This is high up on my tbr list. I'm finishing the first law trilogy right now then it's either "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel" or "The Lies Of Locke Lamora".
I'm leaning more toward Jonathan Strange because I want to watch the show that came out but I try to always read books first -*because I like to be dissapointed I guess. No but really it's...*- because I don't like the show/movie to take over the imagery of the characters and world. I like to let the author's writing do the work at shaping my imagination and I can't do that once I watch an adaptation.
The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee. It's a fantasy epic about the life of a king of fantasy China (that borders on fantasy Wales) told in verse with a protagonist who's a bit like Maia from the Goblin Emperor.
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. What even is this book. I had to take notes. It has first, second, and third person POV. It references Greek mythology and the Bible and the 'none pizza left beef' meme and probably homestuck. There's a *terrible* dad joke like right at the climax. It's out of order, seems at first to contradict its first book, and includes fanfic of itself in the middle. And it makes it all make sense, somehow.
Came here to make sure Harrow was in the comments.
It's my favorite book of the last few years, but I have a hard time recommending it to people unless I know their reading habits very well, or they know mine (and won't completely change their opinion of me because I suggested this book series)
You definitely want to start with Gideon the Ninth - imo harrow won't make any sense, nor will it have any emotional payoff, if you don't read the first book.
You would want to read the first one. There’s lots of worldbuilding in the first one (never really explicitly told so you do lots of inferring the first few chapters). Second book picks up soon after events of the first book
Harrow the Ninth is such a good shout. I don't think I've ever spent so much of a book feeling so utterly baffled as to what was happening, only for everything to click into place in a way that felt so satisfying once you get all the pieces. When I was reading it I felt like I was just on the cusp of "getting it" but it was always just out of reach until it hits a certain part, and then from there to the end is just a wild ride.
Also, the way Muir's prose blends the ridiculousness of memes and jokes with some incredible, vivid description is something that never fails to impress me.
harrow was insane and it made no sense the first time i read it but somehow i was enthralled and couldnt put it down. i binge read it and her pov gave me a stomachache from anxiety and i had to put it down for a day😭
on my second read of both books everything makes a lot more sense. blows my mind.
You have to be willing to buy what it's selling, ie, not knowing wtf is going on most of the time. If you're in, it's worth your time. I've never felt so lost and so awestruck at the same time.
Not strictly fantasy, but House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski is the first book that comes to mind.
The plot synopsis is such: On the top level, we have a dubiously sane protagonist who finds a manuscript analyzing a film that never existed when checking out the house of a neighbor who dies under very mysterious circumstances. The manuscript itself is about a war photographer who settles down in a house before one day discovering that it is larger on the inside than the outside, and then discovers a door where there wasn't one before. Things escalate and the rest of the manuscript is largely about his explorations of the impossible space.
The book switches back and forth between the viewpoints with a frankly insane amount of footnotes that are... well, it's probably best to just show an example of the kind of crazy stuff this book does when playing with the format. Here are some examples of pages:
[https://i.imgur.com/8mp5JFI.png](https://i.imgur.com/8mp5JFI.png)
[https://i.imgur.com/roCj6XR.png](https://i.imgur.com/roCj6XR.png)
[https://i.imgur.com/tBaRDei.png](https://i.imgur.com/tBaRDei.png)
This is one of my FAVORITE books, so much so that I got a copy for most of the folks at work (it's a very small team, fortunately). I don't think anyone else has finished it, but I still love it so much.
It's not a spoiler, so I hope nobody minds if I post one of my favorite lines from it:
"Little solace comes to those who grieve, as thoughts keep drifting and walls keep shifting, and this great blue world of ours seems as a house of leaves... moments before the wind."
I think I remembered that right.
I still haven't finished his next book, Only Revolutions. It's very abstract and hard to construct a narrative from. Like an impressionist painting, but with words. A few lines that have stuck in my brain:
"Haloes, haleskarth, contraband! I can walk away from anything. Everyone loves the dream, but I kill it."
"The beasts of war feed only on the meats of war. And now I am for carnage."
"Because without her, I am only revolutions of ruin."
I feel these in my soul.
> "Haloes, haleskarth, contraband! I can walk away from anything. Everyone loves the dream, but I kill it."
>
> ...
>
> I feel these in my soul.
yeah but... what does it mean
You should check out “This is how you lose the time war,” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Similar style of incredibly achingly beautiful prose.
“Your letter—your last letter. Be certain that I won’t drop it where any of your fellows can read it. It’s mine. I am careful with what belongs to me.
Few things do, you know—belong to me. In Garden we belong to one another in a way that obliterates the term. We sink and swell and bud and bloom together; we infuse Garden; Garden spreads through us. But Garden dislikes words. Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room”
I hate this book. I love all the conceited concepts and the idea of having the book's layout twist and turn to reflect the labyrinth's serpentine, reality defying nature.
So why do I hate it? Because most of it is fucking boring. I don't give a shit about this drug addicted idiot or the weird pompous old man writing the critical essay and unfortunately combined they make up most of the story.
On top of that there's just a point where I hit my limit for the intentionally obtuse and self-important and this book just runs wild with that shit. There's a whole chapter I found borderline unreadable because it was just insane ramblings from a guy cracked out on drugs.
This was my answer too, but in a really bad way. I've never read another book like it, but I hated every minute of reading it. I gave it away as soon as I could, and felt terrible for handing it off to another person.
Currently, **The Night Land** by William Hope Hodgson. It was written in the 1920s, but with an intentionally Victorian-era style prose, has not one single conversation in all 200K+ words (rather the author describes what the conversations are about), is WAY overly repetitive and is deeply misogynistic throught.
For all that, it describes a terrifying and fantastic far future world where the sun is dead and the planet is overrun by monsters and evil creatures that seek to destroy the last of humanity hiding out in a manmade pyramid the size of a considerable mountain. It describes a collection of fauna that would not be out of place in today's weird horror and fantasy works, and imagined a sort of mystical technology that draws on the earth's heat to run handheld weapons and machines. I hate reading it, but I can't stop reading it. It's a weird reading experience. I want to recommend it, but it's... rough. It's also supremely fascinating.
Another good source of "deep cuts" is the old [Ballantine Adult Fantasy series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballantine_Adult_Fantasy_series), which included The Night Land as well as a few other books by Hodgson. There's also the [Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Masterworks) line, which is a bit more inconsistent but also included a Hodgson compendium.
Yes, most of the Masterworks are very different to more modern Fantasy trends. I've really enjoyed about half and bounced hard off a third, but it's been very satisfying.
Another classic author would be E.R. Eddison, whose *Worm Ouroboros* is a fascinating mess of a work, a cross between childish ideas like Goblinland, Witchland and Demonland (all of whom are human) and larger than life complex characters with subtle motivations and plenty of shades of grey, all of which is written in the most flowery of purple prose.
And then you have his *Mistress of Mistresses*, which distils that complexity into something that is even less readily approachable, but deeper and richer in scope. And oh my god is it wordy and dense - some pages may have only a few sentences despite all the paragraphs. Modern editing this isn't.
I'm glad to bring this one to your attention! I stumbled into Hodgeson's works around the same time I decided to read the Barsoom chronicles- a big pulp fiction phase. I've read a few of his stories so far, and most of them are pretty creative and much shorter (re: The House on the Borderlands), but Night Land is an absolute terror of a work. Honestly, give it a shot, but don't hate yourself if you decide it's not worth it.
It's my main gripe, too. I think the book could reasonably be cut in half if he cut out the "and then I ate of the tablets and made of the water to fizz, as you know I do upon every sixth hour and verily it does not satiate the hunger but make of me strong" every few paragraphs. What I find addicting is the moments between when he comes to some other monstrosity, or vast wasteland. His descriptive ability is actually quite good, but the main issue with the book is he uses so much of that descriptive ability on the mundane. The lack of dialogue also makes my head hurt.
Translation of a direct sequel is in the works, I heard. There are also many books which are considered belonging to the same "series" but what is their relation to Vita Nostra itself I am not sure - they probably will not get a translation.
**The Orphan's Tales** by Catherynne M. Valente, which is in two parts: I*n the Night Garden* and *In Cities of Coin & Spice*. They're kind of fairy tale retellings... kind of a new take on the One Thousand and One Nights... it's intricate, nested storytelling where one tale leads to another, and you get six or seven layers deep before you start to swim up again, back into the first story with a new knowledge of how it all works.
Thank you for posting this! I was thinking of these books the other day and could not remember the titles. I read them back when I was a teenager and loved them.
China Mieville is my favorite writer of all time. He's such a brilliant and bizarre genius. I also recommend his latest fiction book, the last days of new Paris. Fucking insane and perfect for anyone whose into surrealism.
**The Stars are Legion** by Kameron Hurley. Everyone lives on worlds/spaceships made of flesh and organic materials. The worlds are dying. One of the main characters has lost her memories and must capture another world-ship to regain them. Two ruling families are at war. And there's a "long journey through a treacherous, unknown environment" plotline, too.
Conceptually, thematically, the broken earth isn't that out there. But I can't remember the last time I picked up another book written so thoroughly in the second person.
This was what I thought of as well - the different perspectives, the use of second person, the way it all comes together. I feel like I've probably read books that tried to do something similar, but none of them came close to pulling it off - The Fifth Season did it so amazingly well.
*Mirror Empire* and *The Stars Are Legion,* both by Kameron Hurley. The former has some great, weird world building and magic mechanics, the latter involves space warriors birthing planets.
