Books

Matthew Stokoe - Cows

House of Leaves - hands down whackiest in terms of narrative and gimmicky text stuff

Ship of Theseus in terms of just shear amount of gimmick stuff

So there's a whole series of books that's basically set in Magic Florida. Just Google "Xanth map" and look at the images. I just went and tried to read the plot of the first one and boy I'm out of breath.

Magic Florida Man, what more do you need?

Victoria by “Thomas Hobbes” penname for William Lind. USA breakup revenge fic, where square jawed conservative heroes run around schooling the lesbian feminist state, the environmentalist state, winning the war on terror by genocide by all Muslims everywhere… everything in the book is just bonkers.

The last house on needless street. Realllllly weird and unexpected !! A bit hard to get into because I was like wtf is happening here but I actually ended up enjoying it a lot.

I don’t read very weird books obviously lol

It’s not totally insane but the concept is: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Jaws but the shark is made of concepts

Roadside Picnic was prolly the one book where I never actually knew wtf was happening. The wind up bird chronicle too, but I heard that book was written purposely in circles with no real ending.

Bunny by Mona Awad. Read it recently and had a hard time explaining the book to others but couldn't stop talking about it either, as it is such a weird but fun mix of genres and narration.

The death of Bunny Monroe by Nick cave was amazingly crazy when I read it as a teenager. Wonder if I would enjoy it now

Snail by Richard Miller.

I don't remember very much of it anymore, but I believe that it's about some German marshal during WWII who experiences a series of metamorphical changes throughout time. He turned into a woman at one point and there's several sex scenes, one which somehow involved Athena and a donkey. Anyway, I didn't understand much of it when I discovered it as a kid but it always stuck out to me how wild and surrealistic it was. Maybe I'll have another go at it later.

The Breast.

The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. Bizzaro

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. Starts off weird, gets quickly weirder, finishes in bizarro-land, all in simple yet beautiful and elegant prose.

Glamorama

Quicksand by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki ❤️

Ulysses by James Joyce and Bunny by Mona Awad springs to mind. Also One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez. All of these I liked and enjoyed! Weird and all over the place in their own way.

On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn. Kahn was the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove. The book goes into remarkably granular detail regarding nuclear game theory, civil defense/resilience to nuclear war, and various schools of thought about optimal Cold War strategy.

He was very influential on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It's wild because he really goes there in terms of imagining actually fighting and winning a nuclear war for the stated purpose of making such a war less likely.

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix. Omg what a crazy ride!!!

Not sure if this sub is a fiction only place, but Happy Like Murders kinda messed me up for a bit. Extremely well written True Crime account of Fred and Rosemary West.

For fiction, I'm a big postmodern lover, but Even Cowgirls get the Blues was "crazy" in a wacky sense. I read a good amount of Tom Robbins it in my teens/twenties, and it was very formative in shaping my taste, I think.

The night land. The protagonist has some psychic powers that makes him communicate with a girl on the other side of the Planet. Earth is dying and everyone lives on a gigantic ultra futuristic pyramid while the sun is death and everything outside the pyramid is heavily mutated or is related to some Lovecraftian horror eldritch. The dude has a military armor and a gigantic mecanic saw as a weapon and he has to travel to save the girl back to the pyramid. Pretty wild and cool

I recently read Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki. It's a series of interrelated short stories, and it's pretty weird. And great. Think alternate timelines in which the Municipal Police Department building in Tokyo becomes a giant handroll eaten by some unknown celestial figure. (This is really not a spoiler!)

In high school, my best friend would bring me Christopher Pike and, a couple years later, Chuck Palahniuk novels, and they unseated many of my notions about reality.

The Wasp Factory was a ride

The library at mount char is definitely my craziest read and the hike by drew magary too

The Big U, Neal Stephenson

Made me read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, equally insane.

The Merciless by Danielle Vega.

It’s about a group of teenage girls that are really into the dark arts and one of them convinces the others to do an exorcism on another girl and it’s done horribly wrong. The way the author describes everything gets under my skin every time I read the series and while it’s dark, twisted, and horrible…it’s really well done.

I found it in the teen section at Barnes & Noble a few years ago and after just recently rereading it…I’m not sure most teens these days can handle what’s in it or if they even should read it. But it’s also so good!

At some point I would have said “Sophie’s Garden” by Jostein Gardener, which is kind of about a young girl writing letters to a philosopher but really about the history of philosophy, with a serious twist.

Recently I read Italo Calvino’s “On a Winter’s Night, a Traveler” which absolutely blew away any expectations I could have had. This is my recommendation!

I know you said one book, but to me, Steven King’s Dark Tower series is the craziest shit ever. He literally incorporates a lot of his other major works into the odyssey, including the accident that almost killed him in real life. It’s so wild, and I love every second of it.

When I was 20, I got arrested for driving while prohibited and had to spend 7 days in jail. While there, the guard gave me a book to help pass the time and it was the weirdest, fever dream of a book I’ve ever read.

It was an alternate history where space lizards invaded earth during ww2. They failed their invasion but it let the nazis stay in power. Oh and also ginger makes the lizards go into heat and fuck in the streets.

Obligatory House of Leaves comment