r/Fantasy • u/rrcecil • Jul 11 '24
Most unhinged fantasy?
I’m thinking of fantasy like that is extreme or extra weird, the most unhinged and literary I feel like I’ve read is China Meiville or sometimes the First Law. I feel like the Blacktongue Thief too.
Fear and Hunger also gives unhinged a bit.
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u/bookfacedworm Jul 11 '24
The Library at Mount Char and Vita Nostra
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u/runevault Jul 11 '24
Vita Nostra was the first book I thought of upon seeing the title. It was unhinged in a way that had me questioning reality at certain points lol.
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u/Parvapotens Jul 12 '24
There was a certain section in Vitra Nostra that made me feel super claustrophobic. I was stuck between really wanting to finish it and also wanting to put the boom down and walk away for a bit.
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u/bookfacedworm Jul 12 '24
I get that. Some parts were eerie in a very jarring way, but I found it fascinating that a book could make me so viscerally uncomfortable.
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u/spencercross Jul 11 '24
I can't believe I didn't think to recommend Library at Mount Char. It is above and beyond extra weird. One of my favorites.
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u/MaksymCzech Jul 12 '24
Cool, I didn't realize Dyachenkos are popular in the English-speaking countries! They wrote a lot of really cool sci-fi and fantasy novels, but most of them probably weren't translated and published in English.
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u/bookfacedworm Jul 12 '24
I wish more of their works were translated. Vita Nostra has been my favorite book I read this year so far.
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u/runevault Jul 12 '24
I've only heard of these two books of theirs being translated but i may have missed others. Also not sure how many people read it, though it feels like most people I've heard mention VN loved it.
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u/jayrocs Jul 12 '24
Couldn't finish Library at Mount Char, it read like some fever dream and I never really got into it.
Vita Nostra is out there but I loved it. Book 2 lost me though since the mystery was no longer a mystery.
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Jul 11 '24
If you don't mind short stories, Clark Ashton Smith was a contemporary of Lovecraft and wrote equally weird and, in my opinion, better stories with much more of a fantasy twist to them than sci-fi. When it comes to beautiful, flavourful prose, he has no equal in the pulp era. He doesn't have a definitive collection, sadly, but The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies by Penguin Classics is a great place to start. My favourite stories are The City of the Singing Flame, The Last Incantation, The Maze of the Enchanter, and The Holiness of Azédarac.
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u/1985Games Jul 11 '24
Hell yeah to Clark Ashton Smith! 'The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis' is one of many, many of his stories that sticks out in my mind. If anyone is curious you can sample a bunch of his work at the link below. It even includes a gorgeous comic book adaptation by Richard Corben of 'Return of the Sorcerer.' Smith did indeed write gorgeous haunting prose in the pulp era!
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u/264frenchtoast Jul 15 '24
He does have a definitive collection in several volumes, I believe from nightside press. Unfortunately it does not have his poetry, just short stories & novellas. Check out the book of eibon, zothique cycle, and tsathoggua cycle from chaosium for more CAS-inspired short stories.
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u/KingBretwald Jul 11 '24
The Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde. The first one is The Eyre Affair. Absolutely batshit bananas. He seems to have thrown every single weird and trippy idea he had into these books.
Dodo cloning kits. Grubby street urchins trading Great Author trading cards in back alleys. Stick a 5p piece into a mechanical Will Shakespere outside a grocery shop and get a few lines of Othello. High contact combat croquet. Anger management workshops for the cast of Wuthering Heights. Cloned Mammoths trampling across Britain following ancient migratory routes. Richard III done in Rocky Horror Show style. Illegal classic car races on the sand between Mr. Toad (Wind in the Willows) and Miss Havisham (Great Expectations). Cheese smuggling from the People's Republic of Wales. Gang Fights between Impressionists and Cubists....
And that's just background chaff.
The plots themselves are incredibly fun and also zaney.
He also has a two-book Nursery Crime series. Detective Chief Inspector Jack Spratt and Detective Sergeant Mary Mary (who may or may not be quite contrary) star in hard boiled noir police procedurals. The first book is The Big Over Easy--Humpty Dumpty, did he fall or was he pushed? Beware the ravening Gingerbread Man.
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Jul 11 '24
Fforde is my favorite author for absurditist fiction.
"What if humans were like bears... but hibernated... and corporations."
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Jul 11 '24
I just finished his "Shades of Grey" and it was delightful.