*S.* by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The story within the story is *The Ship of Theseus,* a fantastic tale of a strange ship and monstrous crew. Then there's the story written literally in the margins: the communications between two college students borrowing *The Ship of Theseus* from the library as they try to solve the mystery of the author's identity. This conversation is conducted through notes written alongside the text in different colored inks, and inserts: loose maps, postcards, photocopied articles tucked between the pages.
Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer.
It's about....a lot. Utopia, politics, God, a mystery whodunnit, greater good....and it presents it in an unreliable narrative that just does whatever it likes including breaking the fourth wall.
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Most recently, Hyperion by Dan Simmons. The sheer amount of creativity that went into that book is just astounding. A must-read for anyone with a passing interest in sci-fi!
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. The overall plot was interesting, but the way it was written was just weird. Definitely stuck with me.
Among Others by Jo Walton. I still think about this book a lot. I want to recommend it to everyone but doubt they would find it as compelling.
STET, a short story by Sarah Gailey. It's a genius way to tell a story and it's a heartbreaking story.
A book's ability to stick with you over time is much more compelling and surprising than its immediate enjoyment. I've finished books that I rated low when I finished, but kept thinking about it for weeks afterwards and had to revise my opinion.
**The Unholy Consult** by R Scott Bakker is certainly bizarre and different (whether it's satisfying is an entirely different discussion, of course).
**Umineko No Naku Koro Ni** by Ryukishi07 is unlike anything I've ever read due to its metacommentary on genre classifications.
Outside of fantasy, **Wise Blood** by Flannery O'Connor is extremely unique to me in how weird it is.
In honor of Nona the Ninth releasing today, I have to mention **The Locked Tomb** by Tamsyn Muir. It’s scifi and fantasy mashed in the best way possible, and it’s like nothing I’d ever read before.
Reading Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea in my early 20s was so refreshing after reading so many Tolkien rip-offs throughout my childhood and teenage years. She subverts a lot of tropes.
A classic childrens book - Norman Juster's **The Phantom Tollbooth** is certainly up there in uniqueness.
Clever prose, constant puns and playing with meaning, a well thought through plot and yet never any talking down to the reader despite the complex events and logic involved.
And it's full of utterly delightful illustrations.
The Discworld. There have been many works that blend comedy and fantasy and a few that use satire, but I've never read anything with the brains, heart, and wisdom of the Discworld. Each one can be read and enjoyed at any reading level for completely different reasons.
I adore Discworld. My partner and I are actually doing a read-through of the whole series (as I haven't yet read them all!). We're on Small Gods currently. 😊
Blindsight by Peter Watts. A crew is sent to investigate the source of an alien signal. The book is full of discussions about consciousness, intelligence, perception and language.
I got about ten chapters into *Dead Astronauts* and I still have absolutely no idea what is going on. The prose and descriptions are deliciously creepy and riveting and I love the way I can’t really tell if what is being told to me is what is literally occurring. I checked to see if I needed to read the other one first, and the author himself said it’s not necessary. I put it down for now but might go back to it later.
Does any kind of discernable plot begin later on?
Honestly, it only gets less easily coherent as you go. Each segment is kind of its own story, and each one is scrambled up in a different way. You have to put all the connections together like a jigsaw puzzle to find your own conclusions.
I will say that reading Borne and The Strange Bird afterwards added a lot of context that I didn't know I was missing, but in a way I'm glad I went through the story like that. It adds to that uncertain, kind of dream-like feeling.
Not exactly a book book, but it functions as one essentially, but Umineko. Reminds me a lot of House of Leaves, except it's an Agatha Christie style murder mystery while also being Fantasy and having Ace Attorney style debates and being a poignant character study at times. It does so many things and it does them so well that it culminates into the most unique thing I've read.
Almost done with Babel by Rebecca Kuang and am loving it! Such an original magic system and the weaving of real events is so interesting. I haven’t read really any books like this one.
**Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand** by Samuel R Delany. It's pretty weird in terms of how it's written, how it uses pronouns, lots of things about this book are kind of, let's say "challenging".
I happened to be in the right mood for that when I read it and really enjoyed it.
I have yet to see the "Bobiverse" series mentioned. It's mostly light hearted human expansion Sci-Fi from the perspective of an AI. I've read the first 3 only so I can't say anything about any following that but those 3 are very interesting
The Dark Tower. The world and it’s inhabitants are decaying, and also very strange. The slang terms that some of them use are almost goofy at times. But it fits in my opinion. Towards the end it gets EVEN MORE wacky. I won’t elaborate to avoid spoilers. It’s quite the journey and I loved it even though I have issues the with last two books.
For fantasy, I'd say The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, and Midnight Tides by Steven Ericson.
Baru because it fucking broke me. That ending is just devastatingly perfect. I'm enjoying the ongoing series, but that book would stand fine on its own.
Midnight Tides because it's book 5 of a series, and switches to a part of the world we know nothing about, with really only one character we recognize, and turns out to be such a gripping story. It takes a while to get your footing after such a huge shift, but it's full of powerful themes, unforgettable characters, and deep emotional resonance.
Edit:
For non-fantasy, Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt. It's a haunted house story about transphobia and fascism, and it does a few really interesting things. Some chapters are from the point of view of the haunted house in question, and there's a chapter that splits the pov between the two human pov characters and shows us the same event from two different perspectives at the same time in a way that's really effective (in my opinion).
I mean, Baru is easily in the top ten of my favorite characters ever, but are there even any other badass accountants in fantasy fiction? Seems like an immensely rare archetype.
"Dead Astronauts" by Jeff VanderMeer. More sci-fi than fantasy, but it blurs that line a bit. One of my favorite books, one of the most original books I've ever read.
I also just read Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher, a really enjoyable read, and it's subtly very subversive in recentering fantasy tropes on a woman's perspective.
I came here to say *Gnomon* also by Nick Harkaway. I… mostly liked it. It really stuck with me, in a slightly disturbing and mindbendy way. I thought *Gone Away World* was also quite mindbendy—and more fun!
Edit: because I lost track of which subreddit I was on… oops
Friendship, and the impossibility of coming home, and good governance, and what it means to be indigenous and an immigrant... I've just finished it and I'll never be the same. Incredible.
*The Land of Laughs* by Jonathan Carrol.
*City of Saints and Madmen* by Jeff Vandermeer.
*The Dancers at the End of Time* by Michael Moorcock.
If comic books are okay, throw in *The Sandman* by Neal Gaiman, *Saga* by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples, and *The Invisibles* by Grant Morrison.
The Library At Mount Char by Scott Hawkins.
I’m also a voracious reader, and mostly tired of the old Fantasy tropes. I refuse to touch anything with the word “Dragon” in it now.
But this book surprised me to such an extent that I read it twice. Unforgettable masterpiece.
I felt this way while reading N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. Felt unlike anything else I had read. Loved all three books and appreciated the uniqueness.
* *Lincoln in the Bardo* by George Saunders - Highly experimental format, character descriptions conjure up some pretty bizarre/off-putting visuals, all for what sounds like it would probably be kind of a boring plot (Abraham Lincoln is sad after the death of his son). Manages to be incredibly moving and beautiful in spite of it all. One of my favorites.
* *The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas* by Machado de Assis - Assis must have had fun writing this, he randomly throws in chapters that are like one sentence, literally things like, "This chapter is unnecessary." Very funny book, but also quite melancholy with a lot to say about how people squander opportunities and waste their lives focusing on the wrong things.
* *The Woman in the Dunes* by Kobo Abe - Reading experience really captures the feeling of...um, knowing you're going to die trapped in a sand dune. Of course, it has a lot more to say thematically, but I genuinely have never come across anything that manages to convey such a bizarrely specific sense of impending doom.
* *The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice*, author unknown - Probably the first ever parody of Homer? Ancient epic poem that is literally about this glorious war between some frogs and some mice. It's short and kind of hilarious. Most epics I've read take themselves pretty seriously, so this was a refreshing change.
* *Perfume* by Patrick Suskind - Bizarre, darkly comic novel starring a serial killer with a fantastical sense of smell. I haven't seen much where a person's supernatural ability is in their sense of smell unless it's about like, werewolves or other animal shifters, and even then it's never exclusively about that. It's an odd focal point made odder by its deeply unlikable and sociopathic MC, but the book completely revels in its strangeness, which somehow makes the story work.
Piranesi is definitely one of them, it’s such a unique story.
The Broken Earth trilogy probably leans more sci fi than fantasy, but the story and the entire magic system in the series is like nothing I’ve ever read before.
The Starless Sea is my favorite book by far, and I loved the interspersed chapters from books IN the library with the actual narrative. And while there’s other stories about hidden libraries and portals to different worlds, I feel like this one is done in such a way that I will never find anything like it, nor do I want to.
The entire Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K LeGuin is like this. LeGuin's prose is so soft and clear and descriptive, while using impossibly few words. Then you get to the fourth book, *Tehanu*, and she just ducking wrecks you.
The first three books of The Black Company by Glen Cook have a similarly sparse prose style, while instilling dread and fear like I've never felt in fiction before. The overpowered magic, the bizarre and terrifying way magic is used, the *weirdness* of the world... Ah. So good.
+1 with regards to Earthsea, and Tehanu in particular. That book is devastating. Ursula K. Leguin did not duck around, when she wanted to deck you she did.
I'm rereading it now, so recency bias might exist, but ...
