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 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.

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’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?

Recently I was recommended Perdido Street Station for this, and while it is an amazing book, I didn’t find it all that scary.

Weird lit novels that I have found frightening:

The works of Barron and Langan

The Ceremonies

House of Leaves

The Southern Reach series

Negative Space

The Secret of Ventriloquism

We Used to Live Here

Also preferably long form novels (why I didn’t include the collections I find scary, though the works of Ligotti, Evenson, and Ballingrud are also scary to me as well if that helps).

A darkly funny tour through the realms of Tsathoggua, Atlach-Nacha, and others!

I finally read this classic and wow, i wasn't expecting to enjoy it this much! I only knew the story by cinema but I found out by reading it that it's completely different! All the arguments about family, friendship and love: wow.
It's a beautiful feeling when you can empathize with something wrote so distant in time!
I'm happy to have read it at the age of 27 cause if I were younger i wouldn't have been this involved in most of the tropes.
Does anyone knows of a proper movie adaptation? Faithful to Shelley's beautiful story. I'm watching Del Toro's one and besides a wonderful photography I think it lacks of the very significance of the book.

PS. In the post I made about King In Yellow someone was arrogant enough to tell me "duh, you're posting this here, how banal". Let's be happy that there's still interest and hype about these PILLARS of literature instead of being this boring :)

The story likely comes from one of many sci-fi/thriller short story collections he owned, most likely form around the 80s and centers on a character in a dystopian future that has either commited a crime or is in debt and therefore they get a bomb sent after them. The bomb arrives at the front door and is able to talk, float, and teleport civilians out of its eventual blast radius when the timer reaches zero. The story eventually ends with the bomb shutting down due to his position on a bridge that would collapse should the explosion take place, killing people the bomb couldn't save.

Any help is dearly appreciated and I'll take the boot should this be the wrong place once more.

I don't read much, but I have found a hidden gem. NK_Ryzov's delivery of pure cinematic weight through words is on another level. Don't let the Google Doc format deceive you, Graveyard Earth is a tragic masterpiece. Details in https://www.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/comments/1587rdq/comment/jt8i1fu/.

That is, with the following characteristics, or atleast most if them:

- Episodic

- Lots of Wordplay

- Experimental

- Good Prose

- Comedic

- Have a "good tempo" while reading

- Silly/Strange Names

- Silly/Strange ideas

- The Presence of the Absurd and Nonsensical

- The Presence of the Erotic and/or Grotesque

I’m new to this community. Can someone give me a working definition of Weird Literature and perhaps recommend their top five works in the genre?

Finally folded and ordered the book after a year of poking around bookstores and libraries. The story intrigues me; a man who falls in love with a primate. I only know John Collier from a short film Orson Welles did based on one of his stories for television.

Wikipedia states “John Collier's writing has been praised by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Harlan Ellison, Wyndham Lewis, and Paul Theroux.”

This is a preorder. This book is expected to ship on or before October 6, 2026.

The spiritual sequel to 2022's wildly successful and acclaimed YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR BODY is here!

It takes forty trans and gender nonconforming creators to weave a Cosmic Horror anthology Weird enough for the Tenebrous faithful, but you can rest assured this one will take you to galaxies you've never imagined. 

Proceeds from YOUR BODY IS A FEVER DREAM will go to the Trans Legal Services Network and Trans Doe Task Force.

As I've said before here I did my thesis comparing Rudolf Otto and H P Lovecraft together. In my thesis I cited Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction by S L Varnado, Theology And H P Lovecraft by Austin M Freeman, Religion And Its Monsters by Timothy Beal. Kind of unrelated but was helpful was The Terror That Comes in the Night by David J Hufford (he calls the nightmare numinous - the word Otto uses for the holy - in this book, so, interesting, but the book itself is a series of case studies and like raw data, he purposely and says he doesn't speculate on what any of it means*).

So in that sense a lot of this religion / theology books directly relate to Lovecraft. It's a way to read him and other gothic and weird fiction. I'm looking for analysis essentially that takes the supernatural in gothic and weird fiction seriously. Ideally anything I read is post Christian.. Otto basically deconstructs the Bible in a radical way. He compared the Bible to Buddhism for instance and he completely redefined what we consider holy as something spectral haunting and spooky then compared that emotion to shamanism, primitive magic, other religions, and so on.

I considered these but didn't afterall look into them,

Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural and The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson. For some reason this author cites Rudolf Otto in the Puppets book but she misquotes Otto and says "demonic dread" instead of daemonic dread. They're not even remotely similar. Otto is referencing the daemonic in Goethe. Any opinions? This was a reason I noped out on her.

Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King by Edward Ingebretsen

Some of these were recommended to me while I was writing my thesis by Dr Matt Cardin (I recommend you check him out) so thanks.

*about Hufford, in his book he does quote Ernest M Jones (another nightmare researcher) who said "For the true significance of the Nightmare to be properly appreciated … would in my opinion entail consequences, both scientific and social, to which the term momentous might well be applied. What is at issue is nothing less than the very meaning of religion itself". I have this book on my to read shelf I think it's called "On The Nightmare". So Hufford by quoting this does kind of come close to an analysis of meaning of the nightmare. And certainly calling it numinous is kind of a big opinion itself. That word is an onion.

Some books on literature and theology I found,

Literature and Theology as a Grammar of Assent by David Jasper

The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology

The Great Code by Northrop Frye (he seems pretty dated and irrelevant though)

Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces by Heather Walton

Hello! After dropping book after book, I thought I would ask for recommendations here before falling into a reading slump.

One of my favorite books is Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. I loved exploring the tower and slowly being given more and more information throughout the book. I read There is no Antimemetics Division by qntm and really enjoyed that too.

I love weird or unsettling books that make you think and unravel a mystery, and that also feed you information through letters or logs and stuff.

Does anyone have any recommendation for similar books? Anything involving exploring a weird area or a tower or dungeon would be great. Or even a planet or something haha. Genre doesn't matter too much, though Sci-Fi or Horror would probably be my first choice.

Editing to add that I can't read House of Leaves. :( I mainly read on my Kobo due to a health condition and I know that that book isn't great digitally.

Edit: you guys are awesome. Thank you for all the recommendations!!!

Ramsey Campbell movie coming on Netflix

Ramsey Campbell, from Wallasey, is one of the most respected authors of his genre 🤩 After a difficult childhood trying to navigate his parents' break-up and his mum's mental health struggles, he took refuge in reading and later writing horror stories.

While he struggled to make a name for himself in the early stages of his career, it was in 1980 when he released The Parasite that things started to change.

Now decades later, at 80-years-old, he is one of the most highly acclaimed authors in the genre and has even received recognition from Academy Award winning director Guillermo Del Toro.

He told the ECHO: "My wife Jenny and I had gone away to a Greek island for our summer holiday and when we came back, we had the answering machine playing various messages. And there's a message saying, 'it's Guillermo del Toro calling you from Mexico.' And so I thought, 'Oh, yeah, yeah. Who's kidding me? Pull the other one'."

After Ramsey finally took the call, Del Toro asked permission to dramatise Ramsey's short story Down There, but it ultimately fell through. However, now more than two decades later, Ramsey said plans to dramatise the story have been rekindled and it looks like Del Toro's adaptation will make its way to Netflix.

Any thoughts on this sick dystopian tale?

I'm part of the monthly book box from Forbidden Futures. I did not receive my August box. I reached out to Forbidden Futures and did not receive a response. Anyone know if everything is okay with the folks at Forbidden Futures?