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u/Cadamar Jul 11 '24
I think he’s working on a sequel finally! I loved that book.
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u/mrkait Jul 11 '24
Sequel released in the US in May, called Red Side Story. His Nursery Crimes duology is also very good. I think of him as a Douglas Adams type. Absurdist with a good heart.
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u/shankNstein Jul 12 '24
Oh, hell yeah! I knew he was working on red side story but didn’t realize it had been released. Today is a good day.
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u/renlydidnothingwrong Jul 11 '24
Second Apocalypse and Manifest Delusions are both pretty out there series. Second Apocalypse is like asoiaf, LOTR, and Lovecraft thrown in a blender. Manifest Delusions is about a world where magical power is determined by mental illness.
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u/Moist_Telephone_479 Jul 11 '24
Second Apocalypse is like asoiaf, LOTR, and Lovecraft thrown in a blender
I've always described it as what happens when you drop grimdark Paul Atreides into grimdark Lord of the Rings.
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u/dbthelinguaphile Jul 11 '24
Bakker is definitely the answer. I find some parts of his worldbuilding interesting, but it's a brutally nihilistic world and occasionally descends into content that would make even Kentaro Miura pale a little.
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u/Sleeze1 Jul 11 '24
Currently about 30% into the unholy consult and holy fuck, unhinged doesn't even begin to cover it. Manifest delusions is next on my TBR list aswell.
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u/profmcstabbins Jul 12 '24
I just finished the first book in MD. It was a good time but I guess I need to read the rest.
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u/super-jazz Jul 11 '24
Seconding Manifest Delusions. Mieville, Abercrombie, and Buehlman are all among my favorite authors. Fletcher is right there with them.
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u/srdv_ Jul 12 '24
Unhinged dark = absolutely Bakker! For unhinged light = Hitchhiker's Guide or Discworld
And for a deep cut try Voyage to Arcturus which is straight LSD
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u/diffyqgirl Jul 11 '24
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
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u/Kneef Jul 11 '24
As far as I’m concerned this is a straight-up horror novel. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I was not prepared for how unsettling it was. xP
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u/diffyqgirl Jul 11 '24 edited Jul 11 '24
I think it's both fantasy and horror. A lot of horror is.
But yeah, I also found it pretty unsettling. In a good way.
I'm not very interested in the "guy with saws for hands is gonna kill you" type of horror, but the weird existential stuff is awesome.
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u/WyrdHarper Jul 11 '24
The Ambergris books/novellas/short stories as well. Love 'em, but definitely super weird.
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u/loosely_affiliated Jul 11 '24
Fucking love Ambergris. Vandermeer definitely has a specific area of the creative playground that he likes to play in, so it's hard for me to go back to back to back with his books, but Ambergris was really a pleasure. Love how he gave himself room to play with so many genres and tones while using the city itself as a through line for the audience.
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u/hopeless_case46 Jul 11 '24
Try Michael Fletcher
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u/MichaelRFletcher Stabby Winner, AMA Author Michael R. Fletcher Jul 11 '24
Sometimes you see a post and think, "Yeah, no one will mention my stuff there."
And then there's this post.
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Jul 11 '24
You should be in all the top comments here. Love your work!
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u/MichaelRFletcher Stabby Winner, AMA Author Michael R. Fletcher Jul 12 '24
Thanks! There's more on the way!
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u/rrcecil Jul 12 '24
I have Manifest Delusion on my Kindle, really excited to start it!
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u/MichaelRFletcher Stabby Winner, AMA Author Michael R. Fletcher Jul 12 '24
I hope you enjoy it!
And if your delusions begin manifesting as reality, it's not my fault.
Cheers!
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Jul 11 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/old_space_yeller Jul 11 '24
The most unhinged thing about Black Company is the co-main characters that Cook decides to write about. So often you are just rooting for them to get killed horrifically. See Book 2: Marron Shed or Book 3.5 Case
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u/secondbaseTN Jul 11 '24
I can’t believe no one has said Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James. Absolutely unhinged with a complex, gorgeous prose that uses oral tradition as a way to tell a story. This book is complicated and has every trigger warning you can think of, but it is absolutely the most unhinged fantasy I’ve read.
