Weirdest novels you ever read

The Glass Arcade

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket".

Dark satire of Russian bureaucracy veers off into wackytown halfway through.

Lincoln in the Bardo is a 2017 experimental novel by American writer George Saunders.

Philip Roth's Operation Shylock was pretty damn weird,

Some Dennis Cooper dreck. Just depraved, creepy, violent garbage.

The Master and Margarita is a masterpiece, R3.

Totally agree with you OP. Gravity's Rainbow was too weird to enjoy for me.

The most pleasantly weird short story I've read was A Perfect Day for Banana Fish.

Love that one.

Hogg was the sickest thing I ever read, even more than Last Exit To Brooklyn. I may be the only man standing who got through it.

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. A nasty little story.

[R7], it was after reading Marianne Faithfull's copy of 'The Master and Margarita' that Mick Jagger composed the lyrics to 'Sympathy for the Devil.' You know he was too cheap to buy a copy of his own.

Bump

Right now I’m on the hunt for my next read, and it’s something specific I need to hit the spot—maybe someone has read what I’m looking for?

Basically what I want is a weird meme-cultural hellbilly punk-politico, told through a looking glass smeared with paste; a brain-stomping, mellifluent mayhem.

The overrated nonsensical frau fiction that was "A Little Life", by Hanya Yanagihara. If a straight white man had written a novel like that about the lives of "lesbians" he would have been deservedly raked over the coals for not knowing the first thing about female sexuality.

"Pond" by Claire-Louise Bennett, with paragraphs like...

I looked out the window at the tree in the yard. In the yard was a small bush with yellow flowers. My mother always hated yellow flowers, along with any food containing garlic. I love garlic myself, especially with fish. Are there fish in the pond beyond my yard?

You get the idea...

I could not finish Gravity's Rainbow. I closed the book at the scat scene.

Doris Lessing's Canopus sequence is pretty fucking weird.

Necromancer - don't think I was able to finish it.

^^ Sorry, not Necromancer, Neuromancer by William Gibson was the weird one I couldn't finish.

The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin. Luckily the chocolate doesn't refer to scat.

Inverted World by Christopher Priest, which opens with: "I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles,"

Description: The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.

The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum.

Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.

Weird, but in a good was, was Cloud Atlas. It was doing so many different things at that same time and extremely well despite what could have been the overwhelming complexity of it. It’s sad they tried to squeeze it into a movie, DO NOT WATCH IT, but maybe someone will tackle it as a limited series on a streaming platform in the future.

By far the strangest was a YA novel by Adam Rapp called 33 Snowfish. It starts with the ten year old escaping from the pedophile who owns him after he overhears that he’s about to star in a snuff film. He meets with and older boy who is so traumatized that he communicates primarily through drawings and who’s a pyromaniac murdering his parents and absconding with his baby brother. They are joined by his 14 year old girlfriend who was forced to turn trucks for her aunt. Did I mention it’s a book for teens?

....

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Here is the review I wrote on goodreads. "So yeah, spiders evolving on a planet intended for monkeys after mankind destroys Earth. OK, I can maybe buy that premise. To be honest, I kept reading to find out about the plight of the humans who were on a ship trying to find a new home. Most of the humans were kept in stasis for hundreds of years...but some woken up every few years to become our protagonists. Honestly, I enjoyed this part of the book because it was interesting to see where they were going with the characters and how much time had passed for them each time they were awakened. But the giant spiders on the planet fighting battles with giant, armor wearing ants was just so silly that I almost gave up on the book. The author really started to lose me when the spiders have evolved so much that they create a helium balloon out of silk to travel into space. Yes, you read that correctly. My suspension of disbelief just couldn't go there anymore. After that, I found myself skimming past the spider crap which the author went on and on about and trying to get to the human stuff. I understand evolution but I also understand that spiders creating and talking on radios to each other was just silly and unbelievable. And spiders creating a giant web IN SPACE around their planet made me actually laugh out loud. I'm sorry but I cannot recommend such weird and incredible nonsense."

I was once a Goodwill book glutton, so I can’t even remember the titles.

There was the Southern Gothic incestuous family that had to return home once a year to eat human flesh.

There was the survivor of a 4000 year-old Indian nuclear war who journeyed to the USA for a final battle.

There was a scifi series in which the protagonist reincarnates several times from old crone to high priest destroying political systems with each reincarnation.

