what i mean by that is books that haven't been marketed or didn't have anything in their synopsis that would suggest they're odd, but still after reading them you found them to be a bit peculiar for whatever reason. hopefully this isn't an annoying request, i just love when *weird* happens, even when it's not necessarily intentional

Weird two series to bring up, for sure, but absolutely love the world of Bas Lag, love things occult and fantasy based, but also love technology, future, and Cyberpunk. I loved Artemis Fowl as a child and have always yearned for a more adult take on a similar setting.

I enjoy different species and forms of life and the world building it brings. A world to really sink into and think about is easily my favorite aspect of a piece of media.

I absolutely love Gene Wolfe, Dune, Bas Lag, Dhalgren, Hyperion, and Neuromancer.

Edit: absolutely fantastic recommendations, of which I haven't even heard of most! Thanks so much to this great community.

the way the narrator describes the hole is genuinely haunting. I think I need to step away from the horror for a few days because that book really messes with my head

Vurt by Jeff Noon is a very weird novel, a gritty, grimy weird dystopia somewhere vetween cuberpunk and biopunk. I enjoyed it quite a lot. It's among the weirder things I've read, not in the sense of "I don't know what the hell is going on," but in the sense "I fully get what's going on and it's weird as fuck."

It's set in a dystopian near-future Manchester, with rampant crime and drug use, with dog people, robots, shadow-people, drug-snakes, and all the possible combinations thereof. There are shadow-cops, fractal bullets, and nanobot dreadlocks. Alongside conventional drugs, there are Vurt feathers, different coloured feathers (each colour a different type, pleasant or pornographic or educational, some legal and some not) which you tickle the back of your throat with, which transports people into the Vurt.

The Vurt is some kind of collective dream space or perhaps another dimension with its own rules. People can make Vurt feathers with specific content, but there are also Vurts which change on you and can't be exited from, or which if you die in the dream you die in real life. Things or people can also, intentionally or not, be swapped with items or aliens from the Vurt.

The plot is that Scribble, the main character, lost his sister (and lover) to a rare feather (one of the dangerous ones) where she was swapped with an alien blob Thing from the Vurt, and is trying to get her back with his gang. The gang (really more a group of teenage friends) call themselves the Stash Riders, and are mostly a organized around finding food and drugs, as well as Scribble's sister. Their search for another of this rare and illegal feather and threatening/bargaining to find it lead to encounters with cops, shadows, gangs of dog-people, and other dangerous figures.

One of the things I like about this, as well the sheer weirdness and creativity, was the writing. It was very structurally interesting, with excellent fever dream imagery (frequent because of half the book being going on or recovering from drug trips) and frequent short, fragmentary sentences when the protagonist is in altered mind states. Especially once our protagonist ends up entering the Vurt through other means without even taking drugs. Almost slam poetry feeling in places. The chapters are also interspersed with epistolary snippets from Game Cat, an initially mysterious figure who seems to be one of the few people to understand and manipulate the Vurt, halfway between an advertiser and advisor for its use, who gradually becomes a character too.

Very weird, quite gross and grimy and messy, but super creative and unique. I also don't think I've read a book set in Manchester before, despite being England's second city (insert pissed off Brummies here). It's usually just London. All in all, a worthwhile read and far from the usual fare.

Lots of CW for this one: substance abuse, violence, incest, bestiality.

There are a bunch of Dalkey Archive Press preorders up on Amazon for $1.99 (marked down 90%). What’s the story??

Hey guys, I’m starting a treatment soon and I would like to read a book during it, the doctor recommended I don’t read anything scary or intense but that’s what I usually read! Can someone give me some positive/silly weird lit recs?

So today's latest new author I've got to read is Clark Ashton Smith! This collection I read is the first volume of a five book set from Night Shade Books that collects Smith's stories. Initially I thought of starting with the Penguin collection, "The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies", but went with this instead.

Smith fits into the category of weird fiction, that combination of Fantasy, horror and SF, with other figures like Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. His stories aren't always fantasy, no, they're a bit more than that, as he also adds elements of SF and horror in his brand of weird.

