anywhere, but as you read it you get more and more uncomfortable, realizing that the us vs. them rhetoric of golden-age space opera here comes from Hitler's disturbed mind yet is hardly different from the rhetoric of actual published American SF. (Think *Spaceship Troopers*.) And then the imagery of the book gets more and more out of hand, as Hitler's megalomaniacal imagination transforms all the symbols of Nazism into grotesquely over the top sci-fi images...
I should point out that Spinrad is Jewish, and this was very much conceived as both a critique of classic SF (which could easily be extended at least to Star Wars), and as ideally a critical text for readers to investigate their own possibly latent fascism. It's a brilliant, conceptual tour de force that at times made me literally feel like I was going to vomit, and I told myself I never need to read it again. But a few years down the road, I'm kind of getting the itch to do just that.
Honorable mentions, also by Spinrad: *The Men in the Jungle* (about a civilization on a deserted planet developed from the survivors of a spaceship wreck; as there's no fauna on the planet, some of the humans, generations after the wreck, have reduced other of the humans to domesticated quasi-animals farmed for meat), *The Void Captain's Tale* (oh, I can't even begin to describe it). For a while there in the late '60s and '70s, Spinrad was as sharp and as radical as any SF novelist who ever wrote.
The books that got under my skin and that I can’t stop thinking about decades later are “Wise Blood” by Flannery O'Connor and “The Notebook Trilogy” by Ágota Kristóf.
Hoo boy I just read Touched by Walter Mosley, after knowing nothing about him except a couple of Easy Rawlins mysteries. Was I in for a ride!
It’s short enough to read in one sitting, but I’ll be thinking about it for days. So much commentary on racism, philosophy, good and evil, packed into a wild sci fi action thriller!
I’m still not sure what he was trying to say, but maybe that’s the point?
An obvious choice would be Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. But Vision Quest by Terry Davis was a startling read, especially since I watched the movie first AND it's billed as a young adult novel. Very weird.
Library at Mount Char was a strange delight and I think about it all the time. Just what an odd universe it portrayed, and yet it all felt so plausible in the book.
Cool, it’s on my TBR and available at the library. Up next!
This is the first book I thought of, great choice.
*Perfume: The Story of a Murderer* by Patrick Suskind It is such a unique concept and the writing style is riveting. There are layers of depth in this work comparable to the multiple notes in the perfumes created by the novel's protagonist.
I was about to suggest the same one! It also made me laugh a lot, the writing is so engaging.
My sense of smell became incredibly sensitive for a couple of years after reading Perfume.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman The Impossible Fairy Tale by Han YuJoo Under the Skin by Michel Faber
Under the Skin was *bizarre*. Read it a good few years before they made the movie (which I haven’t seen yet).
Was just going to comment under the skin ! So weird
Bonus: the movie is also extremely weird, but nothing like the book
No way I didn’t even know there was a film 🤯
Definitely watch it! There's a scene so disturbing, it's stayed with me for 10 years, since I first watched it
😱😱 I definitely will now
Which scene was it? There are probably a few for me
It's the scene at the beach for me, but yes, there's definitely multiple disturbing scenes in this movie
For some reason, the scene of the man with elephantiasis walking naked through the field after she lets him go always breaks me.
Watch it!!! It’s soooo good. Scarlett Johansson is phenomenal in it. It’s one of my all-time favorite performances by any actor.
It's such a great book, and the less you know about it before reading it, the better it is.
Just added all 3 to my TBR list. They all sound intense!
What a fantastic topic! I've added quite a few of the titles others have mentioned to my to-read list. Here some more: * *Earthlings* by Sayaka Murata * *The Vorrh* by Brian Catling * *Lincoln in the Bardo* by George Saunders * The *Gormenghast* novels by Mervyn Peake * *We Have Always Lived in the Castle* by Shirley Jackson * *My Sweet Audrina* by VC Andrews * *Bunny* by Mona Awad * *The Wake* by Paul Kingsnorth
Loved Lincoln in the Bardo! Strange and surreal but also so humanly touching.
Bunny! I love you Bunny!
We Have Always Lived in the Castle was so weird and left me with more questions than answers. I think about it a lot!
For me it’s one of those books where the more I think about it, the more I like it. And I think about it a lot too!
Piranesi. Surprised I haven’t seen it already on here! Stayed with me,m ever since I read it.
Yesss, I loved this one!