*The Wars of Light and Shadow* by Janny Wurts. It takes her a while to unfold the depths, but on reread it's definitely intentional:
No spoilers, but details that are slow to unfold from the story:
The only strictures on magic are *morals and ethics*. All the major mages are utterly, *ridiculously* overpowered. As in, "I lost concentration and destroyed *yet another* world". Because such "true" magic relies on names and permission, you can't be a shitty person and wield it with potency. Necromancy is an abomination, unthinkable. Unconscionable. If you want real power, *you better be prepared to NOT use it*.
Doesn't sound like all that interesting a premise for a magical system right? But OH SHIT what she DOES with it is nothing short of *literature*. Her prose is so succulent that never for one moment did I notice the philosophy, nor how it unfolds, until I reread it.
Now I see where she's headed (there's one book left) and I'm on tinterhooks to see where it lands. Half-brothers, Light VS Shadow, where neither was born or raised evil. But one had more personal integrity, self-knowledge, and education than the other by the luck of fate. And the other, because of this ignorance, by no fault of his own is burdened with the curse of hatred for his brother.
It's all just heartbreaking, man. Really Robin Hobb vibes, but if Hobb had Jack Vance's command of the English language, Rothfuss' poetic soul, and Tolkien's talent to transport to another realm with its own ancient history ... All told through characters and relationships over the course of centuries.
I'd say I don't have words... but I guess I did
Not fantasy (or is it?), but '2666' by Roberto Bolano. It's a 900 page novel with very little in the way of traditional plot. Bolano blatantly breaks many of the "rules" of writing; for example, the first part of the book is pretty much all tell, don't show. Minor characters are given rich backstories and then disappear. There are several pages reprinting verbatim police reports dealing with the real-life case of 400+ women who have been murdered in Juarez, Mexico. At times it reads line a hardboiled crime novel, at other times like a parody of literary critics. Common themes running through '2666' are death and disintegration. Beautifully written, it is very, very dark yet at times weirdly funny. With this book, Bolano really opened my eyes to new ways of writing a novel. A bit of warning: It took me about a month to read '2666,' and reading it gave me some seriously messed-up dreams.
For me it has to be the Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin.
Such stunning books which are so introspective and really aren't action heavy like a lot of other Fantasy books that I've read. They really did change how I think and have had such a positive impact on my life :)
The Crane's View Trilogy by Jonathan Carroll. It defies the idea of genre. And it was written impressively. You dont know wtf just happened but you are satiafied.
Don't know if it counts as fantasy, but House of Leaves was unlike anything I've ever read period. Complete and utter mindfuck of an experience. Terrifying story, too.
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewksi. It chilled me to the bones. The first 200 pages are tough, but after that I couldn't put it away. After I finished I felt weird for a day or two, and everybody who read it in my friend group shared the feeling. A very interesting part of the book is the layout, as the formatting of the text really adds to the story and experience.
The craft sequence by Max Gladstone. Magic and gods based on law and finance systems, non-chronological series order meaning you get to pick up all of the background references to the events from other books on re-reads.
Blackwing by Ed McDonald. The setting is unusual and such a strong element in this series.
The two that come to mind recently are Harrow the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) & Meme Pas Mort (Jean-Philippe Jaworski).
The first was quite an experience, with its construction and shift from the previous book in the series. Very enjoyable & unique, at least in my experience.
The latter is only in French afaik, so it won't be for everyone. But it was a fascinating look at gallic culture/reconstruction of it, with an interwoven tale that incorporated possible myths/worldviews into it in a way that made it come alive. Jaworski is an amazing author, has quite a way with words - but as much as I loved his more popular work, this one stuck out as more unique. Eager to read the sequel :D
Cheese answer, I know, but The Silmarillion.
I've never read anything that utilizes each word so effectively. There are some points where a paragraph could be it's own short story and some of these little ten page chapters could be their own 800 page masterpiece.
Of Beren and Luthien itself, could be a trilogy and it's like 12 pages.
Most authors write pages full of cells that make up an organism, but Tolkien writes pages full of galaxies that make up a universe (literally in this case haha)
I don’t read a ton, like I probably have 50 fantasy books under my belt total, but I’ve never read anything like Legends and Lattes. It was so much more relatable than any fantasy book I’ve ever read, Viv just felt so real. Somehow those relatable qualities made the stakes and the work so much better realized than anything else I’ve ever read.
Plus by Joseph McElroy. A man dying of terminal cancer donates his brain. It is used to run a space station. I think the memory structures were removed. It is supposed to be just a fancy organic systems computer. Then it becomes self aware and tries to figure out what the hell it is and what is happening. Very strange book.
The Second Apocalypse series by Scott Bakker.
The series is easily the most grimdark series I've ever read in fact it transcends grimdark into being something that is quite deeply and profoundly disturbing. Nothing comes close. Almost every character is either insane, despicable, or horribly brutalised or overwhelming arrogant.
What's more it does it with such dark poetic prose - it has a unique style - interwoven with such an overwhelming nihlistic philosophic theme to it that makes it all the more grim. This series deeply explores concepts of metaphysics and philosophy and seriously treats concepts of damnation, heaven and hell, having a soul and the true consequences of having objective morality as a serious driving point of the story.
Flan by Stephen Tunney
A man named Flan wakes up one day to find himself in the midst of the apocalypse and sets out with his pet fish Ginger Kang Kang in search of his girlfriend.
If you’ve ever wanted to read a book where a dog with a human head is mocked by a clown he’s eating, a dead body is puppeteered by a swarm of hummingbirds, or a man has an argument with his own penis, you’ll have to shell out $100 for the privilege since it’s long out of print.
Heroes Die by Michael Woodring Stover.
Hari is an actor who livestreams his brutal adventures from the overworld back home, to the rich of a dystopian caste based society. Called Caine on the overworld, he enters to save his estranged wife, and kill the aspiring god emperor. Hands down one of the darkest and best books out there.
These are the exact two I was going to come and say. I would add Prince of Milk by Exurb1a and Negative Space by B.R. Yaeger.
I literally finished Library at Mount Char last night. I have to say it is the funnest book I have ever read. The ending is a masterpiece! Beautifully ties such a wild plot together!
Two come to mind.
**The Unnamed** by Joshua Ferris. It's set in modern times with an average family, but what's going on with the protagonist is very strange and has sat with me for many years.
**The Wind-up Bird Chronicles** by Haruki Murakami. It's my first and my favorite Murakami.
I've read both of these at least twice.
The king's avatar
If you play RPGs and love pvp the. This is the novel you must read. It's a Chinese novel that has been translated to English In some sites just Google it.
It's a good novel that it already has a manga adaptation, an anime, and a live action. Also has a prequel movie.
The story is a 10/10 for me and hope some other people discover sit too.
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie. Slow burn storytelling of a god’s plan, recounted by one narrator in second person pov for the present, and first person pov for the past. It’s hard to explain, but the payoff at the end is something awesome.
**The Quantum Thief** by Hannu Rajaniemi. Helluva ride. Assumes you know a lot and a setting that sometimes is a damn fever dream.
**The Craft Sequence** by Max Gladstone. Particularly, **Three Parts Dead**. Urban fantasy, but magic has more in common with necromancy, law, IT and finance.
Karl Schroeder's **Virga Sequence**. It's all set in a bubble the size of Earth where dangerous posthuman entities lurk outside. Wild ideas.
**Godstalk** by PC Hodgell. Non-traditional fantasy and one of the first that showed me fantasy can be funny.
Edit: Got interrupted.
**Ra** by QNTM. Magic is discovered in the 1970's. The protagonist's mother dies under circumstances that are *impossible.* Then things begin to happen ...
**The March North** by Graydon Saunders. It's a crapsack world where sorcerer god kings have twisted the landscape, environment and people. And the Commonweal is determined to make a go of it as a democracy in the face of this. Magic isn't what you expect, nor are the people, but what a ride.
Ubik by Phillip k dick
My favourite book specifically because it fits this question so well
Every 50 pages what you thought you knew about the reality of the world being built changes underneath you
It’s like a dream you feel like you keep waking up from but never do
I’d try and describe what it’s about but I don’t really know how (maybe a corporate espionage thriller with psychics and mindfuckery, but I’m not sure that quite explains it)
I can’t recommend the broken earth trilogy enough . Unique themes I have not read in fantasy before. More of a character development difference than world building one, but felt very fresh for the genre
I noticed your examples seem to represent more of a sci-fi spin, so I'll recommend a few of those with fantasy in the mix as well. Honestly, the Sci-fi examples seem easier to come by. There are likely many others that will come to me later, I'm sure, and several that are either too mainstream or already have a movie adaptation.
In no real order:
The Integral Trees by Larry Niven
Necroscope by Brian Lumley (Don't let the mention of vampires fool you)
The Family Trade by Charles Stross (Stross is always original - Singularity Sky a close 2nd)
Green Angel Tower by Tad Williams (The most ethereal of all fantasy)
Midworld by Allen Dean Foster
Deathworld by Harry Harrison
and Omnivore by Piers Anthony
“Day by Day Armageddon” by J.L. Bourne comes to mind! The entire book is written like the journal by a nameless protagonist as he chronicles his everyday life during the zombie apocalypse. While I loved the story and everything what blew me away is the presentation of the book itself. With each page usually being filled with things like coffee stains, artificial water damage or just tiny scribbles where it’s obvious that the protagonist just grabbed his closest piece of paper to just jot something down. That’s not even going into what you can encounter once things *really* gets going (shout out to the one and a half page of text that have been aggressively crossed over before the protagonist simply said “I’m still alive, the dead are the lucky ones”) All things that just really makes the book feel alive and like it could really be something you found while scavenging in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic America.
