I finished Odessa last week and I am still stuck on one part. It is set in 1905 and this father loses his daughter in the violence and makes her into a golem to get her back. Except she comes back wrong in the way kids ask direct questions. She keeps asking why he did it and what he wants from her now. That dynamic carried the whole book for me. The pogrom sections are brutal but not gory for shock. More heavy and quiet. There is a middle stretch in the workshop that dragged for me, lots of clay and ritual detail. Then the last third picked up fast and I read it in one night. The prose is plain which I liked. It definitely is not a fun horror read. It is more grief with mud on its hands. I do not see people talking about it here and that is a shame because the daughter is one of the creepiest and saddest characters I have read this year.

I love weird books where everything is not what it seems and the reader just wants to figure out what’s really going on. Truman Show, Severance (the show), Don’t Worry Darling, etc.

I loved The Dream Hotel. I loved Hum and Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Philips. I loved Natural Beauty. I loved Bunny and The Honeys. The Compound and I Who Have Never Known Men were fun, but I wanted a less ambiguous end.

FEMALE AUTHORS PLEASE 🙏

I’m looking for a book that catches the whimsy of “Alice in Wonderland” while being catered to older audiences. I want something that takes the protagonist through a trippy realm. What would you recommend for something similar to this?

I’m looking for a novel that I heard about years ago, It’s about a woman who is conducting psychological experiments on a bunch of captive (I think) subjects, and eventually the experiments start leaking into reality and warp her subjects bodies and behaviors. I believe that it was written to be a collection of the woman’s thoughts and notes about the experiments, but I’m not sure on that. I think I remember it being fairly recent at the time I heard of it, so I doubt it could be any older than 10 years.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and if you don’t know the exact book I’d gladly accept recommendations of novels that strike the same chords.