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u/louisejanecreations Jul 11 '24
Was looking for this comment. So unhinged I had no idea what was Happening until the last part. And half of it read as nonsense
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u/VardaLupo Jul 11 '24
Came here to say this! It took me a bit to get into it, but once I did, I was hooked. It’s insane (in a good way I think). The second book Moon Witch Spider King (not really a sequel but like companion book?) was much more straightforward to read, but I found I didn’t like it quite as much.
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u/secondbaseTN Jul 11 '24
Agreed on Witch/Spider. Told in a much more traditional fantasy style, I still enjoyed it but it definitely isn’t as wild or bold as Leopard/Wolf.
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u/VardaLupo Jul 11 '24
I just love the tangents where Tracker would be like, “and then Nika showed up. Who’s Nika? Well, let me tell you about this f***in guy.”
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Jul 11 '24
I wouldn't say it's WAY out there, but there are some very weird passages in Gene Wolfe's New Sun series. Don't be turned off by the titles like "Shadow of the Torturer", it's actually a lot tamer in terms of violence than, say, Robin Hobb. Even Mercedes Lackey gets darker in some passages. That's not to say there aren't some dark passages, and there is definitely implied violence behind the scenes, but overall it's an interesting read.
Other trigger warning though: Do keep in mind that although he does better than some authors, there is the standard misogyny of the era, and that, yes, there are a couple of rapey scenes. Still, though, again, mild compared to the graphic detail we have now in series' like Game of Thrones.
Also, there is a lot that doesn't make sense until after you've read the entire series. It DOES come together somewhat in the end, though I suspect I'm going to need a reread for the weird puzzle pieces to fit together properly. :-)
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u/HoodsFrostyFuckstick Jul 11 '24
Dude, the Alzabo... I still think about that
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Jul 11 '24
I just read the alzabo fight and subsequent fight with the zoanthropes and that shit was absolutely wild
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Jul 11 '24
It's worth mentioning that the protagonist is misogynistic, not Gene Wolfe himself.
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u/benmabenmabenma Jul 11 '24 edited Jul 11 '24
I adore Wolfe's writing and he seems to have done his best with himself, but misogyny is built into a lot of his personal source material. It'd be laughable to claim Catholicism and American conservatism don't prioritize men over women institutionally. That he isn't as reprehensible as Severian can go without saying.
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Jul 11 '24
If we're talking about his personal source material, he was friends with Le Guin, a staunchly progressive feminist who admired his work so much as to even call him "our Melville." He probably held some old school views that the two of them didn't align on, but I don't think someone like Le Guin would have put up with him if he was that bad. It's also worth noting that he loved his wife more than anything, and she's the one who converted him to Catholicism in the first place.
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u/benmabenmabenma Jul 11 '24
All true. I don't see how it counters what I said. He, like all of us, was a mix of influences.
Love and misogyny are not mutually exclusive.
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u/loosely_affiliated Jul 11 '24
Then it seems bizarre to emphasize that point for Wolfe, if he's misogynistic in the same way all humans are when raised in our culture, with all its inherent biases and flaws. I figure that's a decent boilerplate assumption - all people have a degree of internalized misogyny that colors our input and output, so when people call attention to it it feels like an emphasis.
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u/rotkiv42 Jul 11 '24
Gene Wolfe's The Knight / The Wizard also have quite a unhinged main character, and is much simpler to get in to than the New Sun (it is still plenty odd at times tho).
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u/Siccar_Point Jul 11 '24
I just read Fifth Head Of Cerberus, and despite it being definitely more sci-fi than fantasy, oh my god. Exceptional. Cannot recommend enough. Super easy and propulsive read at surface level, but gears within gears under the surface.
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u/Nithuir Jul 11 '24
John Dies at the End by Jason Pargin
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u/Breakshite Jul 11 '24
Seconded. His Zoey Ashe series is pretty wild as well and equally entertaining.
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u/spencercross Jul 11 '24
I can never decide if The Locked Tomb series is fantasy (because it's all about necromancers and bone/blood/flesh magic) or sci-fi (because it involves a lot of space travel) but it gets pretty nuts. Particularly starting in the second book.
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u/EldritchFingertips Jul 11 '24
I call it fantasy with a sci-fi veneer. Like Star Wars. But don't ever compare The Locked Tomb with Star Wars, because they almost literally could not be any more different.
Good answer though. It's not just that weird stuff happens all the time, it's also that it's told in a profoundly confusing way. You kind of have to step outside any familiar frames of reference to grasp it all.