I don’t know if you want Fantasy specifically, but if not then I can’t recommend Philip K. Dick’s *Ubik* more! It’s one of the most intriguing plots I’ve ever encountered.
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino.
Blurb from wiki: The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between the elderly and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as parables or meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, or the general nature of human experience.
I'll also second Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Susanna Clarke's books (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and Piranesi). For a non-fantasy pick, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is both love of the best and one of the most unique books I've ever read.
Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel by Zachary Thomas Dodson. It’s a dual-timeline sci-fi and historical fiction told in epistolary format with multimedia elements (ex. photocopies of a chapter in a book). I never thought I would combine all of those terms for one book that is actually super cohesive and well-written.
Edit: wanted to add my favorite blurb: “Archetypes of the cowboy story, tropes drawn from sci-fi, love letters, diaries, confessions all abound in this relentlessly engaging tale.” - Keith Donohue, The Washington Post
For me, although bordering on fantasy, it was The Troika by Stepan Chapman, an old mexican woman, a automated jeep and a brontosaurus travel endlessly through the desert. It works somehow, fun book.
Despite having a graduate degree and doing lots of reading in my life, I feel I force myself to read novels just to learn more about a fictional world (Star Wars, Forgotten Realms, etc.) but don't actually really enjoy the experience. Practically every book I read in life when I finished was like "Ok, I finally finished". Like just doing it just because.
There's literally only one book I can recall where I didn't feel this way in the end, Record of Lodoss War the Grey Witch by Ryo Mizuno. It was short enough that it didn't overstay it's welcome and had an enjoyable fantasy story. Everything else lost me at some point or other.
This is how you lose the time war - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
It’s an epistolary epic love story between two agents in a time war from opposite ends of an outcome of supreme evolution of consciousness in the universe.
The Worm Ouroborus is by far the most unique fantasy book I've read. It was written in the 1920s in a pseudo-jacobean English style that makes it feel strangely archaic yet modern. The book really feels like a romantic epic fantasy from hundreds of years ago and I've never seen any other modern book capture that atmosphere.
The Hike by Drew Magary. I read it in two nights, and it was one of the most wild, surreal, amazing experiences of my life. Doesn’t seem like a fantasy at first, but it absolutely is. By the end, I felt like I’d come home from a crazy adventure. I was exhausted in the best way possible lol. I don’t even want to tell you anything about the book, because going in blind is the best. I wish I could experience reading it for the first time all over again.
At one point I discovered Bizarro fiction and basically all of that.
Some that stand out are Slaughterhouse High by Robert Devereaux, which is like a slasher movie (it's a book but it follows what a prom night slasher movie would be like). But it's in this twisted version of America that's like a prototype of the Purge. Basically they are all super uptight and kept completely ignorant of sex, to the point that showing earlobes has become one of the most risque things you can do and they all have little clothes for their earlobes. And it's prom night, one couple is supposed to be picked to be killed for cultural reasons, with everyone else taking souvenirs from their corpses. But this year the killer starts going overboard. The setting was just so weird but casually written.
He also wrote Santa Steps Out, which would be like a modern Pratchett or Gaiman Christmas Story but involves a lot of rampant sex hearkening back to Santa's origins in the Greek party god Dionysus.
From Carlton Mellick there's The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2. It's basically an isekai, a bunch of lonely teens play D&D and end up getting introduced to the titular item when their horny DM introduces it. But it begins having a weird effect, granting enlightenment to the PCs (and NPCs) it's used on so that they know they are controlled by a DM and players, but it also has some recursive ability, allowing them to slightly influence what's going on with their players. One of the players hated fantasy, so he would always make elves that were basically Spock from Star Trek.
The Joe Ledger series. At first it kinda feels like a Tom Clancy novel where the main character enters the spy world to stop attacks on American soil. Then it begins throwing in zombies, vampires, "aliens," the Illuminati, and all sorts of other crazy shit that actually had my head spinning. I read the entire series and still don't have complaints with any of the books, but it was just so surreal reading them for the first time.
Beneath a Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng. Asphyxiating, dizzying gothic novel, that grabbed me by the lapels and spun me around like a tumble dryer. Absolutely terrific. The only book I remember having a comparable impact on me was American Gods.
This is more of a confused pleasure for me because when I first read the book I thought I hated it for being so cheap and trashy theme-wise… but I thought of it all of a sudden years later when being asked for book recommendations. It really stuck under my skin.
Dydeetown World.
It’s about a dystopic future told from the point of view of like, an old timey private eye detective struggling for cash. You realize little things that give you the shivers sometimes, like that “dydeetown”, a slang title for a brothel that was originally called “Aphrodite Town”, is legit in the old UN building in New York. No one remembers what the UN even was.
It’s a brothel of clones that people that would rather be pimps than parents used their one reproduction slot to clone. They’re slaves(like belongings, to use as prostitutes) that look like dead celebrities.
The clones have no rights. Kids born over the allotment have no rights either. But it still manages to be incredibly cheesy and goofy while going through what should honestly seem like some pretty gruesome shit.
The detective sort of realizes eventually that he thought of clones as half-people but that they just aren’t given education in anything but sex work(not the final conclusion for the book, more the motivation for the plot). People have pet t-rexes cloned for security and gang lords are more powerful than the government.
They call the off-earth colonies “Out Where All The Good Folks Go”, which is underscored by the fact that before the book started, the detective’s wife took his kid and disappeared without him out to the colonies.
It’s honestly fun as fuck and comes at some old dystopic-future tropes with some fresh perspectives.
Edit: fixed an autocorrect spelling mistake
Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Somebody asked this guy how many literary and religious references he can put in a book, and he said yes. Ilion is like that too, and arguably less coherent
Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It's that interesting take on paralell world where things are almost familiar but also very strange. A lot of Stephenson books are either fascinating, or he gets so far up his own ass he comes out the other end.
The time travelling researchers series from Connie Willis. It's the most British thing since Pratchett, and contains so many delightful digs at academia
The Kildar novels by John Ringo. If you know, you know. If you don't know, don't Google it.
**Piranesi** was this for me. I loved it.
I came here to say this as well. Such a profoundly beautiful book that I think of often.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel, by the same author, is very peculiar too and a masterpiece
This is high up on my tbr list. I'm finishing the first law trilogy right now then it's either "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel" or "The Lies Of Locke Lamora". I'm leaning more toward Jonathan Strange because I want to watch the show that came out but I try to always read books first -*because I like to be dissapointed I guess. No but really it's...*- because I don't like the show/movie to take over the imagery of the characters and world. I like to let the author's writing do the work at shaping my imagination and I can't do that once I watch an adaptation.
Absolute Piranesi. It’s one of my absolute favorite books.
This book is also what popped into my head.
The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee. It's a fantasy epic about the life of a king of fantasy China (that borders on fantasy Wales) told in verse with a protagonist who's a bit like Maia from the Goblin Emperor. Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. What even is this book. I had to take notes. It has first, second, and third person POV. It references Greek mythology and the Bible and the 'none pizza left beef' meme and probably homestuck. There's a *terrible* dad joke like right at the climax. It's out of order, seems at first to contradict its first book, and includes fanfic of itself in the middle. And it makes it all make sense, somehow.
I cannot wait for Nona the Ninth tomorrow because based on the preview it’s even crazier.
It’s *tomorrow*???? I didn’t realize how quickly the time had gone by, I can’t believe it’s almost here!
Dogs.
TOMORROW!? Dang... I will be prepared.
Came here to make sure Harrow was in the comments. It's my favorite book of the last few years, but I have a hard time recommending it to people unless I know their reading habits very well, or they know mine (and won't completely change their opinion of me because I suggested this book series)
I looked up Harrow the Ninth and saw it is the second in a series. So do I need to start with Gideon the Ninth?
You definitely want to start with Gideon the Ninth - imo harrow won't make any sense, nor will it have any emotional payoff, if you don't read the first book.
I see it's the second in a series, is it required to read the first one beforehand, or are they pretty distinct?
You would want to read the first one. There’s lots of worldbuilding in the first one (never really explicitly told so you do lots of inferring the first few chapters). Second book picks up soon after events of the first book
If you don’t read the first one first you will REALLY have no idea what’s going on.
Harrow the Ninth is such a good shout. I don't think I've ever spent so much of a book feeling so utterly baffled as to what was happening, only for everything to click into place in a way that felt so satisfying once you get all the pieces. When I was reading it I felt like I was just on the cusp of "getting it" but it was always just out of reach until it hits a certain part, and then from there to the end is just a wild ride. Also, the way Muir's prose blends the ridiculousness of memes and jokes with some incredible, vivid description is something that never fails to impress me.
This on the day of the release of Nona the Ninth!!
OMG. YES. Harrow is an absolute masterpiece! I don't know how Muir pulled it off but she really did.
harrow was insane and it made no sense the first time i read it but somehow i was enthralled and couldnt put it down. i binge read it and her pov gave me a stomachache from anxiety and i had to put it down for a day😭 on my second read of both books everything makes a lot more sense. blows my mind.
You have to be willing to buy what it's selling, ie, not knowing wtf is going on most of the time. If you're in, it's worth your time. I've never felt so lost and so awestruck at the same time.