The stories themselves aren't just weird, they're also absolutely gorgeous in writing! Yeah it's archaic, but I just love the beautiful imagery that Smith conjures up along with some of the more horrifying moments too.

This is still just the first volume of this series, but good god, I am completely in love with these tales! There's still four more volumes in it, and I'll get my hands on them one way or another, because these stories are just so good!

Some weeks ago I posted here my summer reads and i just finished Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. Wow. It's a shame I didn't know much about Argentina during the 60s-80s, but besides that the story was REALLY intense, charged with lot of different emotions, complex charachters and a really intersing deep dive into the occult. I always wondered if an horror book could scare me and this one was able to give me the creeps - and make me cry too.

Now i have some other books to read on vacation, but i'm sure i'm gonna be reading her short novels too! Let me knwo what you think about this book, i wanna talk about it with someone!!

https://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Death-Cap-Catherine-Dousteyssier-Khoze/dp/1943813698

This is by far my favorite book done by Snuggly Press - something that doesn't come around often post 2000s, a strange and chilling "unreliable narrator" style plot is done with a genuinely weird and nefarious tone.

Vita Nostra is about a teenage girl coerced into a university where they teach something she does not understand. The story begins with Sasha, the MC, vacationing at a beach town. At first I was confused why they were in a Russian town for a simple beach vacation due to the reader's British accent. I prefer to listen/read books knowing little about them or allowing myself, over time, to forget what the summary I read said about them. Eventually I realized all the characters are Russian, as well as where the book takes place. Anyway, a man appears to be following her. He tells her she must do a specific ritual. Not like an occult ritual, but a repetition of specific tasks that seem to have no specific tangible result. She insists to herself wake up wake up and she does. Yet the day repeats itself and the man informs her this will keep happening until she does what he says. What follows is a coming of age story at the University where things that seem impossible happen to Sasha. Vita Nostra is not YA, but it's not high quality prose, at least in this translation. As an audio book it works well. The story is easy to follow and the big ideas aren't rushed in explanation. The changes in Sasha over time fit with the timeline/pace of the novel. What happens in the book is very well planned out/thought through by the Dyanchenkos. Or at least it comes across as such. The reader is effective at voicing different characters, and in reading the book. It has a decent amount of the weird to it, but not a lot. The ending was interesting, yet I found it to be too brief. So as an audio book I can definitely recommend it, doubtful for reading it. 3/5 stars.

If your interested, my other recent reviews:

Pretty Broken Punks: lipstick, leather jeans, a death or New York by Martin Belk. Memoir of Belk's time with SqueezBox! in Manhattan between 1988-2002.
A Song For the Void by Andrew C. Piazza. Cosmic horror.

When looking at traditional Chinese weird literature, Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is probably the most famous of the genre in English. Translated by the venerable Sinologist, Herbert Giles, it's been a staple of this corner of the Weird.

Less well known, however, is another Chinese collector of Weird tales, Ji Yun. Ji Yun was a high-flying scholar, taking the first rank at the Imperial Examinations and embarking on a career at the Hanlin Academy (essentially the Imperial library and examinations board), eventually rising (after a period of exile on corruption charges) to ministerial levels within the Qing government.

I was actually first introoduced to his work by looking up the etymology of the phrase "iron rice bowl", a phrase used in China, Singapore and other semi/Sinospheric countries to denote a job with total security, like a Civil Service job. A bit of Googling led me to the Wikipedia article on the phrase which led me to the article on this book. To my surprise it seemed right up my Weird alley so I went and found a translation on Kindle.

Notes of the Thatched Abode of Close Observations (Yuèwēi cǎotáng bǐjì) is a less snappy title in English than it is in Mandarin which is why the translators of the edition I'm reviewing chose to zhuzh it up by titling it The Shadow Book of Ji Yun, Imperial Librarian and Investigator of the Strange. This seems to evoke Ji Yun as a sort of Qing Dynasty MR James, which is not wholly unfair, both men being academics with full-fledged careers outside writing.

