Books

Model land by Tyra Banks. Delightfully nutso buttso. I wish there was a sequel

The Long Walk by Steven King, absolutely blew me away.

I thought Eyes of the Overworld and Cugels Saga by Jack Vance were the most wild shit I’ve ever read, then I read his Rhialto the Marvelous. The situations are so absurd and the dramatic irony so funny.

I think Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. That and his book Post Office. Just the first things to come to mind, even though I can't remember them and need to read them again.

Dhalgren

Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami.

All of his books are a little odd but this one is truly baffling. Compelling story told using beautiful language and I kinda love it but I don’t understand it at all. I spent a few years post-read encouraging others in my circle to read it as well so we could “WTF?!?” at each other about it.

The Red by Tiffany Reisz

A beautiful young artist submits to a rich, sexy, kinky man for a year to save her gallery. Very hot, strange book. Really good though.

Vostok by Steve Alten. After The Loch, which was phenomenal, I went, "Yeah, more of this!"

It was not. It went....really weird.

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. That book is like a teenager wanted to write the most fucked-up short story he could think of and then proceeded to outdo himself 10 times.

John dies at the end by David Wong. It got crazier every time I turned the page.

The first that comes to mind is Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. The whole book is very surreal. It’s a dark satirical take on American politics. One of the final scenes is a very graphic description of children (if I’m remembering correctly they were like 6-8 years old) using medieval torture techniques on each other. There was one little girl that they pulled by her arms and legs — they kept stretching and unstretching her repeatedly and the description of what was happening to her body (going red, saliva coming out of her mouth, bones cracking) was pretty long. Like the book was weird all the way through, but it went totally left in that scene. I think it’s the only time someone’s asked me what’s wrong with me because of the expression I had on my face while reading.

Acting Class by Nick Drnaso.

His books are all… uncomfortable, but this one even more so. It’s like the uncanny valley in a story. If you like graphic novels and weird stuff, he might be your guy.

"Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson and "JPod" by Douglas Coupland in which he parodied his own "Microserfs". And it is brilliant!

The Tommyknockers by Stephen King is a bonkers, drug filled fever dream that SK wrote and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

I cannot recall the title, I don’t think I finished the book but there was a sex scene with a human and a dolphin in it.

House of Leaves. Even the way it's written is crazy. Pages are written in spiral and different things on pages which make you feel off like the person who's perspective it is.

Highly recommended

Bunny by Mona Awad because wtf is going on with that book

For a book a lot of people read, Neuromancer is pretty confounding. In some ways, it doesn't seem so crazy now-a-days, but that's just the curse of prescient and influential works of art!

Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk. It left me in quite the state of mind after I had finished it. It really wasn't the relaxing afternoon read I had hoped it was.

Despite being one of my favorites, 100 Years of Solitude is pretty crazy

The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall.

I’ve never seen anyone talk about this book. Read it in the Dutch translation as a teen and it stuck with me for years. Never read the English, so can’t vouch for the original but wacky is a good word

It dives into linguistic theory, extremely meta concepts about words and reading and language and it absolutely blew my mind back then. Maybe I should revisit to see what it’s like now

It's not a book but a story by Harlan Ellison called, "I have no mouth, and I must scream".

I was a pre-teen at the time and it gave my nightmares some new fodder I can tell you. I read it in one of my older brothers' sci fi magazines he subscribed to. I was forbidden to look at or touch them so I had to suffer in silence or be found out as a "dirty little sneak".

Memories.

I LOVED "Blood and Guts in High School" by Kathy Acker

Candy Man by Vincent King. Straight acid trip

One of the craziest books I ever read was Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. My memory of it persists to this day, and I read it all the way back when I was in high school. It's about a professional Bolshevik revolutionary named Rubashov, who has dedicated his entire life to the Revolution, including assassinating people he knew whom the Party had designated "enemies of the people." Rubashov now finds himself caught in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. At first, he is resistant, hoping his lifelong loyalty to the Party will exonerate him. Then, as his interrogation proceeds, he realizes that his doom is a forgone conclusion. He spends the last 100 pages of the book rationalizing to himself why the Party and the Revolution should demand his execution. It's a real mind-twister of a book.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. It was kinda a tough read for me when I read it as a teenager because it goes back and forth between a few different stories happening at the same time, I should give it another read now since my reading skills improved since half my life ago

Unexpectedly, A Touch of Jen was super weird. I knew it was about a strange couple collectively obsessed with a woman, but I did not know it would take a hilarious, campy, horrific turn in the last third of the book.

Quantum Psychology - Robert Anton Wilson

The Lime-Works, by Thomas Bernhard. I found it to be a disturbing and accurate (Imo) look at someone dealing with obsession and isolation. A man devotes himself entirely to writing a book on the "sense of hearing". He bankrupts himself buying an old lime-works (the only suitable location for writing his book), drags his ill wife there, who he then puts through a series of auditory tests he's devised, all for his book. His book never comes to fruition because the correct or propitious conditions never arise, because he's constantly distracted, because he can't properly organize his thoughts, because his neighbors are too distracting, because his wife is constantly second-guessing him and impeding his "work", etc. The more he withdraws for silence and focus in order to complete what he believes to be his "life's work", the more attuned he becomes with the voice in his head that is obsessively preventing him from doing so. He snaps and kills his wife after she remarks on his sanity, exposing him as a madman who ruined both of their lives over his preoccupation and obsession with a book that was never going to be written.