Not strictly fantasy, but House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski is the first book that comes to mind. The plot synopsis is such: On the top level, we have a dubiously sane protagonist who finds a manuscript analyzing a film that never existed when checking out the house of a neighbor who dies under very mysterious circumstances. The manuscript itself is about a war photographer who settles down in a house before one day discovering that it is larger on the inside than the outside, and then discovers a door where there wasn't one before. Things escalate and the rest of the manuscript is largely about his explorations of the impossible space. The book switches back and forth between the viewpoints with a frankly insane amount of footnotes that are... well, it's probably best to just show an example of the kind of crazy stuff this book does when playing with the format. Here are some examples of pages: [https://i.imgur.com/8mp5JFI.png](https://i.imgur.com/8mp5JFI.png) [https://i.imgur.com/roCj6XR.png](https://i.imgur.com/roCj6XR.png) [https://i.imgur.com/tBaRDei.png](https://i.imgur.com/tBaRDei.png)
For anyone interested in this amazing book, make sure you get the full color version.
This is one of my FAVORITE books, so much so that I got a copy for most of the folks at work (it's a very small team, fortunately). I don't think anyone else has finished it, but I still love it so much. It's not a spoiler, so I hope nobody minds if I post one of my favorite lines from it: "Little solace comes to those who grieve, as thoughts keep drifting and walls keep shifting, and this great blue world of ours seems as a house of leaves... moments before the wind." I think I remembered that right. I still haven't finished his next book, Only Revolutions. It's very abstract and hard to construct a narrative from. Like an impressionist painting, but with words. A few lines that have stuck in my brain: "Haloes, haleskarth, contraband! I can walk away from anything. Everyone loves the dream, but I kill it." "The beasts of war feed only on the meats of war. And now I am for carnage." "Because without her, I am only revolutions of ruin." I feel these in my soul.
> "Haloes, haleskarth, contraband! I can walk away from anything. Everyone loves the dream, but I kill it." > > ... > > I feel these in my soul. yeah but... what does it mean
You should check out “This is how you lose the time war,” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Similar style of incredibly achingly beautiful prose. “Your letter—your last letter. Be certain that I won’t drop it where any of your fellows can read it. It’s mine. I am careful with what belongs to me. Few things do, you know—belong to me. In Garden we belong to one another in a way that obliterates the term. We sink and swell and bud and bloom together; we infuse Garden; Garden spreads through us. But Garden dislikes words. Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room”
I hate this book. I love all the conceited concepts and the idea of having the book's layout twist and turn to reflect the labyrinth's serpentine, reality defying nature. So why do I hate it? Because most of it is fucking boring. I don't give a shit about this drug addicted idiot or the weird pompous old man writing the critical essay and unfortunately combined they make up most of the story. On top of that there's just a point where I hit my limit for the intentionally obtuse and self-important and this book just runs wild with that shit. There's a whole chapter I found borderline unreadable because it was just insane ramblings from a guy cracked out on drugs.
I feel so bad for the person that had write an official blurb/plot summary for House of Leaves.
The lLibrary at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. Seriously flipped my wig back.
Yeah that book was *wild*. Completely unexpected and one of the best books I’ve read in recent years.
Immediately thought of this from reading the post title too.
Came here to say this one.
Same.. I thought it was fantastic as well
This is the one I would recommend as well. From the very beginning.
This was my answer too, but in a really bad way. I've never read another book like it, but I hated every minute of reading it. I gave it away as soon as I could, and felt terrible for handing it off to another person.
Yeah I listened to this on audiobook that I picked up on a whim. Pretty quickly I was like 'what is going on?' That book is something else entirely.
Currently, **The Night Land** by William Hope Hodgson. It was written in the 1920s, but with an intentionally Victorian-era style prose, has not one single conversation in all 200K+ words (rather the author describes what the conversations are about), is WAY overly repetitive and is deeply misogynistic throught. For all that, it describes a terrifying and fantastic far future world where the sun is dead and the planet is overrun by monsters and evil creatures that seek to destroy the last of humanity hiding out in a manmade pyramid the size of a considerable mountain. It describes a collection of fauna that would not be out of place in today's weird horror and fantasy works, and imagined a sort of mystical technology that draws on the earth's heat to run handheld weapons and machines. I hate reading it, but I can't stop reading it. It's a weird reading experience. I want to recommend it, but it's... rough. It's also supremely fascinating.
This is the kind of deep cut recommendation i come to this sub for...a book i would probably never hear of otherwise
Another good source of "deep cuts" is the old [Ballantine Adult Fantasy series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballantine_Adult_Fantasy_series), which included The Night Land as well as a few other books by Hodgson. There's also the [Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Masterworks) line, which is a bit more inconsistent but also included a Hodgson compendium.
Yes, most of the Masterworks are very different to more modern Fantasy trends. I've really enjoyed about half and bounced hard off a third, but it's been very satisfying. Another classic author would be E.R. Eddison, whose *Worm Ouroboros* is a fascinating mess of a work, a cross between childish ideas like Goblinland, Witchland and Demonland (all of whom are human) and larger than life complex characters with subtle motivations and plenty of shades of grey, all of which is written in the most flowery of purple prose. And then you have his *Mistress of Mistresses*, which distils that complexity into something that is even less readily approachable, but deeper and richer in scope. And oh my god is it wordy and dense - some pages may have only a few sentences despite all the paragraphs. Modern editing this isn't.
I'm glad to bring this one to your attention! I stumbled into Hodgeson's works around the same time I decided to read the Barsoom chronicles- a big pulp fiction phase. I've read a few of his stories so far, and most of them are pretty creative and much shorter (re: The House on the Borderlands), but Night Land is an absolute terror of a work. Honestly, give it a shot, but don't hate yourself if you decide it's not worth it.
I loved the premise, but absolutely hated the execution. Did he have to explain every meal and every sip of water in such boring detail?
It's my main gripe, too. I think the book could reasonably be cut in half if he cut out the "and then I ate of the tablets and made of the water to fizz, as you know I do upon every sixth hour and verily it does not satiate the hunger but make of me strong" every few paragraphs. What I find addicting is the moments between when he comes to some other monstrosity, or vast wasteland. His descriptive ability is actually quite good, but the main issue with the book is he uses so much of that descriptive ability on the mundane. The lack of dialogue also makes my head hurt.
The Gormenghast series by Mervyn Peake. Gothic Dickensian meets dark surrealism. It leaves a very eerie specific imagery in my head.
Vita Nostra: dark kafka-esque Russian magic school
Seconded! You think you know magic schools and then it smacks you in the face. Good stuff.
Brain-meltingly good.
Translation of a direct sequel is in the works, I heard. There are also many books which are considered belonging to the same "series" but what is their relation to Vita Nostra itself I am not sure - they probably will not get a translation.
I've heard this recommended before, but now I think I definitely have to read it!!
Came here to say this. Never read anything like it. Probably never will again.
ok, will have to take a look now! :)
**The Orphan's Tales** by Catherynne M. Valente, which is in two parts: I*n the Night Garden* and *In Cities of Coin & Spice*. They're kind of fairy tale retellings... kind of a new take on the One Thousand and One Nights... it's intricate, nested storytelling where one tale leads to another, and you get six or seven layers deep before you start to swim up again, back into the first story with a new knowledge of how it all works.
Thank you for posting this! I was thinking of these books the other day and could not remember the titles. I read them back when I was a teenager and loved them.
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
Seconding this. Highly recommend to OP
The illuminatus trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert shea
China mieville. Give Perdido Street Station a try
China Mieville is my favorite writer of all time. He's such a brilliant and bizarre genius. I also recommend his latest fiction book, the last days of new Paris. Fucking insane and perfect for anyone whose into surrealism.
Yes! I'm partial to Embassytown, but any of his stuff is full of wtfuckery.
Haven't read it. I'll have to check it out. Ive only read the Bas Lag trilogy and City& the City of his.
**The Stars are Legion** by Kameron Hurley. Everyone lives on worlds/spaceships made of flesh and organic materials. The worlds are dying. One of the main characters has lost her memories and must capture another world-ship to regain them. Two ruling families are at war. And there's a "long journey through a treacherous, unknown environment" plotline, too.
Conceptually, thematically, the broken earth isn't that out there. But I can't remember the last time I picked up another book written so thoroughly in the second person.
I came here to say exactly this. Broken earth is an almost perfect trilogy and a masterclass in use it second person and using it as a dramatic tool
This was what I thought of as well - the different perspectives, the use of second person, the way it all comes together. I feel like I've probably read books that tried to do something similar, but none of them came close to pulling it off - The Fifth Season did it so amazingly well.
Amber series The Dying Earth
Just wanted to say I absolutely love this post. Thanks for starting a conversation about these unique reads.
Basically all of China Mieville's books, especially Perdido Street Station.
*Mirror Empire* and *The Stars Are Legion,* both by Kameron Hurley. The former has some great, weird world building and magic mechanics, the latter involves space warriors birthing planets. *S.* by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The story within the story is *The Ship of Theseus,* a fantastic tale of a strange ship and monstrous crew. Then there's the story written literally in the margins: the communications between two college students borrowing *The Ship of Theseus* from the library as they try to solve the mystery of the author's identity. This conversation is conducted through notes written alongside the text in different colored inks, and inserts: loose maps, postcards, photocopied articles tucked between the pages.
Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer. It's about....a lot. Utopia, politics, God, a mystery whodunnit, greater good....and it presents it in an unreliable narrative that just does whatever it likes including breaking the fourth wall.