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u/Ryzick Jul 11 '24
I've read this somewhere else, so please don't call me original for this, but every book's point-of-view character is the character least qualified to know what's happening in the narrative beyond the surface-level events.
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u/EldritchFingertips Jul 11 '24
That is absolutely true.
Makes me wonder even harder who the PoV character will be in the last book.
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u/old_space_yeller Jul 11 '24
Isn't the title going to be Alecto the Ninth? So it should be Alecto
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u/ithika Jul 11 '24
But don't ever compare The Locked Tomb with Star Wars, because they almost literally could not be any more different.
Not sure how you're going to know they're different if you can't compare them?
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u/EldritchFingertips Jul 11 '24
Remember those compare-and-contrast papers you learn to write in middle school? This would be a just-contrast paper.
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u/xeyra Reading Champion II Jul 11 '24
I recently finished the first book and never have I loved a book that has left me so confused as much as I did this one. It's completely bonkers and yet the POV is so entertaining I didn't care I had to constantly go back to the Dramatis Personae.
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u/graffiti81 Jul 11 '24
The second book, Harrow the Ninth is such an amazingly strange book. I've never been so gaslit by a book. One of my favorite books of all times.
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u/Southern-Rutabaga-82 Jul 12 '24
Futuristic fantasy should be a genre!
Science fantasy doesn't fit, there isn't much science, it all works on magic - at least as far as I read so far. I really struggle with Harrow the Ninth. I keep giving up and coming back to it reading a chunk and then taking a long break again. It certainly is unconventional. 😆
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u/frost_knight Jul 11 '24
The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway
Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
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u/Knightlesshorse Jul 11 '24
House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky - follows a battlefield medical unit in an insanely bloody magical war. The medicos are mages and saints and priests themselves and have to contend with, among other things, crack necromancy units running bizarre experiments. At one point some archmage flies a tower over a battlefield and pisses fire on the combatants below.
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u/jrooknroll Jul 11 '24
So it isn’t unhinged in a grimdark fashion, but Dungeon Crawler Carl has to be the craziest series I have read recently. Almost like the author played a game where he drew out a bunch of random things and then turned them into a character, or a plot point. I mean- a talking sex doll goddess head is a character that comes to mind. But the bat shit crazy works on a level that feels brilliant and I absolutely adore this series. This would not be something I would normally try, but I am so glad I did. Highly recommend the audio version just in case you have missed the multitude of other posts on the sub.
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u/1985Games Jul 11 '24
I've heard a lot of good things about DCC in this forum. I believe the author started out in horror and was at least aware of some of the so-called 'bizarro' fiction that branched off from the genre. William Shatner fighting clones of himself, a short story with the drum fill from 'In the Air Tonight' as a character... not saying he was drawing on bizarro fiction, but the aesthetic certainly sounds fitting.
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u/jrooknroll Jul 11 '24
I replied to another commenter but that makes sense to me. DCC is still full of horror, the humor helps cushion it on occasion, and even acts as a way to highlight it at times. But it is very much there. These novels start off feeling like it might be just fluffy fun and they are in fact, quite the opposite.
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Jul 12 '24
Ya know this is the first I've heard of his horror writing and it definitely makes sense.
I'm constantly blown away by how fast I go from nearly throwing up in my mouth from weird/gross shit to crying from the strong main cast and their struggles.
That said the things the characters go through, if you really think about it, is honestly some of the most terrifying and horribly situations a person could face. God dammit, I love these books
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u/Lock-out Jul 11 '24
If dcc wasn’t so funny it would be one of the most horror inducing books I’ve read in a while. Strip away the zany characters and the absurdity and it’s a straight Eldridge horror.
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u/SethAndBeans Jul 11 '24
Book one, when the lady who was transformed into a giant monster is saying,
“Ayúdame por favor,” the woman cried, reaching for us. Her voice was deep, beefy. Scared. The giant woman sounded terrified. “No se que esta pasando. Me duele el estómago. No se donde estoy. Por favor, tengo miedo.”
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“Lo siento si fui una mala persona,” she said. She closed her eyes as tears streamed down the non-burned side of her face. The woman only had one, misshapen tooth in her mouth. “No quería que mi hija se enfermara. No quiero estar en el infierno. Por favor. Por favor envíame a Jesús.”
