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What is the absolute craziest book you've read? (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by kawaiitophat@alien.top to c/books@metacritics.zone

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I'll start, so as a teen I stumbled across a book called," Someone comes to town, someone leaves town." The synopsis caught me as it's about a man with a mountain as a fathera washing machine as a mother and one brother that is dead and trying to harm him. I'll admit some of the technical terms were too much for my developing mind but it has stuck with me all these years.

What is the wackiest / craziest book you've read and did you enjoy the ride?

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[–] Ninja_Pollito@alien.top 0 points 9 months ago (19 children)

I have read several Philip K. Dick books lately. They are all crazy in their own way, but Ubik might have been the craziest so far of what I read. I look forward to more of his books. Oh, and I also read a really weird classic sci fi recently—Hothouse, by Brian Aldiss. I am discovering I really like crazy and weird books.

[–] mybadalternate@alien.top 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What I find incredibly impressive about PKD is that his prose is really, really plain. It’s meat and potatoes straightforward and very rarely has flourishes.

But, using that straightforward prose, he can drop out the bottom of reality better than any other writer I’ve ever read. There’s a few moments in UBIK specifically that are singularly terrifying in the vein of a schizophrenic break. The solid, reliable reality of things just breaks, and it’s deeeeeeeply unsettling.

[–] Ninja_Pollito@alien.top 1 points 9 months ago

Yes, there is such an economy of language, yet he says so much and gives me so much to consider. Ubik really blew my mind (just one wtf moment right after another). Then I followed it with A Scanner Darkly. It really hit me hard in several ways. I had to take a short reading break. The YouTuber Media Death Cult has a lot of great videos on PKD and his work (he also has a project going of reading all his novels).

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