Bizarre books


Books


I just a read a description by Cosmo in "what books are you currently reading?" of Demon Theory by Stephen Graham. It sounds like one of those wierd and unclassifiable books that is something of a fiction, non-fiction, and parody all at the same time. The sort of book that has a core theme or story but it is almost unimportant compared with all of the side-material; where you read it and learn a lot and every time something wierd and wonderful comes up you just think "who wrote this thing? It's remarkable."

I love books like that, but they are very rare. Some I can think of are The White Goddess by Robert Graves, which I'm reading at the moment, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, and (along the same lines) Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Anyone know any more wierd maniacal books like this?

Liberty's Edge

Robert Anton Wilson wrote a really weird book called Cosmic Trigger.
Umberto Eco's a friggin' genius.


I've mentioned it before, but The Riddle of The Traveling Skull by Harry Stephen Keeler is either an amazing parody of the mystery genre or the best worst mystery novel I've ever read. It's unbelievable coincidence after unbelievable coincidence coupled with a healthy dose of 1940s casual racism and dialects that seem to originate only in the author's head. Toward the very end of the book there's a page that says "STOP! All of the characters have now been introduced. Can YOU figure out who is the culprit?!" Of course you can't; Keeler has a proposterous story to top any possible "logical" solution.

Apparently, he would write all of his novels using the technique of grabbing up a handful of newspaper clippings and then trying to unite them in a narrative. His later books were actually entirely visual mysteries: the reader would be presented only with progressive clues in order to piece together the mystery.


Heathansson wrote:
Umberto Eco's a friggin' genius.

Absolutely.

He had another book that was really awesome also about a monastery. Murder mystery Sherlock Holmes like. I forget the name of it though.

Liberty's Edge

jody mcadoo wrote:
Heathansson wrote:
Umberto Eco's a friggin' genius.

Absolutely.

He had another book that was really awesome also about a monastery. Murder mystery Sherlock Holmes like. I forget the name of it though.

The Name of the Rose?


yeah thats it

Paizo Employee Director of Sales

kahoolin wrote:
Anyone know any more wierd maniacal books like this?

Actually... yeah.

Demon Theory, while awesome, absolutely pales in comparison to a book called House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski (who is, coincidentally, the little brother of rock singer/songwriter Poe).

This book (also ostensibly horror) incorporates three separate stories at once, almost layered one-upon-the-other. The base story, which appears in the text is a manuscript of the case history of a family that moves into a house. Everything is normal until one day a small door just appears in the wall of their living room. Of course there is nothing on the backside of the wall, but when they open the door, there is a corridor that goes off into the darkness. Then other walls and spaces inside the house start shifting imperceptibly. Gaps open up, things no longer fit together as they should and all the while the emotional ties within the family start to break down as the disjoint emptiness fills the house and its occupants. A very psychological haunted house horror story.

But then there's the second story of the book, which occurs in the first set of footnotes. This is the story of an old man who finds this manuscript (the family's story in the house) scattered about in a trunk and proceeds to put it back together, edit it and research the story further. His notes start out very clinical and researched, but soon they get scatterbrained and he describs the darkness, emptiness and disjointedness that begins to fill his life.

The final story takes place in the second set of footnotes. This is the story (written in first-person) of the old man's slacker neighbor, who breaks into the old man's apartment after the old man has been missing for several weeks. The slacker finds the manuscript and begins reading and annotating his own story/observations/rants in the footnotes. As he recognizes the emptiness creeping into the old man's life (the old man, mind you, who had just mysteriously disappeared), he also recognizes it coming into his own. And he reacts.

Now... I have yet to mention the weird part of the book (yeah... now i get to the weird part...). Much like Eco's constructionist approach to Name of the Rose (in which the first two thirds of the book are deliberately written to be difficult to read so as to mirror the difficulties of reach the Abbey), the text of House of Leaves is arranged in such a way to mirror and illustrate the disjointed nature of the emptiness that fills everything in the book. To follow a chain of footnotes you may find yourself turning page after page, reading up and down margins, turning the book upside down, and twisting it about.

There's one particular chain that leads you to the back third of the book where the footnote (the old man's discussion of the concept of "tunnels" keyed from a discussion of the local geology around the house) is placed within a 1" x 1" blue box in the center of the page for twenty pages. Then, later in the book when you actually get to the part of the family's story that has been pushed around by this discussion, you find that they are recalling crawling through a dark corridor that is too small to walk comfortably, but tall enough that it feels silly to crawl. Constructionist.

All in all an admittedly challenging, but fun, read. It also includes one moment that actually genuinely creeped me out, and this does not happen.

/book

oops... got a bit long-winded there.

cos

The Exchange

Has anyone read The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin? It's a sort of tale within a tale within a tale, ostensibly about an English spy in medieval Cairo who gets swept up in - well, it's a bit hard to describe. At one level it is a dark fantasy with Arabian Nights overtones, at another a story about, well, storytelling. At one point, the seeming narator gets murdered, but then it turned out he wasn't the narrator anyway, and.. Well, it also has monkeys in it too.

Liberty's Edge

The story within a set of footnotes reminds me of Pale Fire by Nabokov. The book is a poem (it has been years - I do not remember what the poem is about) but the footnotes start out a literary but we find that the footnoter believes himself to be the exhiled King of Zembla and that the poem is an allegory for his, clearly imaginary, life.


If you haven't already checked it out, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (and really all of Mitchell's novels) is right up their with the matsers.

Cloud Atlas is six different narratives -- all set in different times and places -- that are loosley connected. Each narrative takes advantage of different tropes from various literary genres: there's the sci-fi story, the detective story, etc.

The beauty of the book is that the reader never gets resolution in any of the individual stories, rather a gerneral sense of resolution happens with the end of the book.

David Mitchell is as good as it gets. Check him out.

El Skootro


Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse is a fairly normal story until the last chapter. There it takes a turn for the bizarre. The story jumps off into a different reality of sorts.

I don't want to spoil it for anyone who intends to read it. If anyone has read it and understands what the last chapter is about please let me know. I will post my e-mail address so you can avoid spoiling it for others.

It was mentioned that Umberto Eco is a genius. I agree.

Liberty's Edge

Cosmo wrote:
House of Leaves

Dude, I have to see this book!


Still Life with Woodpecker & Another Roadside Attraction by Tim Robbins. Pretty much anything by him is going to be bizarre but those are the only 2 I've read so far.

Oh, and I totally agree that Eco is a friggin' genius.


The Emperors New Clothes is about the cyber world and mathmatics; pretty wild

Infinite Zero; more wild mathmatics

The Design of Everyday Things; this book will change how you look at the world.

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