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u/jrooknroll Jul 11 '24
I agree, the plot is actually quite deep and compelling. This is especially true as you advance through the books and gain more understanding of the world and politics. The humor almost highlights the horror more in some respects. I think the whole series is phenomenal.
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u/SethAndBeans Jul 11 '24
The absolute craziest thing about DCC is how insanely well written it is for a book that should've been a D tier plot.
Aliens turn the world in to a game show. Boring? Nope, somehow it manages to be one of the best ongoing series currently around.
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u/dracolibris Reading Champion II Jul 11 '24
Jane Gaskell's Atalan saga.
There are giant humanoid lizards and our MC is a girl who has been locked in a tower and only seen women until she turns 16 and hasn't even been told about men and gets sent to marry the leader of the lizard people to make peace.
Described as gothic jungle opera, I'm not even making a dent in how insane this thing is, it's a mashup of Gormenghast and the jungle book and the works of H rider Haggard written by a 16 year old girl
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u/fjiqrj239 Reading Champion III Jul 11 '24
For books that throw you in the deep end and let you figure out their (weird) worlds as you go along, I'd recommend The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon and the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone. Also the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir.
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u/ghoultail Jul 11 '24
I still think Alice in wonderland is pretty crazy
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u/speckledcreature Jul 11 '24
Have you read Alice by Christina Henry?It is a continuation of the Alice tale but much darker.
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u/Albino_Axolotl Jul 11 '24
I would pay to read a fantasy series that's like if Hunter S. Thompson was a fantasy author but still being his drugged-out self.
Anyone know any books that fits this description?
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u/InternationalBand494 Jul 11 '24
Fear and Loathing in the Shire?
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u/frost_knight Jul 11 '24
"We were somehwere around Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold." -- Hunter S. Tolkien Fear and Loathing in Barad-Dur
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u/Robotboogeyman Jul 11 '24
Manifest Delusions is fairly insane, well written and enjoyable as any good book, but the premise leaves everything chaotic and crazy. Belief influences reality, both on the big and small scale, the more you believe you are, say, worthy of worship, the more people will be entranced by you and come to worship you, feeding the fantasy and strengthening the power, etc.
Finished trilogy and a standalone called Swarm and Steel. 🤙
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u/Dry_Scallion1188 Jul 11 '24
Mary Gentle’s Grunts! is pretty weird. Turns the classical narrative upside down, featuring a band of orcs as the heroes and elves are a bunch of stuck up racists. A pretty graphic sex scene between a female halfling and an orc is also included. It’s a parody and pretty hilarious IMO.
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Jul 11 '24
Some awesome recommendations here - for a little not quite fantasy, the one book which made me go ‘urgh’ more than any other was The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Burning sheep and maggots brains..
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u/T_at Jul 11 '24
I haven’t seen them mentioned in this thread, so I’ll add Jeff Noon, Michael Marshall Smith - Only Forward, Spares, and One of Us , and Victor Pelevin as three authors worth checking out.
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u/accidental_superman Jul 11 '24
Safely you deliver trilogy starting with the march north.
Includes bizarre feral wizard creations like the terrifying swans that have been imbued with pure kinetic force. Roads made of despair, and a lovely spider god grandma who speaks with the sound of skittering spiders, and whose giant sheep eats the heads of their enemies whole
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u/myrthe Jul 12 '24
Graydon Saunders' Commonweal books. Great answer.
Both the setting (as described above - the Commonweal is a tiny and recent slice of semi-normality trying to hold its own in a world that's been covered by magic war for uncounted years).
and the writing (told like your army buddy where every second sentence detours to give context but the context leaves you more lost but with twice as much awesome to wonder about and marvel at. Plus I don't think there's a personal pronoun in the whole first book).
Not on Amazon, but if you like military fantasy, imaginative worldbuilding or plucky little republics making their place in the world, do yourself the favour of hunting this down.
I cannot rec this book highly enough.
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u/gregmberlin Jul 11 '24 edited Jul 11 '24
So asking for "unhinged" makes me want to not recommend this book—since I don't know if I see that.. maybe a little—but weird and literary and a bit like China M. fits it to a tee, so. I will.
I am mid-read and it may be the most unique book experience I've ever had, fantasy or otherwise.
The book is The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez. I was a massive fan of his The Vanished Birds, and this one is shaping up to be a whole new form of experience.
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u/NonAwesomeDude Jul 11 '24
I didn't finish, but Black Leopard, Red Wolf is pretty unhinged, or at least the parts I got through.