There was the young gay model used and abused by an artist who escapes and exacts revenge when he finds the artist has found a new victim to star in his masterpiece.

Yeah, donated books usually have the strangest shit.

[quote] Basically what I want is a weird meme-cultural hellbilly punk-politico, told through a looking glass smeared with paste; a brain-stomping, mellifluent mayhem.

You're welcome.

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

The Art of the Deal - Donald Trump

It was about an evil, orange demon

[quote]R22 They are joined by his 14 year old girlfriend who was forced to turn trucks for her aunt.

How strong she must have been.

[quote] [R22] They are joined by his 14 year old girlfriend who was forced to turn trucks for her aunt.

That does sound like one weird novel!

I Am the Cheese

not that weird (except the surprise twist which was mind blowing to an 11 year old) but the structure of alternating chapters of narrative story telling and doctor/patient audiotape transcripts was very weird to me at that young age.

Well, “The Handmaid’s Tale” is pretty weird.

R31 Cormier was very good at those types of books, After The First Death also has a very disturbing twist.

R33 Thank you for the heads up, now I will read After the First Death.

Nancy Drew in "The Shocking Secret of Hannah's Gruen".

(Spoiler alert) I was so not prepared to find out in the last line that Hannah's gruen had been the narrator.

[quote] a scifi series in which the protagonist reincarnates several times from old crone to high priest destroying political systems with each reincarnation.

Ok, that sounds incredible and I really want to read it. Anyone know what the title is?

HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Danielewski

I got about halfway through before putting it aside, but I still might go back to it someday. It was interesting but quite challenging.

House Of Leaves was a trip. I think it's a masterpiece but it's so damn convoluted. I don't think the author (whoever he is) would ever be able to produce something as great.

The author is Mark Z Danielewski. His sister is the singer Poe, and her album Haunted serves as a companion to House of Leaves.

He started a series called The Familiar that was supposed to be 26 volumes long, but sales weren't great, so the project "paused."

I loved The House of Leaves, and I wish that an ebook version would be released. It wouldn't work on Kindle, but would work on Apple Books or a Kindle Fire type of reader, but it isn't something that could just be scanned via OCR and dumped to an pub format, so I don't imagine the publisher would want to spend the money to make an electronic version happen.

I do have my copy still, and will reread it one of these days. The text formatting really did add to the tension, and Johnny's story in the footnotes was interesting as well.

Ducks, Newburyport. Weird is an inadequate descriptor. Mind blowing is more like it. It’s a BIG book: don’t be intimidated by the weight: it’s so worth it!

[quote]don’t be intimidated by the weight: it’s so worth it!

I have a t-shirt that says this!

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, was a bit unsettling. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, is weird, creepy, and somehow touching.

Attachments by Judith Rossner. A novel about conjoined twin sisters.

R13 for you

R2 I totally agree, i raced through it like in a fever dream. 25 yrs later & I still remember the “black gum children.” I think parts of the book were plagiarized? Porn must’ve been drunk out of his mind when he wrote it.

Poe not porn!! It didn’t autocorrect this time…

R22 some YA lit is surprisingly violent, graphic and dark.

Like how I was surprised on reading the trashy Scholastic ANIMORPHS books, that the content seemed to bely the casual first-person tweenage narrative and the fun cutest sci-fi premise (“ohh we can turn into any animal we want! Hijinx ensue!!”). Brass tacks, it was basically a longform series about a bloody intergalactic b!0terr0r!sm war, in which random human children were forcibly given body-horror Eldritch abilities by an alien race of supremacists, and then forced to fight for Earth’s freedom from a plague of brain-eating parasites. By the end, one of the main protags essentially suicides, another kamikazes herself into battle, and the rest get PTSD and can’t look each other in the eye again once they reach adulthood. It’s beyond fucked up.

Our Lady of the Flowers. I was maybe 13 or 14. Found it so weird and confusing but very arousing.

I downloaded The Master and Margarita last night and just finished it. Very enjoyable, thanks for the recommendation.

r8 Bananafish is one of my favourite short stories. If you get a chance, try to find the stories of a New Zealand short story writer called Owen Marshall - especially 'The day Hemingway died' 'The fat boy' and 'Mumsie and Zip.' He is a master who was prolific in the seventies, and who I believe would be world famous if from a more prominent country.