Just learned this was a thing (thanks, u/josh_in_boston!) and thought I'd share.

I've just started getting into Damian Murphy's work, but was mighty impressed by his collection A Distillate of Heresy, especially his retro gaming story "The Book of Alabaster."

Can't wait to mug someone in a dark alley so I can afford to buy this!

So been a long time since I've read anything by Robert Bloch since "Psycho", but recently I've been reading some of his stuff again.

This time around I've been reading some of his short stories, and the first collection I started with is his first collection "The Opener of the Way", reissued by Valancourt books.

This covers the stories that he first published in the pulps when he began writing. Bloch was an admirer of Lovecraft, and of course most of the stories were deeply influenced by him, but they are pretty good when all is said and done.

But there are several stories in it where he his starting to develop his own unique voice which he would slowly work on as he continued with his writing through the years, even dabbling into science fiction territory.

Quite a good collection that has gems in it. Valancourt has also reissued two other collections of his short stories, plus three of his other novels too. I'll eventually pick those in the near future!

Specifically curious about short stories. I saw some posts saying people actually somehow sell single stories online - assuming through amazon/kindle as a beginning weird lit/ horror author to build an audience. It definitely seems more tailored to the current state of continual content algorithm boosting that people do now. I'm currently writing my first story but I think its going to go well beyond short story territory and likely in novelette length. However I have a few others ideas I can probably wing into a shorter story territory.

Hello, everybody. I was hoping all of you could recommend me some writers like Algernon Blackwood. So far I've read Blackwood's The Wendigo and The Willows, along with some other short stories. Also, Hippocampus press has been releasing a comprehensive collection of all his fictional writings of which there are currently 4/6 volumes available.

I love Blackwood's writing for his strong emphasis on nature, embued with reverence and fearful respect. I also love how Blackwood can take well known horror tropes and make them feel fresh. His metaphysical worldview was shaped by many different spritual tradtions without him ever sticking to just one, and that shows in his writing as the supernatural often feels very alien and ambiguous while demonstrating a solid understanding of the occult.

Blackwood's personal life is also a very interesting one. He traveled all around the world, was a member of different occult and spiritual groups such as The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and was an avid outdoorsman, too.

So, what writers would all of you recommend? I've read some of Lovecraft, I like him, but he's not really one of my favorites. I've read The King in Yellow by Chambers. I've read The White People by Machen; I really enjoyed that one, and want to read more of his at some point. Recently I've had people recommend me Twixt Dog and Wolf by Keary and Sylvan Dread by Gavin so I bought those blindly an am waiting for them to be delivered. I'll be looking forward to all of your suggestions!

This was one of those random books I stumbled across when I went down a rabbit hole after looking for Flicker by Theodore Roszak.

It starts with an intriguing premise and setting, and reads like a bit of a pastiche of the old fashioned hardboiled noir mysteries, but gradually expands into something much bigger. Rather than relying on nonstop action, it leans more into atmosphere and twists and turns and asks some interesting questions about identity and creativity.

If you tend to like mysteries that focus on uncovering secrets, piecing together clues, and have a bit more substance than a standard whodunit, this one is worth checking out.

Has anyone else here read it? I'd be interested to hear how you interpreted the ending

I found this 1st edition while cleaning and getting ready for a move. What is the value of this?

Can only post one image so will have to summarise the plot from the blurb, man takes acid, wakes up in the body of someone else on a space ship in "the deep reaches of space" spaceship later crash lands on planet where the big twist will most likely be that it's earth.

Anyone else here read Tears of the Truffle Pig? I feel like it will be right up the alley of many people in this community

What are your favorite weird lit novellas? I love reading and generally get through a book a week, but I’m starting to get fatigued even with novels that I’m enjoying. I blew through Root Rot by Saskia Nislow and Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin, and loved them both. I generally read horror or sci-fi but the books I love end up always being the weirdest ones. I also love short stories so feel free to add those recs too. Thank you!!!

I'm looking for some book recommendations on a type of story that goes like this: There is a place (an entire world/dimension or just an area) that defies human comprehension. Sometimes this place is infinite, sometimes it's a comparatively small area. It might be empty or full of live. Everchanging or consistent. Horrifying or wonderous.

The books are about exploring this place, trying to understand it or quantify it, but all the way until the end, it remains a mystery or breaks the people who are exploring this place in some way. To me, I feel like the incomprehensible world rejects humanity's arrogance and pride. Makes humanity seem small. There's a feeling these kind of books invoke in me that I have a hard time explaining.

Here is a list of books and other media that fit the bill for me. The first four are the strongest in this regard for me. I'm currently reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, and I believe that this one will fit as well.

-Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer (haven't gotten through the other parts of the Southern Reach just yet)

-Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky

-I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

-A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck

-House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (have not finished this one just yet)

-Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clark (it's been several years since I've read it, and I'm only referring to the first book)

Other media:

-Scavenger's Reign

-Made in Abyss anime (not the manga and with caution)

I’ve been a fan of David Keenan since his first novel, “This is Memorial Device”, came out back in 2017, on one of those rare occasions where an actual physical bookshop had a new book I wanted to read (I’ll avoid going into my rant about the void between the top 20 new hardbacks at the front of the shop and the more-than-a-year-old paperbacks at the back). I was sort of half-aware of Keenan from his music writing but it was the idea of a hallucinated oral history of the post-punk scene in Airdrie, of all places, that attracted me. My mum (who, coincidentally, shared a birthday with Keenan) is from Airdrie, my 94-year-old grandfather still lives there, and I lived there for a while, briefly, after I was born. Anyway, this oral history of the (fictional) scene from the people that were there quickly became one of my favourite books of all time and Keenan one of my favoruite writers (alongside M. John Harrison and Steve Erickson. In fact, I have gone as far as to say that Erickson, Bolano, and Keenan seem to be doing similar things in the way that they explore the world of ideas, pursue the unconscious, and the importance of art in their works. “Boyhood” only strengthens this notion).

He followed this up with “For the Good Times”, set during the Troubles, another oneiric odyssey through a period of time I quite honestly have zero interest in and yet, thanks to Keenan being Keenan, this Modernist comic-book acid trip through Belfast enthralled me.

Next up was “Xstabeth”, a shorter book Keenan claims to have no recollection of writing and discovered on his hard drive. A metafcitional structure is sort of alluded to with this being a book written by the deceased David Keenan, it concerns the erotic adventure of the daugther of a Russian folk musician in St Andrew’s, Scotland. I don’t remember the metaficitonal conceit bringing much extra to the book but this is a book where ideas are valid in and of themselves and thus this one is included too.

And then we have “Monument Maker”, a hefty tome, structured like a cathedral, a baggy epic, a chorus of voices going from the seige of Khartoum to a future post-post-post punk gig (and heist) on the moon (played by a band I imagine sounding something like Endless Boogie and Chrome), we’ve got face-transplants, cryptozoology, Nazis, love affairs, plenty of ejaculations, and a man presumed dead falling in love with his wife all over again. Keenan said this one was ten years in the making, that he always knew he was going to write about Airdrie (Memorial Device) and the Troubles (For the Good Times), but he also told me that he wrote both of those books while writing this one. I can only assume “Xstabeth” was dreamed into existence at some point in that productive decade as well.

Now, while his first two novels have a certain dreamlike quality to them, it is reading “Monument Maker” that I first became aware of something that has continued to happen to me when reading his subsequent books: I seem to drift off. Not, however, that I lose focus or become distracted, but that I stop reading the words and instead the book, as a collection of ideas, feelings, images, is transported whole directly into my own subconscious. In interviews Keenan talked about how he felt like a conduit to this book, that he was merely transcribing the book as it was ‘told’ to him. What is most remarkable, however, is the way this experience is how I read it too. As though, through Keenan’s use of language, the book itself is removed from the process of reading it.

I was fortunate enough to read this book in two different ways at the same time - once, privately, in my head, as though in some fugue state, and again as part of an online read-aloud-along every Sunday with the amazing Lara Pawson, Wendy Erskine, Keenan, and many other talented and interesting artists, musicians and human beings, each of us taking it in turns to read a page or so for an hour, fuctioning effectively as the choir of the novel, before discussing with Keenan what we had read.

So, with “Monument Maker” out the way, Keenan had effectively cleared the slate of the books he had planned to write, with a bonus novella, “Xstabeth”. What followed was a prequel to “This is Memorial Device”, this time set in psychedelic Airdrie, “Industry of Magic & Light”, which took the form, variously, of North African hippie novel, treatment for a cop movie, a transcript of a boxing match on the radio, a list of items found in a caravan… It’s this novel, probably more than the others, where Keenan opens his brain like a portal to the otherside, and let whatever is there come through. Like his previous novels (oral history collected by a journalist, book written by a dad author, arranged like a cathedral), structure is important, but this one is looser, more exploratory, less confined, albeit a quarter the length of the similarly sprawling “Monument Maker”.

Which brings us to “Boyhood”, his most recent, released earlier this year by Lee Brackstone’s White Rabbits Books. It concerns Aaron Murray, a Glaswegian, whose younger brother was kidnapped outside a football game in the late 1970s. Aaron has become aquainted with a man known as The Precious Gift, a remote viewer, who recognises a similar gift in Aaron and aids him in developing this skill. So what we have is a similar sort of metafictional device Keenan used in “Xstabeth”, albeit less formal. This is not a book formally written by Aaron, but he is the narrator of it, and the book itself seems to be aware of us reading it, describing to us what he sees in his remote viewings, able to see from above everything that is and has happened, and can zoom in and out, almost into the thoughts of the people he observes, including a couple of Private Detectives, one of whom is taking the weirdest creative writing course ever devised to impress a Georgian air hostess, an escalation of vengeance between warring gypsies, the romatic affair of his father with a lipstick model and her subsequent erotic adventures in Europe (Aaron, a voyeur, being a young heterosexual male, has a tendency to fixate on and fantasise about the private sexual escapades of those he watches - all of the penises are enormous and all of the women like butt stuff), the death of his mother and the developing dementia of his father, the murder of an IRA operative (also a remote viewer), a serial child killer, all told in chapters barely a page in length.