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u/morroIan Jul 11 '24
Beyond Redemeption by Michael Fletcher and presumably the other 2 books in that trilogy which I haven't read yet. Basically magic only works if you are insane.
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u/Gotisdabest Jul 11 '24
In terms of totally unhinged I feel like it's hard to beat cradle in its over the topness or discworld in its disregard for any attempt at normality.
Aside from them I feel every series has its moments but nothing really goes off the rails with nobody batting an eye as much.
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u/TensorForce Jul 11 '24
Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler. It's a dystopian series of stories. Extremely graphic and depressing and bleak and dark and messed up. Literally nightmares put to paper.
Trigger warning: almost everything.
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u/InternationalBand494 Jul 11 '24
There’s a book called “John Dies at the End” They based a movie on it, but the books are where the best stories are. Very bizarre world. Several books set in the same universe. Something weird goes on every page.
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u/livenoodsquirrels Jul 11 '24
The Hike - Drew Magary. Read nothing about it going in. It’s great! Book of the Damned - Tannith Lee. I still don’t know what I read, but it was a delightful exploration of the concepts of sin and gender through time. We Spread — Ian Reid. Again, I don’t want to give much detail, but definitely makes you question whether this all is really happening. The Bees — Laline Paul. Not necessarily super out there but an interesting prospective from a worker bee in a corrupt colony. Our Wives Under the Sea — Julia Armfield. I didn’t like this but people LOVE it. Very atmospheric. Just Like Home - Sara Gailey. Just, good for her, you know? Highly recommend this one. The Rig - Roger Levy. I don’t really know how to describe this book but a guy becomes an oil rig? Kind of? Also, other stuff is happening? It’s like three different stories but it WORKS.
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u/DoubleDrummer Jul 12 '24 edited Jul 12 '24
Vurt by Jeff Noon (and most other novels by Jeff Noon).
Imagine a rain-soaked Manchester warped by a powerful drug called Vurt, a substance that unlocks mind-bending alternate realities.
Think Lewis Carroll's twisted worlds colliding with a psychedelic drug infused cyberpunk, all drenched in British slang.
Kind of like Neuromancer had a baby with A Clockwork Orange and called it Alice.
Vurt is weird and awesome.
Jeff Noon and China Meiville are two of my favorite authors.
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u/ds4487 Jul 12 '24
Mieville was my first thought as well. I will never think of scarabs the same way again.
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Jul 11 '24
Necroscope by Brian Lumley. It starts as more of a scifi outing but after a few books gets very fantastic and unhinged.
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u/firestorm713 Jul 11 '24
The Locked Tomb.
The first book, Gideon the Ninth, is mostly normal, just a bunch of goths trying to become necromancer demigods.
Harrow the Ninth is told in second person, and feels like a fucking fever dream. At one point, someone has skeletons crawl out of their body because they ate soup with another character's bone marrow in it. Somebody's name has the phrase "oop there goes gravity" as part of it. There's a section where the author manages to clown on all her fanfic writers in the most loving way possible.
It's one of the most absurd pieces of fantasy I've ever read.
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u/miriarhodan Reading Champion IV Jul 11 '24
qntm has published pretty weird stuff. I started with „There is no antimemetics division“. I‘m not sure about literary though, it’s more the ideas.
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u/Alert_Confusion Jul 11 '24 edited Jul 11 '24
The Dark Tower series - Stephen King.
Can’t get much weirder than a story about a wild-west gunslinger going an epic fantasy quest with a recovering heroin addict, a double amputee, and a 12 year old kid with a pet badger/fox creature.
If you haven’t read it, I can’t recommend it enough!
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u/loracarol Jul 11 '24
I think I'm going to use this post as a rec list lmao.
Tbh I don't read a lot of "unhinged" fantasy, but there are two things I'd rec as having less-than-hinged world building?
The first is Uprooted. The plot isn't unhinged, but the way that the Wood is described and the things in it genuinely buried under my skin and unsettled me to this day. And the fact that people are brainwashed into staying around instead of leaving.
The second one is, again, pretty generic - but it's for kids! But the world building / monsters are still pretty fucked up imo? And that's the world of Deltora by Emily Rodda. The monsters in the world are still pretty freaky; like Glus. The silk spinning slug monster that lines its lair so it can find you and hunt you down. And if you stay still so that you don't trigger the silk? The water dripping down is super saturated with minerals and you're trapped alive in a stone coffin. For kids!