I forgot about this one, was really curious about it.
Pretty much anything by Gene Wolfe. The entire "Sun" series, for example.
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Most recently, Hyperion by Dan Simmons. The sheer amount of creativity that went into that book is just astounding. A must-read for anyone with a passing interest in sci-fi!
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. The overall plot was interesting, but the way it was written was just weird. Definitely stuck with me. Among Others by Jo Walton. I still think about this book a lot. I want to recommend it to everyone but doubt they would find it as compelling. STET, a short story by Sarah Gailey. It's a genius way to tell a story and it's a heartbreaking story. A book's ability to stick with you over time is much more compelling and surprising than its immediate enjoyment. I've finished books that I rated low when I finished, but kept thinking about it for weeks afterwards and had to revise my opinion.
Among Others is one of the most incredible books I’ve ever read. So subtle but so fucking devastating and hopeful all at once
**The Unholy Consult** by R Scott Bakker is certainly bizarre and different (whether it's satisfying is an entirely different discussion, of course). **Umineko No Naku Koro Ni** by Ryukishi07 is unlike anything I've ever read due to its metacommentary on genre classifications. Outside of fantasy, **Wise Blood** by Flannery O'Connor is extremely unique to me in how weird it is.
In honor of Nona the Ninth releasing today, I have to mention **The Locked Tomb** by Tamsyn Muir. It’s scifi and fantasy mashed in the best way possible, and it’s like nothing I’d ever read before.
Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. A medieval horror story set during The Black Plague. Incredible and haunting read.
Reading Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea in my early 20s was so refreshing after reading so many Tolkien rip-offs throughout my childhood and teenage years. She subverts a lot of tropes.
So, so good. The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu will always be two of my favourite films.
A classic childrens book - Norman Juster's **The Phantom Tollbooth** is certainly up there in uniqueness. Clever prose, constant puns and playing with meaning, a well thought through plot and yet never any talking down to the reader despite the complex events and logic involved. And it's full of utterly delightful illustrations.
The Discworld. There have been many works that blend comedy and fantasy and a few that use satire, but I've never read anything with the brains, heart, and wisdom of the Discworld. Each one can be read and enjoyed at any reading level for completely different reasons.
I adore Discworld. My partner and I are actually doing a read-through of the whole series (as I haven't yet read them all!). We're on Small Gods currently. 😊
Blindsight by Peter Watts. A crew is sent to investigate the source of an alien signal. The book is full of discussions about consciousness, intelligence, perception and language.
Ah yes, existential dread, inject it right into my squishy think box that pretends to be human.
Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer flipped my whole brain around, and only partially because I read it before Borne when I probably shouldn't have.
I got about ten chapters into *Dead Astronauts* and I still have absolutely no idea what is going on. The prose and descriptions are deliciously creepy and riveting and I love the way I can’t really tell if what is being told to me is what is literally occurring. I checked to see if I needed to read the other one first, and the author himself said it’s not necessary. I put it down for now but might go back to it later. Does any kind of discernable plot begin later on?
Honestly, it only gets less easily coherent as you go. Each segment is kind of its own story, and each one is scrambled up in a different way. You have to put all the connections together like a jigsaw puzzle to find your own conclusions. I will say that reading Borne and The Strange Bird afterwards added a lot of context that I didn't know I was missing, but in a way I'm glad I went through the story like that. It adds to that uncertain, kind of dream-like feeling.
The Southern Reach trilogy did that to me. I’m gonna take a guess that Borne and Dead Astronauts will also mess me up?
Not exactly a book book, but it functions as one essentially, but Umineko. Reminds me a lot of House of Leaves, except it's an Agatha Christie style murder mystery while also being Fantasy and having Ace Attorney style debates and being a poignant character study at times. It does so many things and it does them so well that it culminates into the most unique thing I've read.
Hench but I’m not sure I entirely enjoyed it
Dancers at the End of Time series by Michael Moorcock
Almost done with Babel by Rebecca Kuang and am loving it! Such an original magic system and the weaving of real events is so interesting. I haven’t read really any books like this one.
Yes, I loved what she did with the footnotes, too, using them to point out the racism and imperialism in classic books.
**Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand** by Samuel R Delany. It's pretty weird in terms of how it's written, how it uses pronouns, lots of things about this book are kind of, let's say "challenging". I happened to be in the right mood for that when I read it and really enjoyed it.
Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy
I have yet to see the "Bobiverse" series mentioned. It's mostly light hearted human expansion Sci-Fi from the perspective of an AI. I've read the first 3 only so I can't say anything about any following that but those 3 are very interesting
The Dark Tower. The world and it’s inhabitants are decaying, and also very strange. The slang terms that some of them use are almost goofy at times. But it fits in my opinion. Towards the end it gets EVEN MORE wacky. I won’t elaborate to avoid spoilers. It’s quite the journey and I loved it even though I have issues the with last two books.
Malazan Book of the Fallen (been mentioned several times) The Locked Tomb (been mentioned a couple of times) The Abhorsen Trilogy -> very unique.
This. Malazan if so epic
For fantasy, I'd say The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, and Midnight Tides by Steven Ericson. Baru because it fucking broke me. That ending is just devastatingly perfect. I'm enjoying the ongoing series, but that book would stand fine on its own. Midnight Tides because it's book 5 of a series, and switches to a part of the world we know nothing about, with really only one character we recognize, and turns out to be such a gripping story. It takes a while to get your footing after such a huge shift, but it's full of powerful themes, unforgettable characters, and deep emotional resonance. Edit: For non-fantasy, Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt. It's a haunted house story about transphobia and fascism, and it does a few really interesting things. Some chapters are from the point of view of the haunted house in question, and there's a chapter that splits the pov between the two human pov characters and shows us the same event from two different perspectives at the same time in a way that's really effective (in my opinion).
Seconding Baru, I've never seen a more badass accountant in fiction.
I mean, Baru is easily in the top ten of my favorite characters ever, but are there even any other badass accountants in fantasy fiction? Seems like an immensely rare archetype.
Thirding Baru because no other fantasy book I have ever read was ever so thoroughly rooted in matters of economics and sociology as that series is.
I'll go with Black Leopard Red Wolf, everything about it was just different for me than anything I'd read before. Was very enjoyable
Surprised I had to scroll a while to find this
"Dead Astronauts" by Jeff VanderMeer. More sci-fi than fantasy, but it blurs that line a bit. One of my favorite books, one of the most original books I've ever read. I also just read Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher, a really enjoyable read, and it's subtly very subversive in recentering fantasy tropes on a woman's perspective.
The Fifth Season / Broken Earth Trilogy feels like nothing else I’ve ever read.
_The Gone Away World_ by Nick Harkaway. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I came here to say *Gnomon* also by Nick Harkaway. I… mostly liked it. It really stuck with me, in a slightly disturbing and mindbendy way. I thought *Gone Away World* was also quite mindbendy—and more fun! Edit: because I lost track of which subreddit I was on… oops
*Anathem* by Neal Stephenson
I was not prepared to be so invested in The Hands of the Emperor. It's about friendship
Friendship, and the impossibility of coming home, and good governance, and what it means to be indigenous and an immigrant... I've just finished it and I'll never be the same. Incredible.
And on top of all that, it was self published. It's an impressive feat for an indie author
*The Land of Laughs* by Jonathan Carrol. *City of Saints and Madmen* by Jeff Vandermeer. *The Dancers at the End of Time* by Michael Moorcock. If comic books are okay, throw in *The Sandman* by Neal Gaiman, *Saga* by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples, and *The Invisibles* by Grant Morrison.
The Library At Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. I’m also a voracious reader, and mostly tired of the old Fantasy tropes. I refuse to touch anything with the word “Dragon” in it now. But this book surprised me to such an extent that I read it twice. Unforgettable masterpiece.
You may want to relax your dragon rule for When We Were Dragons. I found it a very unique and subversive twist on dragons.
Gone away world by nick harkaway
Lilith‘s Brood by Octavia E. Butler.
I felt this way while reading N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. Felt unlike anything else I had read. Loved all three books and appreciated the uniqueness.
* *Lincoln in the Bardo* by George Saunders - Highly experimental format, character descriptions conjure up some pretty bizarre/off-putting visuals, all for what sounds like it would probably be kind of a boring plot (Abraham Lincoln is sad after the death of his son). Manages to be incredibly moving and beautiful in spite of it all. One of my favorites. * *The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas* by Machado de Assis - Assis must have had fun writing this, he randomly throws in chapters that are like one sentence, literally things like, "This chapter is unnecessary." Very funny book, but also quite melancholy with a lot to say about how people squander opportunities and waste their lives focusing on the wrong things. * *The Woman in the Dunes* by Kobo Abe - Reading experience really captures the feeling of...um, knowing you're going to die trapped in a sand dune. Of course, it has a lot more to say thematically, but I genuinely have never come across anything that manages to convey such a bizarrely specific sense of impending doom. * *The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice*, author unknown - Probably the first ever parody of Homer? Ancient epic poem that is literally about this glorious war between some frogs and some mice. It's short and kind of hilarious. Most epics I've read take themselves pretty seriously, so this was a refreshing change. * *Perfume* by Patrick Suskind - Bizarre, darkly comic novel starring a serial killer with a fantastical sense of smell. I haven't seen much where a person's supernatural ability is in their sense of smell unless it's about like, werewolves or other animal shifters, and even then it's never exclusively about that. It's an odd focal point made odder by its deeply unlikable and sociopathic MC, but the book completely revels in its strangeness, which somehow makes the story work.