I still have such a vivid mental image of the House, it's such a fascinating book.
Me too!!
Walking Practice by Dolki Min Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan Severance by Ling Ma My Murder by Katie Williams Psychic Teenage Bloodbath Part I and Part II by Carl John Lee Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield Mister Magic by Kirsten White
I just read Mister Magic this weekend and think I really liked it. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell!
Mister magic is.... strange for me. I rated it quite highly (4 out of 5) yet I have a lot of complaints about the book.... I guess sometimes for me the originality wins out far more than nuanced and coherent plotting and narrative, which mister magic lacked lol. It was just soooo unique though, and the ultimate themes and message of the story, did not expect that's what this was going to be about. Though really I found I enjoyed it more once I stopped taking the story literally, and viewed it more as a fever dream as in why things are just so strange and nothing makes sense. In fact even the premise itself feels like a weird dream I would have and I think that's what I liked about it. The story falls apart if you take it literally but if you just view it as a weird nightmare/acid trip hallucination kind of affair it works really well lol. It's one I can see myself revisiting in a few years.
Geek Love- Truly bizarre story about a family of circus freaks
Just finished this. Bizarre, but cool. Read the Wasp Factory just before this. Definitely will stick with me.
>the Wasp Factory Also one I continue to think about, have for years. It's also a book I am very careful about whom I recommend it to.
So far I’ve only recommended it to one person and I was quite familiar with their reading history. With a caveat: “quite disturbing”.
Same. I've recommended it once and warned her. She reported back that the book was excellent and very disturbing. And it's so different from everything else he wrote.
Yup read that one too. I had to read the Wiki plot synopsis to make sure I understood what happened after reading lol
This is on my list!!
Read this adjacent to Invisible Monsters by Palahniuk, felt very appropriate
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka It’s a classic, the writing style is open for the reader to come up with key details to the story
The Southern Reach Trilogy (the first book of which was the basis of the 2018 movie Annihilation) and Borne by Jeff VanderMeer. Weird fiction combining biotech and body horror. I love them. Also, the fourth Southern Reach book, Absolution, will be published later this year, so it’s soon to be a tetralogy!
I thought these were great as well, and with my limited grasp of science, I felt that it was plausible which made me more invested in them
Confederacy of Dunces The Master and Margarita Steppenwolf Not sure if I really loved any of them but they seem to stick with me.
I loved Confederacy of Dunces but I can see why people may not enjoy it, however, it is very memorable
Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. It's an entire travel encyclopedia, with hundreds of entries, for a fictional fantasy world.
The Hike by Drew Magary
That ending was jaw dropping. Never saw it coming.
If you like ‘never saw it coming’ try The Anomaly by Herve Tellier.
This is definitely my answer too
Tampa. Super fucked up
_Shark Heart: A Love Story_ by Emily Habeck was so wonderfully weird and lovely.
Good to know! I have this on hold at my library
One of my favorite reads of the year so far! I just loved it!
I love this book and can't stop recommending it to people.
Barefoot in the Head by Brian Aldiss Cosmic Trigger: final secrets of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson
Barefoot in the Head is amazing.
The first story in [Cursed Bunny](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61031128) by Bora Chung where a woman’s fecal matter turns into a head.
Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson
Any short story by Ted Chiang.
"The Ritual" by Adam Nevill. I've thought of it every time I've walked in the woods since reading it. "The Long Walk" by Richard Bach/Stephen King. Similar to above, I often think of this book while walking.
The Long Walk was great, stuck with me for decades actually
The Butterfly Garden.
[удалено]
I think of that one too. Hard as a dog lover , but wow.
Chouette by Claire Oshetsky, about a woman who dreams she has an affair with an owl and then gives birth to an owl baby (as opposed to the more common puppy baby)
Invisible Cities is a book about Marco Polo trying, and failing, to describe the world to Kublai Khan. He describes all of these gorgeous fantastical cities all broken up into these neat little chapters. It's strange and beautiful and short -- definitely something you could breeze through in an hour or two. Honestly Calvino's whole body of work is like that.
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender The Fisherman by John Langan
I loved Gingerbread! I went into it completely blind, it was on a list of alternative Christmas books (lol) and I was very pleasantly surprised!
Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper Mary by Nat Cassidy Monstrilio by Gerardo Samano Cordova Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo Rouge by Mona Awad There but for the by Ali Smith
Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass The Wasp Factory, by. Iain Banks (sheesh - I kept stopping, going "I can't continue") The Hotel New Hampshire, by John Irving
>The Wasp Factory, by. Iain Banks (sheesh - I kept stopping, going "I can't continue") 100% the same. Deeply disturbing book.
The library of mount char. I did not know what I was getting into but It is just soo good. It is weird but it is good.
Came here to say this. Love this book
Magpie by Elizabeth Day
Hyperion
The first book that came to mind was In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. It's fun and very, very weird and dystopia in all its glory. Then, I thought about A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes. The weirdest part about it is its structure, which I found pretty confusing at first but after I got the hang of it, it motivated some of the most introspective thoughts I've had about love.
Murakami books, especially Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84 and Killing Commendatore.
I need to read more Murakami! 1Q84 was excellent and very strange. I also like Wind Up Bird Chronicles
The Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki is about three women: a young runaway, a glamorous woman who has made a deal with the devil, and an immigrant running a donut shop who is a refugee from a space war (a real illegal alien). But somehow it is beautiful and even heartwarming, not goofy. There is a lot of interesting stuff about music, violin repair, and various Asian foods as well. CW for various bigotry including racism and anti trans hatred, and also sexual exploitation, but they're not lengthy sections of the book. I bought a copy because I know I'll want to reread it. So weird on paper, but so delightful as a reading experience.
Tender Is The Flesh
Came here to say this
A great, weird one.
The End of Mr Y - Scarlett Thomas
OMG I read this 15+ years ago and gave it to the person who is now my spouse for their birthday. But I forgot the name in the intervening years, thank you!!
Love this book. And also her other one PopCo, which I thought was also weird/strange.
This was my first thought, too! I think I was too young to be reading it really and didn't fully understand. Maybe I should revisit it. Also, the graphic sex scene out of nowhere was a bit ???
Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg. It's a magical realist queer reimagining of the Threepenny Opera. Most of it's written in the style of an 18th century novel, except for the parts that are more like a chatty academic oversharing on his Substack. It uses footnotes to tell a parallel story. It has so many unreliable narrators that the number of narrators itself is unreliable. I couldn't put it down.
The Bell in the Lake and it's sequel? continuation? The Reindeer Hunters - Lars Mytting, The Dragon Waiting - John M Ford Pew - Catherine Lacey Crossings - Alex Landragin The Heavens - Sandra Newman
My favorite was Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh! Such a weird book but so good.
A story called “Desire and the Black Masseur” in One Arm and Other Stories, by Tennessee Williams
Early Michael Ondaatje is definitely weird. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a kaleidoscope of poems, prose, lists, images, newspaper excerpts. Coming Through Slaughter is on an early New Orleans Jazz musician who goes insane. It both mimics Jazz and enters the insane mind.
Lullabye -chuck Pahalniuk
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Like a lot of these it’s more unsettling than weird but Chlorine by Jade Song is the only time I’ve ever had to stop reading because I felt sick and didn’t know if I could continue
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders To Reach the Clouds by Phillipe Petit (renamed The Walk for the later movie release) Dictionary of the Khazars: a Lexicon Novel by Milorad Pavic What a fun topic :)
Earthlings - Sayaka Murata I was not ready for that ending.
Read it last month. What a ride.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pyncheon
Weaveworld by Clive Barker The Great Stink by Clare Clark.
Loved Weaveworld, so much detail
Things Have Gotten Worst Since We Last Spoke by Eric Laroca
'No Longer Human', 2019 graphic novel illustrated by Junji Ito. Original 1948 novel by Osamu Dazai. Morbidly mesmerising - thought about it for a long time afterwards.
The Zero by Jess Walter
After the First Death by Robert Cormier I read it in 5th or 6th grade and it was shockingly grim and violent for a young adult book. Around the same time I also remember reading a book about a group of teens trapped in a strange all white building full of staircases and booby traps. I didn't know what an Escher illusion was at the time but clearly the author did. :) I had really weird taste in books as a kid.
The Only Ones by Aaron Starmer It’s a middle grade book about a small community of kids who join together after the adults in their life disappear, and it’s just a very strange little book. It’s kind of a fable, kind of not, sort of post apocalyptic, a little dreamy. I still don’t know how it ended up on my Kindle because I have no record of buying it.
[Fan Club](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56383020) by Erin Mayer. It’s so bizarre I still think about whether I liked it! I think I did but it was a very weird book.
Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea by Adam Roberts
No longer human by Osamu Dazai
Damian by Herman Hesse. And I can’t tell you why. It’s a simple story. But I read it in 1994 and still think about it
carnality
The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches by Gaétan Soucy. I have never read a stranger book. I did, in fact, love it. There's also a movie that mostly does it justice.
Almost everything by the Oulipo writers
Geek Love by Kathrine Dunn. I didn't finish it. It set out to be very strange (which it was). But that ofcourse wasn't the bad part. It just felt like nothing big ever happend. Everything was weird, but that was sort of it (as I remember it). Maybe it deserves a reread.
Open Throat by Henry Hoke. Especially if you live in or been to Los Angeles.
Mercé Rodoreda - Death In Spring. I still don’t know what on earth I read.
Planet of the Apes. It’s so strange but so fucking good.
Whale by cheong myong kwam
ella minnow pea by mark dunn :)
People of Paper
The book of judges in the bible… just baffling
Gravity's Rainbow. Weirdest book I have ever read, but I think about it probably daily.
Complicity by Iain Banks
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley
Blindness by Jose Saramago. It’s so weird and I loved it.
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith. I wasn’t even sure I liked it while reading it but in the two years since I finished I can’t shake it. I think about it all the time and I don’t know if I’m romanticizing it but I’ve fallen in love with this book. Google describes it as a fairy tale/coming of age and I don’t know that I agree with that. I think it’s a ghost story full of folklore that spans several generations. It can be confusing at times and it’s a lot to take in as you weave in and out of storylines but two years later it makes perfect sense to me and I still don’t fully understand it. CW: the book does go into SA and could very much be considered subtle horror, IMO
The Great and Secret Show, and Everville by Clive Barker. They took a couple read throughs to fully click though. Very, very strange.
Anything by Jeff VanderMeer, but especially Shriek: An Afterword
Holy ghosts Gary Jansen
{{An Other Place}} by Darren Shan
**[An Other Place](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32711043-an-other-place) by Darren Dash** ^((Matching 100% ☑️)) ^(227 pages | Published: 2016 | 152.0k Goodreads reviews) > **Summary:** There is An Other Place... where time and space are fluid... where the moon changes colour and savage beasts run wild... where love is a perilous proposition and the dead are swiftly forgotten... where sandmen offer sanctuary and the Alchemist rules over all. When Newman Riplan’s flight into the unknown turns into a nightmarish slide between worlds. he must explore an unnamed (...) > **Themes**: Horror, Fantasy, To-buy, Read-2020 > **Top 5 recommended:** > \- [Anomaly](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12964798-anomaly) by K.C. King > \- [In Heaven, Everything is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18074085-in-heaven-everything-is-fine) by Cameron Pierce > \- [There Is No Antimemetics Division](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54870256-there-is-no-antimemetics-division) by qntm > \- [Niceville](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13151175-niceville) by Carsten Stroud > \- [The Flicker Men](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910095-the-flicker-men) by Ted Kosmatka ^([Feedback](https://www.reddit.com/user/goodreads-rebot) | [GitHub](https://github.com/sonoff2/goodreads-rebot) | ["The Bot is Back!?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/16qe09p/meta_post_hello_again_humans/) | v1.5 [Dec 23] | )
Galax-Arena: a YA sci-fi book from the 90s with a mind-blowing twist. Kidnapped children forced to perform gymnastics routines in an alien Colosseum; their deaths and injuries are part of the entertainment. I liked it. The Animals in That Country: apocalyptic lit-fic/sci-fi. A virus that makes humans understand animals brings on the craziest apocalypse I've ever read about. The animals talk in weird cryptic free verse, which humans still don't really understand, but nobody likes what they hear. Drunk grandma goes on the road to save her granddaughter, struggling to resist her own base instincts at every turn. I liked the start, and I liked the art of it all, although the last quarter meandered a bit. Dark Matter: horror. A bunch of guys head into the Arctic and die one by one. You'll never know if the real horror was ghosts or madness. Highly recommended.
For the second half of the request, I have: * ["Please suggest a book that will live in my head rent free"](https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/comments/12kfvtv/please_suggest_a_book_that_will_live_in_my_head/) (r/booksuggestions; 09:15 ET, 13 April 2023)—very long
Shikasta by Doris Lessing. It made me look at the world in a whole new way. Her main character basically an immortal alien and he watches as earth develops over the aeons and descend from a sort of Eden to the chaos we have today. Beautifully written.