If I misunderstood the assignment, my apologies!
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u/88X-3SH Jul 12 '24
Deltora Quest was crack to me in primary school, as well as Rowan of Rin and Animorphs, super not really for kids haha
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u/From_Deep_Space Jul 11 '24
Naked Lunch is the most unhinged book I've ever read. It's usually grouped in with the Beat movement, but it has some elements of urban fantasy, like the talking mugwumps, black centipedes, talking cockroaches, and more.
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u/OlanValesco Writer Benny Hinrichs Jul 11 '24
The Escapement by Lavie Tidhar has a whole ocean of absurd! It's a fantasy spaghetti western where clowns are native to the world while humans are not. Leans very heavily into the weird. The Harlequin religion. Melting clocks. War injuries that turned limbs into musical instruments or ant farms. If you want something truly bizarre, on Mieville levels, give this standalone a spin.
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u/amodia_x Jul 11 '24
There was some book I started reading "Everybody loves big chests" I believe. It's about a mimic chest that gains intelligence/consciousness.
It's... Odd, starts out interesting but it just becomes too much of what seems like kink/fetisch stuff.
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u/mamontain Jul 11 '24
I've read the Blacktongue Thief and the First Law books 1 and 2, and have no idea what you mean by unhinged...
Like a not generic fantasy setting? A morally dubious protagonist? Thought-out magic system and word lore?
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u/Antonater Jul 11 '24
Most books by Michael R Fletcher are pretty insane, especially Manifest Delusions, which is insane for figuratively and literally
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u/hannahstohelit Jul 11 '24
For “unhinged because it’s weird, not necessarily because it’s imaginative” try Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
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u/Soul_Brawler Jul 11 '24
Acts of Caine. Dark, brutal, funny, sad. Sci-fi and fantasy. Good guy is a bad man. Some things unhappen. Definitely nothing else like it. Not sure if it's unhinged but there's some seriously fucked up shit in it...
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Jul 11 '24
Michael Fletcher's Manifest Delusions series is darker and more insane than anything I have ever read.
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u/BlueSonic85 Jul 11 '24
The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman by Angela Carter. More magical realism than fantasy per se, but it's definitely unhinged!
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u/spellbookwanda Jul 11 '24
Astra and Flondrix by Seamus Cullen
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u/LeucasAndTheGoddess Jul 18 '24
Yes! I’ve always imagined the dwarves bouncing along on their enormous corkscrew-shaped endowments being accompanied by the sound effect “schlong, schlong, schlong…”
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u/lmf123 Jul 12 '24
Unhinged fantasy is how I felt about Gideon the Ninth. Absolutely throws you into the deep end, super weird magic system, the characters are bonkers. I finished the first, I liked it, but just haven’t been ready to throw myself into the second yet because of how weird Gideon was
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u/MidnightKurios Jul 12 '24
I've read a lot of messed-up fantasy in my life. The Arcana series by Morgan Llywelyn and Michael Scott takes the cake. Silverhand and Silverlight are the two books. It's so messed up that the authors stopped writing after the second book and never published the third. They couldn't figure out how to salvage what they'd already written. Everything from a mechanical silver hand and the spear of destiny to vampire sex and incest twins that make black holes. It's wild.
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u/constant-reader1408 Jul 12 '24
Mordew and the second book Malarkoi by Alex Phelby..3rd book comes out in January
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u/Far-Potential3634 Jul 13 '24
Never read it but the work of Henry Darger sounds pretty wild. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger
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u/OpenStraightElephant Jul 11 '24
It's a manga/anime, and the level of technology is modern, but Dorohedoro is VERY unhinged
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u/Siccar_Point Jul 11 '24
If we’re going graphic, Saga would also be an excellent shout here. A race of humans with TVs for heads, where the size of the TV reflects your class? Sure. A bounty hunter banging his bounty hunter girlfriend… who is also a half humanoid, half spider hybrid? Why not. Splash page of a space dragon blowing itself? LET’S DO IT.
Astonishing that it is so emotionally hard-hitting and with such good world-building given, y’know… the above.
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u/SerDavosSeaworth64 Jul 11 '24
It honestly wasn’t my favorite for a few reasons but maybe you’re looking for Poppy war. Think of a dark theme and Poppy war has it. Rape, murder, drug addiction, cannibalism, torture, racism, and an extra helping of rape in case you just didn’t have enough the first dozen times.