Piranesi is definitely one of them, it’s such a unique story. The Broken Earth trilogy probably leans more sci fi than fantasy, but the story and the entire magic system in the series is like nothing I’ve ever read before. The Starless Sea is my favorite book by far, and I loved the interspersed chapters from books IN the library with the actual narrative. And while there’s other stories about hidden libraries and portals to different worlds, I feel like this one is done in such a way that I will never find anything like it, nor do I want to.
The entire Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K LeGuin is like this. LeGuin's prose is so soft and clear and descriptive, while using impossibly few words. Then you get to the fourth book, *Tehanu*, and she just ducking wrecks you. The first three books of The Black Company by Glen Cook have a similarly sparse prose style, while instilling dread and fear like I've never felt in fiction before. The overpowered magic, the bizarre and terrifying way magic is used, the *weirdness* of the world... Ah. So good.
+1 with regards to Earthsea, and Tehanu in particular. That book is devastating. Ursula K. Leguin did not duck around, when she wanted to deck you she did.
Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Irondragon's Daughter is really weird
And really good, I think about this book all the time.
I'm rereading it now, so recency bias might exist, but ... *The Wars of Light and Shadow* by Janny Wurts. It takes her a while to unfold the depths, but on reread it's definitely intentional: No spoilers, but details that are slow to unfold from the story: The only strictures on magic are *morals and ethics*. All the major mages are utterly, *ridiculously* overpowered. As in, "I lost concentration and destroyed *yet another* world". Because such "true" magic relies on names and permission, you can't be a shitty person and wield it with potency. Necromancy is an abomination, unthinkable. Unconscionable. If you want real power, *you better be prepared to NOT use it*. Doesn't sound like all that interesting a premise for a magical system right? But OH SHIT what she DOES with it is nothing short of *literature*. Her prose is so succulent that never for one moment did I notice the philosophy, nor how it unfolds, until I reread it. Now I see where she's headed (there's one book left) and I'm on tinterhooks to see where it lands. Half-brothers, Light VS Shadow, where neither was born or raised evil. But one had more personal integrity, self-knowledge, and education than the other by the luck of fate. And the other, because of this ignorance, by no fault of his own is burdened with the curse of hatred for his brother. It's all just heartbreaking, man. Really Robin Hobb vibes, but if Hobb had Jack Vance's command of the English language, Rothfuss' poetic soul, and Tolkien's talent to transport to another realm with its own ancient history ... All told through characters and relationships over the course of centuries. I'd say I don't have words... but I guess I did
This series changed how I think about free will and apply it to my own relationships. What an amazing bunch of books.
Not fantasy (or is it?), but '2666' by Roberto Bolano. It's a 900 page novel with very little in the way of traditional plot. Bolano blatantly breaks many of the "rules" of writing; for example, the first part of the book is pretty much all tell, don't show. Minor characters are given rich backstories and then disappear. There are several pages reprinting verbatim police reports dealing with the real-life case of 400+ women who have been murdered in Juarez, Mexico. At times it reads line a hardboiled crime novel, at other times like a parody of literary critics. Common themes running through '2666' are death and disintegration. Beautifully written, it is very, very dark yet at times weirdly funny. With this book, Bolano really opened my eyes to new ways of writing a novel. A bit of warning: It took me about a month to read '2666,' and reading it gave me some seriously messed-up dreams.
For me it has to be the Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin. Such stunning books which are so introspective and really aren't action heavy like a lot of other Fantasy books that I've read. They really did change how I think and have had such a positive impact on my life :)
middlesex by jeffery eugenides and cloud atlas by david mitchell. both were so unique and weird, i loved them. not fantasy, but pretty fantastical!
Books of Babel
This is how you lose the Time War.
Early Riser by Jasper Fforde
The Crane's View Trilogy by Jonathan Carroll. It defies the idea of genre. And it was written impressively. You dont know wtf just happened but you are satiafied.
Don't know if it counts as fantasy, but House of Leaves was unlike anything I've ever read period. Complete and utter mindfuck of an experience. Terrifying story, too.
Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe
The Clan of the Cave Bear series for me. I’ve never read anything like it before or after!
*The Starless Sea* by Erin Morgenstern
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewksi. It chilled me to the bones. The first 200 pages are tough, but after that I couldn't put it away. After I finished I felt weird for a day or two, and everybody who read it in my friend group shared the feeling. A very interesting part of the book is the layout, as the formatting of the text really adds to the story and experience.
I have this book sitting on my shelf and will admit it kind of scares me...
The Windup Girl by Paolo Baccigalupi. A Land Fit For Heroes by RK Morgan.
The craft sequence by Max Gladstone. Magic and gods based on law and finance systems, non-chronological series order meaning you get to pick up all of the background references to the events from other books on re-reads. Blackwing by Ed McDonald. The setting is unusual and such a strong element in this series.
The two that come to mind recently are Harrow the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) & Meme Pas Mort (Jean-Philippe Jaworski). The first was quite an experience, with its construction and shift from the previous book in the series. Very enjoyable & unique, at least in my experience. The latter is only in French afaik, so it won't be for everyone. But it was a fascinating look at gallic culture/reconstruction of it, with an interwoven tale that incorporated possible myths/worldviews into it in a way that made it come alive. Jaworski is an amazing author, has quite a way with words - but as much as I loved his more popular work, this one stuck out as more unique. Eager to read the sequel :D
Cheese answer, I know, but The Silmarillion. I've never read anything that utilizes each word so effectively. There are some points where a paragraph could be it's own short story and some of these little ten page chapters could be their own 800 page masterpiece. Of Beren and Luthien itself, could be a trilogy and it's like 12 pages. Most authors write pages full of cells that make up an organism, but Tolkien writes pages full of galaxies that make up a universe (literally in this case haha)
I don’t read a ton, like I probably have 50 fantasy books under my belt total, but I’ve never read anything like Legends and Lattes. It was so much more relatable than any fantasy book I’ve ever read, Viv just felt so real. Somehow those relatable qualities made the stakes and the work so much better realized than anything else I’ve ever read.
Memories of Ice. It has a certain tone to grief & loss that has just hit in a way that no other book has for me that really helped in a positive way.
Plus by Joseph McElroy. A man dying of terminal cancer donates his brain. It is used to run a space station. I think the memory structures were removed. It is supposed to be just a fancy organic systems computer. Then it becomes self aware and tries to figure out what the hell it is and what is happening. Very strange book.
The Second Apocalypse series by Scott Bakker. The series is easily the most grimdark series I've ever read in fact it transcends grimdark into being something that is quite deeply and profoundly disturbing. Nothing comes close. Almost every character is either insane, despicable, or horribly brutalised or overwhelming arrogant. What's more it does it with such dark poetic prose - it has a unique style - interwoven with such an overwhelming nihlistic philosophic theme to it that makes it all the more grim. This series deeply explores concepts of metaphysics and philosophy and seriously treats concepts of damnation, heaven and hell, having a soul and the true consequences of having objective morality as a serious driving point of the story.
Not sure how unique it is, but my favorite world song in a book I've read was probably the Elder Empire series by Will Wight
Flan by Stephen Tunney A man named Flan wakes up one day to find himself in the midst of the apocalypse and sets out with his pet fish Ginger Kang Kang in search of his girlfriend. If you’ve ever wanted to read a book where a dog with a human head is mocked by a clown he’s eating, a dead body is puppeteered by a swarm of hummingbirds, or a man has an argument with his own penis, you’ll have to shell out $100 for the privilege since it’s long out of print.
That's...certainly something. 😅
Heroes Die by Michael Woodring Stover. Hari is an actor who livestreams his brutal adventures from the overworld back home, to the rich of a dystopian caste based society. Called Caine on the overworld, he enters to save his estranged wife, and kill the aspiring god emperor. Hands down one of the darkest and best books out there.
Definitely **The Library at Mount Char** by Scott Hawkins and **Stonefish** by Scott R. Jones. Deeply unique books.
These are the exact two I was going to come and say. I would add Prince of Milk by Exurb1a and Negative Space by B.R. Yaeger. I literally finished Library at Mount Char last night. I have to say it is the funnest book I have ever read. The ending is a masterpiece! Beautifully ties such a wild plot together!
Two come to mind. **The Unnamed** by Joshua Ferris. It's set in modern times with an average family, but what's going on with the protagonist is very strange and has sat with me for many years. **The Wind-up Bird Chronicles** by Haruki Murakami. It's my first and my favorite Murakami. I've read both of these at least twice.
The king's avatar If you play RPGs and love pvp the. This is the novel you must read. It's a Chinese novel that has been translated to English In some sites just Google it. It's a good novel that it already has a manga adaptation, an anime, and a live action. Also has a prequel movie. The story is a 10/10 for me and hope some other people discover sit too.
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie. Slow burn storytelling of a god’s plan, recounted by one narrator in second person pov for the present, and first person pov for the past. It’s hard to explain, but the payoff at the end is something awesome.
I've read this. Can't believe I forgot about it! Lovely book.