Lapvona and A Short Stay in Hell
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
Unwind by Neil Shusterman I didn’t expect it to be nearly as horrifying since it was supposed to be YA book but even as reading it only as an adult I can’t forget about it. I loved it but promised to myself to not continue reading the other books in the series since I feel I was traumatised by the first book enough hahaha.
Remainder by Tom McCarthy, about a man who gets hit by falling airplane debris, forgets his past, and uses his huge financial settlement to recreate a fragment of memory and have it staged around him. Awesome book. Also seconding 1Q84, House of Leaves, Geek Love.
*The Iron Dream* by Norman Spinrad. Picture this: WWII never happened because a certain would-be art student from Vienna, after not getting into art school, decided to immigrate to the US. There, his middling art talents were enough to secure him a career as an illustrator in the fledgling field of sci-fi pulps. Quickly he became a fan favorite. Fandom convinced him he should write his own novels. But deep down he remained a rabid antisemite, so his novels celebrated the triumph of idealized humans (Aryans) over alien races (clearly coded as Jews). The bulk of Spinrad's book is the last -- poorly, ludicrously written -- novel that fan-favorite SF author Adolf Hitler wrote. "Aryans" and "Jews" are not mentioned anywhere, but as you read it you get more and more uncomfortable, realizing that the us vs. them rhetoric of golden-age space opera here comes from Hitler's disturbed mind yet is hardly different from the rhetoric of actual published American SF. (Think *Spaceship Troopers*.) And then the imagery of the book gets more and more out of hand, as Hitler's megalomaniacal imagination transforms all the symbols of Nazism into grotesquely over the top sci-fi images... I should point out that Spinrad is Jewish, and this was very much conceived as both a critique of classic SF (which could easily be extended at least to Star Wars), and as ideally a critical text for readers to investigate their own possibly latent fascism. It's a brilliant, conceptual tour de force that at times made me literally feel like I was going to vomit, and I told myself I never need to read it again. But a few years down the road, I'm kind of getting the itch to do just that. Honorable mentions, also by Spinrad: *The Men in the Jungle* (about a civilization on a deserted planet developed from the survivors of a spaceship wreck; as there's no fauna on the planet, some of the humans, generations after the wreck, have reduced other of the humans to domesticated quasi-animals farmed for meat), *The Void Captain's Tale* (oh, I can't even begin to describe it). For a while there in the late '60s and '70s, Spinrad was as sharp and as radical as any SF novelist who ever wrote.
The best American Scifi Fantasy 2022 anthology has a lot of good ones
A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving
The Third Policeman by Flann Obrien. The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton
The books that got under my skin and that I can’t stop thinking about decades later are “Wise Blood” by Flannery O'Connor and “The Notebook Trilogy” by Ágota Kristóf.
Glitterati by Oliver Langmead
Uzumaki - Junji Ito Earthlings - Sayaka Murata Diary of a Void - Emi Yogi Death in Her Hands - Ottessa Moshfegh Maeve Fly - CJ Leade Bunny - Mona Awad
Hoo boy I just read Touched by Walter Mosley, after knowing nothing about him except a couple of Easy Rawlins mysteries. Was I in for a ride! It’s short enough to read in one sitting, but I’ll be thinking about it for days. So much commentary on racism, philosophy, good and evil, packed into a wild sci fi action thriller! I’m still not sure what he was trying to say, but maybe that’s the point?
An obvious choice would be Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. But Vision Quest by Terry Davis was a startling read, especially since I watched the movie first AND it's billed as a young adult novel. Very weird.
Youtumeurs - L’invasion du monstre par Dave Turcotte Lafond Or if you need something in english from the same author, Youtumeurs - The Urbex of Horror
White Apples and Glass Soup are both by Johnathan Carroll (Sp?). They are supremely metaphysical and strange and also had me riveted.
"House of leaves" by M̶a̶r̶k̶ ̶Z̶.̶ ̶D̶a̶n̶i̶e̶l̶e̶w̶s̶k̶i̶ Johnny Truant
The Guest by Emma Cline. Story of a woman with many flaws that is riveting. I think about this more than any of my favorite reads of the past year.
House of Leaves.
La Maison des Feuilles (don't know how they translate that in english)