Enjoy weird fiction overall, sci-fi and “horror” (in a very general sense). I like some Lovecraft, VanderMeers, Ballard, China Miéville, Samanta Schweblin, late William Gibson, Mariana Enríquez… what recent books or writers caught your eye that may loosely fit the term or are similar to works of the above authors? Can be in English, Portuguese or Spanish.
Imajica by Clive Barker
Teleportasm by Joshua Millican
Air by Geoff Ryman
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan (go in blind and stick with it)
14 by Peter Clines
The Hike by Drew Magary
Break the Bodies, Haunting the Bones By Micah Dean Hicks
Where They Wait by Scott Carson
John Dies at the End was a wonderfully weird, semi-horror book I read in high school. Wikipedia describes it as comic Lovecraftian horror. Perfectly tasteless while also having really interesting plot hooks. I still think about that book even now, 15 years later. There’s also a movie adaptation but they cut so much it’s almost a completely different story.
Thomas Ligotti and Shirley Jackson
Leguin - City of Illusions …and all her other books. Check out old school The Machine Stops E.M. Forster. And Ministry for the Future- Kim Stanley Robinson and all of his other books.
I have not read those authors, but i really enjoyed Staircase in the Woods, by Chuck Wendig. It was an enthralling read.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil was a lot of fun.
Gideon the ninth by Tamsyn Muir Escapeology by Ren Warom Weaveworld by Clive Barker
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I haven’t read those authors so I’m not sure if it’s the same type of weird, but I recently read Hyperion which is both weird and good.
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Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory and then all his other works.
Iain M. Banks if you’re looking for this SciFi works.
been curious about all is works, but never tried to read them… i’ll have a go soon
Ever read Blindsight by Peter Watts?
keep getting references to Watts’s book, but no
It’s a good read. It taught me about the actual real concept of blindsight., seeing without perceiving.
My all-time favorite novel is Blindness by Jose Saramago. I have only read it in English, but it was originally published in Portuguese as “Ensaio sobre a cegueira”.
From Wikipedia: “It centers on an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in a nonspecific city, and follows multiple unnamed characters as they navigate the social breakdown that swiftly follows.”
I haven’t seen it mentioned yet so I’ll throw in my rec: the spear cuts through water. You know how they say you need to know the rules to break the rules? This book is a masterclass in that. It does so many things that novels simply aren’t supposed to… And the execution is flawless. The story is compelling, but I was most engaged with the way it was written. It felt like nothing else I’ve ever encountered - not because the ideas were new (nesting narratives, shifts in perspective, genre twists, etc) but because I’ve never seen so much of it executed so well together.
It’s hard to go wrong with Jeremy C. Shipp. I loved Vacation but it’s hard to get ahold of at the moment. Their most recent work is The Merry Dredgers which I haven’t read yet but looks fantastic.
House of leaves is my all time favourite mindfuck horror literature. I just recommend going hard copy over ebook as the formatting is super important. I can’t really describe it except to say I can see how Backrooms could be inspired by it.
i read a few from Carlton Mellick III, they’re pretty weird. some are translated to spanish: https://carltonmellick.com/books/
other bizzaro fiction in english: https://www.bizarrocentral.com/bizarro-books/
for weird horror, my favourite that might just be weird enough for the question is The Seven Days of Peter Crumb by Jonny Glynn