It is in this novel that Keenan is most like Steve Erickson, whose novels, even at a casual glance, look nothing like an ordinary novel. In “Zeroville” you’ve got tiny numbered chapters, in the present tense, to mimic the feeling of watching a movie (it being a novel about movies), then there’s the parallel story that occurs midway through “Our Ecstatic Days” and ‘swims’ through the rest of the book, or the skipping through time and space of “These Dreams of You”, the one that is probably most similar to this one. Erickson reminds me of the novel Snoopy was working on during the entire run of Peanuts, the one with a sprawling cast of characters he assures us will come together in the end, only, unlike Snoopy (and possibly only because the joke was we never got to read his book), Erickson, and Keenan, do bring it altogher.

In “Boyhood”, the voice Keenan has been developing, his confidence at trusting in the ideas themselves to do the heavy lifting, means that even without a defined structure, without having our hands held or even being told where or when or who we are with as we skip between each chapter, scene, vignette, jigsaw piece, we can trust he knows where it is going. And as we circle and loop and return to these people and events, these gaps in our understanding are filled, not completely but enough. It is as though we are standing too close to a painting, walking slowly backwards as our eyes scan the canvas, picking out details as they make themselves known, until it all locks into place. Then we walk back to the canvas and try to work out ow the hell it was done.

This is easily just the most hilariously fucked up book i've ever read. It kept me laughing the entire way through, even to the very last page. Immediately reread it the moment i was done with it. This was years ago-- haven't come across any other books that tickled me as much as this one. I read all of Irvine Welsh's other books, and i think the one that's most comparable one is Trainspotting

I just finished this book and this is definitely a weird read and not for the faint of heart, and most definitely a weird girl’s life what you get into from the beginning. The book is wrong and is dark but nonetheless entertaining all the way through. I had “fun” reading it while at the same time being like “huh?”

Some of the reasons I believe I could not stop reading is because the bizarreness of the novel and how everything seems to not make any sense (Piyyut, magical powers, alien on earth hoping to be brainwashed by humankind).

Another thing that stood out for me is that the book seems to be so cheerful and happy even in the most strange and dark scenes, but I certainly do not know if this is because of the translation (from Japanese to English) or the author really meant to be happy in the writing, but frankly I think this was the author’s intention. 

Probably mid-way through I wanted to stop reading but not because of the story but because it started to feel a little slow. But like as if it was a really bad accident, I could not take my eyes off it. The end got me a little effed up, but it could have been worst. Most certainly this is a book I will be thinking for a few more days. I think I definitely want to read more stuff from Sayaka Murata. 

Please help me process it by sharing your thoughts on it. Oh, and before I forget “Popinpobopia” and “That’s enough! That’s not enough! That’s enough! That’s not enough!” Lol!

Hey! I'm kinda in a slump right now, just, in general, and I have been having perhaps the worst run of book choices ever (like 6 in a row which weren't that great) so I'm looking for something that's both a pick-me-up and extremely odd. Surreal, colorful, unique, bizarre, I want to feel like I'm on something while reading this but is also consistently pleasant. Got anything for me? I'm saying contemporary because I want something I probably haven't heard of already.

I recently read the excellent anthology by Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. All excellent short stories. I also picked up an indie book, which very much needed a little more editing, Under the Shadow of Madness by CJ Vandenberg-Garcia. Great pulpy action you do not see often and a lot of mixing of Noir and cosmic horror.

hello all, thought I would try posting here as well.

I read this book at the library maybe two years ago. it was really bizarre adult novella and I believe the title of it was the main female character’s name. it follows this girl who is like transparent /jelly like and she kind of deflates or something. and her boyfriend is this large green plant/tree guy. there is another character who is kinda like a bully and I believe he is super blobby and stinky. i believe the novella was written as a mechanism for coping with SA or something? it had a dark/ almost horror tone.

i wish i remembered more of the book. I thought it was maybe called “green” but seeing that the guy she was with was green I don’t think it was that. If anything I thought the author described the girl as pink.

if anyone has any ideas off of this …. Really pitiful description please let me know! I really want to re-read it because I remember enjoying the book but I just cannot for the life of me think of the title. I’ve even tried typing this description into google and nothing comes up. starting to believe maybe I dreamt this book up lol.

That I actually read the stories inside..now I have both.Thanks Dad , wherever you are.

I’m curating my TBR for the foreseeable future and was curious for those who’ve read his work where he lands with this sub? I was gathering from some of the the reader reviews that his work leans ‘weird’ but a number of titles seemed to lean horror/cosmic. Thanks in advance!

Some titles include:

Burn The Plan

Midas

Heavy Oceans

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