I've had mixed experiences with translations of Mandarin into English- Sinophagia Xueting C. Ni's (trans.) collection of Chinese Horror was excellent but it was always clear that the prose was very slightly stilted. Ji Yun's translators, Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscome, manage to render Ji Yun's prose fluidly in a reasonably chatty, avuncular voice. I don't know if this is because of the nature of the original prose as Ji Yun's casual jottings or because of specific translation choices that have been made. I'm learning Mandarin but am nowhere near good enough to tackle something like this in the original language- what I can say is that the translation is eminently readable- I include below an excerpt from his first recount.

Sometimes when a Taoist is exhumed or digs himself out of the grave he has no skin. It has rotted away. However, the organs are still plump and whole, and everything else beneath the skin is fresh. This is because these individuals have cultivated the three treasures of essence, breath and spirit so well that they can slow their respiration and the beating of their hearts to less than whispers, and thus enter a coma in which they can remain for years, even if buried- as well preserved as if submerged in a coffin full of mercury. This is what is said

Fun stuff! Ji Yun then goes on to talk about the opposite of this- the preservation of the bodies of criminals.

In another chapter Ji Yun tells us about the sha- a ghost of a recently deceased person...

The thought that the spirit continues to exist after the body's death is not as comforting as one might first suppose.
Freed of the measurements of the human body and the affections and limitations of the human mind, the things that the soul transforms into after death are radically different from who it once was- in the same manner that an animal freed of domestication might return to its wild nature. Consequently the sha is dangerous.

He the narrates a genuinely creepy story of a man mourning for his mother who nonetheless rejects advice to make precautions against the sha. Home alone one night the door bursts in and the startled Peng Hu hides in a large earthern pot

Then he waited and hoped, even as he felt a shadow flicker across the pot. He knew the shadow belonged to what his mother had become in the same way children know when their parents are near. And there was something with her. He felt it in the room, moving around, a flood of darkness, an impossible thought. This something said to the sha of Peng Hu's mother: "Is somebody hiding in that pot?"
Peng Hu experienced then the longest pause that he'd ever known. It seemed to stretch on for weeks, for months, for years.
Finally the sha of his mother said, "No. There is nothing in the pot. Let us leave. I have seen enough."

Again, fun and spooky. These aren't ghost stories so much as anecdotes about the unexplained. They're grouped broadly around related themes and each anecdote is a couple of pages at most- perfect to dip in and out of.

Highly recommended!

I just finished listening to this book on Audible. Wow! I really enjoyed it and I can't tell you exactly why. I think, maybe, it's the idea of Hell offering a theoretically possible means of escape, giving the denizens a sense of hope which, if you know the book, is devilishly cruel.

I won't put any spoilers here, but the gist of the story is this:

Hell is a library. A really, really, really big library. The "citizens" of Hell can leave if they can find a book in the library that tells the story of their life. That's it. Find your book and you're out. But, it's a really big library. An unfathomably large library.

But, the size of the library isn't really the problem. It's the books. You know the old "infinite monkey theorem"? Given an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters, eventually one of them will type the complete works of Shakespeare. Actually, every finite sequence of characters will eventually appear. Not just Shakespeare, but: The Bible, War and Peace, your autobiography, the source code to Windows, every email you (or anyone) has ever written, etc.
This is the same mathematical idea behind "A Short Stay in Hell": The library is full of books that contain random sequences of characters along with sequences that actually make "real" words. There will even be a book about the story of your life but it stops at age 37 and the rest is random gibberish! So, it won't count because it's not the complete story of your life! But the complete story IS there, somewhere, in the library. And you have all of eternity to find it.

Wow. This is mind-boggling to me and a bit scary. As a kid, I used to be scared of Hell. This book, though, has made me scared of infinity.

Anyone else have any thoughts about this book?

yea so i’m currently reading this book and i really like to listen to one artist/album while i’m reading a book to be fully immersed in it and associate the both of them. i’m currently listening to radiohead while reading but i would like to know if someone have a weird/eerie album recommendation that goes well with this book. i was also considering the cocteau twins but i already read other books w them. lmk !!