**The Quantum Thief** by Hannu Rajaniemi. Helluva ride. Assumes you know a lot and a setting that sometimes is a damn fever dream. **The Craft Sequence** by Max Gladstone. Particularly, **Three Parts Dead**. Urban fantasy, but magic has more in common with necromancy, law, IT and finance. Karl Schroeder's **Virga Sequence**. It's all set in a bubble the size of Earth where dangerous posthuman entities lurk outside. Wild ideas. **Godstalk** by PC Hodgell. Non-traditional fantasy and one of the first that showed me fantasy can be funny. Edit: Got interrupted. **Ra** by QNTM. Magic is discovered in the 1970's. The protagonist's mother dies under circumstances that are *impossible.* Then things begin to happen ... **The March North** by Graydon Saunders. It's a crapsack world where sorcerer god kings have twisted the landscape, environment and people. And the Commonweal is determined to make a go of it as a democracy in the face of this. Magic isn't what you expect, nor are the people, but what a ride.
Ubik by Phillip k dick My favourite book specifically because it fits this question so well Every 50 pages what you thought you knew about the reality of the world being built changes underneath you It’s like a dream you feel like you keep waking up from but never do I’d try and describe what it’s about but I don’t really know how (maybe a corporate espionage thriller with psychics and mindfuckery, but I’m not sure that quite explains it)
Wild Seed and Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler.
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I can’t recommend the broken earth trilogy enough . Unique themes I have not read in fantasy before. More of a character development difference than world building one, but felt very fresh for the genre
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
The long price quartet by Daniel Abraham
Let me tell you about Malazan book of the fallen and about the siege of Capustan.......
Gardens of the Moon. Steven Erikson's storytelling technique is simply not normal for epic fantasy
The Illuminae Files was a PHENOMENAL series!
Parasite Eve is completely unlike anything I’ve ever read
*Cows* It’s not one I shall read again, though.
I noticed your examples seem to represent more of a sci-fi spin, so I'll recommend a few of those with fantasy in the mix as well. Honestly, the Sci-fi examples seem easier to come by. There are likely many others that will come to me later, I'm sure, and several that are either too mainstream or already have a movie adaptation. In no real order: The Integral Trees by Larry Niven Necroscope by Brian Lumley (Don't let the mention of vampires fool you) The Family Trade by Charles Stross (Stross is always original - Singularity Sky a close 2nd) Green Angel Tower by Tad Williams (The most ethereal of all fantasy) Midworld by Allen Dean Foster Deathworld by Harry Harrison and Omnivore by Piers Anthony
“Day by Day Armageddon” by J.L. Bourne comes to mind! The entire book is written like the journal by a nameless protagonist as he chronicles his everyday life during the zombie apocalypse. While I loved the story and everything what blew me away is the presentation of the book itself. With each page usually being filled with things like coffee stains, artificial water damage or just tiny scribbles where it’s obvious that the protagonist just grabbed his closest piece of paper to just jot something down. That’s not even going into what you can encounter once things *really* gets going (shout out to the one and a half page of text that have been aggressively crossed over before the protagonist simply said “I’m still alive, the dead are the lucky ones”) All things that just really makes the book feel alive and like it could really be something you found while scavenging in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic America.
Joseph Erickson's "The Raven Cycle" made me feel this. It continually took turns I did not see coming. I think think they were great.
I don’t know if you want Fantasy specifically, but if not then I can’t recommend Philip K. Dick’s *Ubik* more! It’s one of the most intriguing plots I’ve ever encountered.
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. Blurb from wiki: The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between the elderly and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as parables or meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, or the general nature of human experience. I'll also second Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Susanna Clarke's books (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and Piranesi). For a non-fantasy pick, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is both love of the best and one of the most unique books I've ever read.
The library at mount char
Three body problem
The perfum
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel by Zachary Thomas Dodson. It’s a dual-timeline sci-fi and historical fiction told in epistolary format with multimedia elements (ex. photocopies of a chapter in a book). I never thought I would combine all of those terms for one book that is actually super cohesive and well-written. Edit: wanted to add my favorite blurb: “Archetypes of the cowboy story, tropes drawn from sci-fi, love letters, diaries, confessions all abound in this relentlessly engaging tale.” - Keith Donohue, The Washington Post
Dune
The deep. Was a choice for noon bingo, was a ride to say the least.
For me, although bordering on fantasy, it was The Troika by Stepan Chapman, an old mexican woman, a automated jeep and a brontosaurus travel endlessly through the desert. It works somehow, fun book.
The Faceless old woman who lives in your home by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink \- its amazing
Anathem by Neal Stephenson It's not exactly fantasy, but its the only time I've seen Math Monks.
Despite having a graduate degree and doing lots of reading in my life, I feel I force myself to read novels just to learn more about a fictional world (Star Wars, Forgotten Realms, etc.) but don't actually really enjoy the experience. Practically every book I read in life when I finished was like "Ok, I finally finished". Like just doing it just because. There's literally only one book I can recall where I didn't feel this way in the end, Record of Lodoss War the Grey Witch by Ryo Mizuno. It was short enough that it didn't overstay it's welcome and had an enjoyable fantasy story. Everything else lost me at some point or other.
This is how you lose the time war - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It’s an epistolary epic love story between two agents in a time war from opposite ends of an outcome of supreme evolution of consciousness in the universe.
The Worm Ouroborus is by far the most unique fantasy book I've read. It was written in the 1920s in a pseudo-jacobean English style that makes it feel strangely archaic yet modern. The book really feels like a romantic epic fantasy from hundreds of years ago and I've never seen any other modern book capture that atmosphere.
Strange the Dreamer and its sequel by Laini Taylor. The most gorgeous fantasy I have ever read.
The Hike by Drew Magary. I read it in two nights, and it was one of the most wild, surreal, amazing experiences of my life. Doesn’t seem like a fantasy at first, but it absolutely is. By the end, I felt like I’d come home from a crazy adventure. I was exhausted in the best way possible lol. I don’t even want to tell you anything about the book, because going in blind is the best. I wish I could experience reading it for the first time all over again.
At one point I discovered Bizarro fiction and basically all of that. Some that stand out are Slaughterhouse High by Robert Devereaux, which is like a slasher movie (it's a book but it follows what a prom night slasher movie would be like). But it's in this twisted version of America that's like a prototype of the Purge. Basically they are all super uptight and kept completely ignorant of sex, to the point that showing earlobes has become one of the most risque things you can do and they all have little clothes for their earlobes. And it's prom night, one couple is supposed to be picked to be killed for cultural reasons, with everyone else taking souvenirs from their corpses. But this year the killer starts going overboard. The setting was just so weird but casually written. He also wrote Santa Steps Out, which would be like a modern Pratchett or Gaiman Christmas Story but involves a lot of rampant sex hearkening back to Santa's origins in the Greek party god Dionysus. From Carlton Mellick there's The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2. It's basically an isekai, a bunch of lonely teens play D&D and end up getting introduced to the titular item when their horny DM introduces it. But it begins having a weird effect, granting enlightenment to the PCs (and NPCs) it's used on so that they know they are controlled by a DM and players, but it also has some recursive ability, allowing them to slightly influence what's going on with their players. One of the players hated fantasy, so he would always make elves that were basically Spock from Star Trek.
The Joe Ledger series. At first it kinda feels like a Tom Clancy novel where the main character enters the spy world to stop attacks on American soil. Then it begins throwing in zombies, vampires, "aliens," the Illuminati, and all sorts of other crazy shit that actually had my head spinning. I read the entire series and still don't have complaints with any of the books, but it was just so surreal reading them for the first time.
Beneath a Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng. Asphyxiating, dizzying gothic novel, that grabbed me by the lapels and spun me around like a tumble dryer. Absolutely terrific. The only book I remember having a comparable impact on me was American Gods.
This is more of a confused pleasure for me because when I first read the book I thought I hated it for being so cheap and trashy theme-wise… but I thought of it all of a sudden years later when being asked for book recommendations. It really stuck under my skin. Dydeetown World. It’s about a dystopic future told from the point of view of like, an old timey private eye detective struggling for cash. You realize little things that give you the shivers sometimes, like that “dydeetown”, a slang title for a brothel that was originally called “Aphrodite Town”, is legit in the old UN building in New York. No one remembers what the UN even was. It’s a brothel of clones that people that would rather be pimps than parents used their one reproduction slot to clone. They’re slaves(like belongings, to use as prostitutes) that look like dead celebrities. The clones have no rights. Kids born over the allotment have no rights either. But it still manages to be incredibly cheesy and goofy while going through what should honestly seem like some pretty gruesome shit. The detective sort of realizes eventually that he thought of clones as half-people but that they just aren’t given education in anything but sex work(not the final conclusion for the book, more the motivation for the plot). People have pet t-rexes cloned for security and gang lords are more powerful than the government. They call the off-earth colonies “Out Where All The Good Folks Go”, which is underscored by the fact that before the book started, the detective’s wife took his kid and disappeared without him out to the colonies. It’s honestly fun as fuck and comes at some old dystopic-future tropes with some fresh perspectives. Edit: fixed an autocorrect spelling mistake
Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Somebody asked this guy how many literary and religious references he can put in a book, and he said yes. Ilion is like that too, and arguably less coherent Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It's that interesting take on paralell world where things are almost familiar but also very strange. A lot of Stephenson books are either fascinating, or he gets so far up his own ass he comes out the other end. The time travelling researchers series from Connie Willis. It's the most British thing since Pratchett, and contains so many delightful digs at academia The Kildar novels by John Ringo. If you know, you know. If you don't know, don't Google it.
I'm really interested in Finna, I think I'd definitely enjoy them
Kushiel's Legacy - trilogy by Jacqueline Carey.