Ginger Man by i forget what's his name
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Ginger Man by i forget what's his name
I can think of plays like that...
I just read The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe and it was both the most twisted, dark, and insane book I've read in years and one of the best. Really really good and really demented.
jp donleavy...Quote:
Originally Posted by GX4146
yep thanksQuote:
Originally Posted by Hank Stamper
Drop what you're reading now and pick this up...Quote:
Originally Posted by johann cruyff
It is genius.
Thanks for all the suggestions.
I've decided to go with these as they appeal to me the most.
Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky.
Therese Raquin, Émile Zola.
The Art of Murder, José Carlos Somoza.
Uncle Silas, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.
Hear, hear! Somewhat gorey, but very psychologically disturbing! :nod:Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Hill
This thread has had a lot of good suggestions; I would further recommend The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (quite possibly the most unsettling thing I have ever read, ironically written by a devout Jesuit), 'Titus Andronicus' by William Shakespeare (yes, even the Bard can whip up some crazy plots!), almost anything by Chuck Palahniuk or H.P. Lovecraft, and Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley.
I almost forgot to mention Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs - a must read for the deep, dark, twisted, violent insanity literature fan. ;)
I still don't think anyone can match Ellis's insanity... The other recommendations I've seen mentioned don't even come close.
Elfriede Jelinek - Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher)
Oh yes, she's disturbing enough! I've read Lust, as well as another one by her, and her writing is often shocking stuff. I wonder whether she isn't a little bit disturbed, actually.
Howard P. Lovecraft.
Although I have barely begun "The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories", I hear that it is pretty intense.
I tend to divide between "good weird" and "bad weird" when it comes to my books:
Good Weird: anything by Haruki Murakami, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y.
Bad Weird: anything by Joyce (!) sorry Joyce fans, and I also had real trouble with Toni Morrison's Beloved, just couldn't work it out at all...
Very interesting topic.
Cosmicomiche by Italo Calvino. It was the first real piece of literature I read in Italian, which made it even weirder.
"The Hunger Artist" by Kafka. I read it for class and was left thinking, damn - that was WEIRD. To me, it was even more bizarre than Metamorphosis.
"The Statement of Randolph Carter" by H.P. Lovecraft. Scared me witless.
I loved this book! The magical realism was crafted really well, so I didn't find too ludicrous.Quote:
Originally Posted by _JadeRain_
At page 49 right now, another vote for Finnegans Wake.
Then The Troika by Stepan Chapman, and Erickson's Days Between Stations.
i say ditto on the hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. also, the first couple of books in the cs lewis space trilogy (have not read the third), out of the silent planet, and perelandra, were sorta "out there."
Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
I felt like squirming the whole time I was reading it. Interesting...but weird.
gravity rainbow:
Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master,
but you can tickle his creatures.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.
Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, ****ing idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
\m/
I'd also say Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It was a fascinating read but I can't really explain why. It was fantastical and impossible and engaging.
The Blood Of Angels by Stephen Gregory is the strangest book I have ever read. It starts off extremely slow. However, if you can get past the first 120 pages you will not want to stop reading it until the end.
I won't tell you what happens in it in case you decide to read it. But it just begins as the rather normal man's obsession with a woman. From there it gets weird, & then just more & more strange until the end of the book. By then you are thinking "What the [beep]???"
I find it terrible when a gifted author put you in the shoes of a derange mind,like say Nabokov with Lolita or more recently read Andrei Makine The crime of Olga arbelina.You actualy understand and feel the processe going through,and it is not something agreable.
On another scale any of Hubert Selby jr book are very unsettling,and yes,weirds.The willow tre,the demon,are some reads!
Also Rainer Maria Rilke-the notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge was a very strange book and one that i could not grasp enterly.It clearly made me feel my limitation.I shall go back to it and maybe another read would help get more out of it.
I agree. You find yourself identifying, or even empathizing with the deranged minds. After reading Lolita I thought it was such a powerful love story. Yet if I heard about some pedophile who was preying on a 12 year old girl, I would be prone to find it disgusting and unacceptable... usually such books cast me into a dejected mood, one in which I start absorbing or picking up certain emotions, characteristics, or moods of the main character...Quote:
Originally Posted by thomas212
Cohen's Beautiful Losers, considered the gem of Canadian Literature, was next to impossible to read. Postmodernism has its limits...:D
The Castle by Kafka is certainly up there... Strange, but also difficult and b-o-r-i-n-g. Nobody has mentioned Amerika, I wonder if that's because nobody has read it or because it's more accessible than other works by Kafka?
And Steppenwolf, loved the beginning but the rest is certainly 'out there'.
I think it was the Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini. It’s a sort of illustrated survey on a fictitious surrealistic world, and it is written in an invented language which hasn’t been deciphered yet (maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all, but who knows?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus
I ordered this book; it arrived last week, now I’m looking forward to it a wee bit more. I will have to pay a bit more attention, thanks for the heads up.Quote:
Originally Posted by thomas212
For me, Kafka is weird. The Metamorphosis and The Trial, I just don’t seem to grasp him at all. I read him, and wonder, why? I don’t think of him as so much a genius as I do insane.
Good luck.Quote:
Originally Posted by grotto
This is not antinomic.Quote:
For me, Kafka is weird. The Metamorphosis and The Trial, I just don’t seem to grasp him at all. I read him, and wonder, why? I don’t think of him as so much a genius as I do insane.
Lots of genius were a bit insane and some of the mads have touch of genius.
The Metamorphosis, Young Goodman Brown or Diary by Chuck Palahniuk. All of those were just...weird.
Naked Lunch
I'd have to say that Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland...
Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus! Trilogy".
Those books make everything listed so far read as linear as "See Spot Run" ;)
Naked Lunch - William Burroughs; enough said.
I agree about Kafka...just bizarre stuff.
[The weird books you've been mentioning that I've read I love them all. What does that tell about me, I wonder? And though I've never read Finnegan's Wake I'm sure it's the weirdest ever]
Good weird: anything by Daniil Kharms / Kafka / Ernst Jandl
Bad weird: is there such thing?
Don't-know-what-to-make-of-it weird: anything by Gertrude Stein
Years ago, I read this book called "How to Disapear Completely and Never Be Found" by Doug Richmond. It was really strange, but it still kept my attention. It was about this girl and her friend and a rat-man who writes comic books.
"Slaughterhouse-five" by Kurt Vonnegut was also really wierd, but also really good. I love the pictures drawn throughout.
Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille
I read it a while ago so my memory is a little hazy, but essentially it is about these two teenagers who have very strange sex, involving eggs and milk and urine. Everyone is insane. After some girl kills herself they go to Spain. More weird sex (this time with a bull's testicles). They rape a priest and pluck out his eye. The end.
Yeah , I'd go for the so-called Nova trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express.Quote:
Originally Posted by Trystan
Burroughs had fully developed his cutting-up and folding-in techniques by then, to which Naked Lunch stands as a precursor. And on that note, Brion Gysin's The Process. Oh, and Der Prozess (The Trial) by Kafka. On a roll... ;)
Someone mentioned Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman. His At Swim Two Birds is the strangest thing I've read. And it's hilarious. But it helps if you drink Guinness while you read. Borges is bizarre in a magical way. Pirandello's Six Characters... is in the same vein as At Swim To Birds. Crying of Lot 49 was nicely weird, also.
The short stories of R. A. Lafferty.
The most bizarre book ever has to be "Naked Lunch". Then, Jose Saramago's Blindness and everything by Haruki Murakami are also quite bizarre/disturbing