What were the most bizarre books you have ever read?

Modern occult books, such as those by a man called Johannes Nefastos (yes, really), a head figure in our very own occult satanist group, Star of Azazel. To say the guy is well read is an understatement, which seems to be a constant with occultists. Another one is the Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising.

Collecting occult writings and other strange things is my hobby. No I'm not a wizard. I'm not even 30.

I used to own a children's book about a dog who farts throughout the story. I got it from Scholastic Book Fair back in Elementary School.

I went to the Exeter UFO Festival last year and bought a signed copy of When Alien Abductions Go Wrogn [sic] by Bob Ingraham. It is a self-described humor book about alien abduction stories and my God is it a trip. Each chapter focuses on an alien abduction going "wrogn" in some manner.

The jokes themselves are either poorly delivered or in poor taste. The punchline for one of them has nothing to do with aliens at all. It's just a very elaborate lead-up to a very lame gag about molesting children. Another story involves a group of abductees eating spaghetti with sauce made of dead aliens. One has the aliens "catch" Earth's obesity epidemic (???) and another ends with a joke about a female alien raping a male human. And that's not even half the book.

It really has to be seen to be believed...

Le tre resurrezioni di Sisifo Re (The Three Resurrections of Sysyphus Rex) it's the story of this duo of detectives working in a city torn by warfare. Except that it's set in the future and most of the warring factions employ and/or straight-up ARE mythological horrors. One of the detectives (the titular character) is an old man cosplaying as the Heat Ledger Joker, and a former psychologist who can apparently see the future; the other is an overweight, alcoholic Irishman (the part-time narrator and protagonist) who killed his wife and uses a psychic link to a parallel universe as acids. The two have to investigate a murder waiting to happen, caused by a genderqueer helicopter operator avenging his lover (who is a fallen angel who has been raped from birth and deprived of his wings).

Every line of the 'proper' reality reads like an acid trip, and contains violence so graphic I dare not describe it here. The 'imaginary' reality meanwhile is a shameless yet well-disguised parody of film noir and hard-boiled novels. It gets even more acid when the two realities bleed into each other, seemingly merging at the end of the book.

The book itself is actually well-plotted and well-paced, at tracts disturbing and at tracts gut-bustingly funny, with some well-placed satire, and contains a Crowning Moment of Awesome in which the titular character fends off a horde of cannibal monsters with a giant piece of chimney while riding a hover-surfboard. With a dead kid strapped to his back.

Now that you've read all of this, bear in mind that it comes from an author known until now for writing VERY literary fiction.

edited 8th Sep '17 1:02:55 PM by TheHazMatSuit

I had a series in mind, but then I realized I already brought it up earlier in the thread.

So...um...there's Abarat, I guess, although it's more the "surreal horror" brand of weird. I only ever read the first two, though - by the time the third one came out, I wasn't really interested anymore.

edited 16th Sep '17 8:14:46 PM by SapphireBlue

"Genderqueer helicopter operator", is this guy referencing the Attack Helicopter copypasta?

Either Alice in Wonderland or Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Quite a lot of psychedelic-era 60s/70s literature comes to mind, some Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delany stuff was pretty mind-bending. I’ve also read some Jo Clayton books that were pretty obviously conceived under some pretty heavy “medication,” if you get my meaning.

Report on Probability A by Brian Aldiss really takes the cake, though. I can’t even really tell you what it’s about. “A bunch of people observing each other” is the best I can do.