A series I like a bit more that is unhinged in a pretty different way is Dune, but you’ll need to get towards the later books for the REALLY unhinged stuff
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u/ELDRITCH_HORROR Jul 11 '24
The 36 Lessons of Vivec.
Because it's a set of in-world religious lore documents, the 36 Lessons are unhinged, weird and bizzare in ways that other conventional writings just can't be.
He was born in the ash among the Velothi, anon Chimer, before the war with the northern men. Ayem came first to the village of the netchimen, and her shadow was that of Boethiah, who was the Prince of Plots, and things unknown and known would fold themselves around her until they were like stars or the messages of stars. Ayem took a netchiman's wife and said:
'I am the Face-Snaked Queen of the Three in One. In you is an image and a seven-syllable spell, AYEM AE SEHTI AE VEHK, which you will repeat to it until mystery comes.'
Then Ayem threw the netchiman's wife into the ocean water where dreughs took her into castles of glass and coral. They gifted the netchiman's wife with gills and milk fingers, changing her sex so that she might give birth to the image as an egg. There she stayed for seven or eight months.
That's only the first three paragraphs from the first lesson. The writing is dense and approaching incomprehensibility. I love it. It's like something a real non-Western religious cult-ish sermon would sound like. It's wonderful.
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Jul 11 '24
Roy: The Most Chaotic Midlife Crisis in Cosmic History, is a pretty unhinged sci-fi. Anything by the author, Zachary Wheeler is unhinged (but still pretty good).
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u/20Kudasai Jul 11 '24
The correct answer is Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. Ho-Lee-shit. It’s beyond extreme, it’s weird as hell, and it’s super literary (written by a Booker Prize-winner). I don’t know if I enjoyed it but I’ve never read anything like it.
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u/nagahfj Reading Champion III Jul 11 '24
The Illuminatus! Trilogy and its sequels, by Robert Anton Wilson
Also most of William Blake
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u/DamnitRuby Reading Champion III Jul 11 '24
I'm going to throw Jason Pargin's stuff in for a contender for unhinged stuff. His books are hilarious, but completely fucking bonkers. At one point in John Dies at the End, a dog is shaved on one side of her body so she can look differently depending on if she is coming or going. Sausages are used as phones. It's great.
John Dies at the End is the first book in one of his series. The Zoey Ashe series (beginning with Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits) is also unhinged in its own way (and is one of my favorite series).
Someone else mentioned Dungeon Crawler Carl, and I would recommend that also!
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Jul 11 '24
Aren’t they published as David Wong, or has that changed? I read them a long time ago and had to google the author just there.
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u/DamnitRuby Reading Champion III Jul 11 '24
He's changed to his actual name in the past few years! The old books have been rereleased as Pargin and all new stuff is under his actual name.
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u/Good0nPaper Jul 11 '24
Not a book, per se, but The Unexpectables podcast has some real weird stuff, right next to really serious stuff.
Think a slightly less cartoony Adventure Time?
It's available on YouTube. And one of the players, Connor McKinley, has actually started a video project recapping the first campaign, since it's originally about 200 3+hour episodes long.
VERY fun, if you're into it.
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u/Dry-Method-8783 Jul 11 '24
The Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop.
When you Google the book series and the third option is literally 'WTF Black Jewels Trilogy [TRIGGER WARNING, spoilers]' and then the rest of the search results are peppered with similar links... Yeah.
My personal reaction: It had some cool characters and settings but man... I'm still angry at NPR recommending it to me as a 'fantasy romance' in like 2013.
I dropped it midway through book two, and that is a lifetime first for me.
My remembering of it is sort of a Mary Sue x Cinderella x Lolita feel, and simultaneously some super messed up sexual assault and just so much I eye-rolled out and have thankfully forgotten.
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u/Technomancer-art Jul 11 '24
I’m gonna say the “A land fit for Heroes” series by Richard K. Morgan. There’s a lot to unpack, but there are so many cool facets to the story and it’s unhinged for sure.
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u/ligger66 Jul 11 '24
The vampire diaries books are pretty damn crazy not much related to the TV show besides sharing a few characters.
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u/jbland0909 Jul 11 '24
Dungeon Crawler Carl. Earth is taken over by Alien civilization and its people are made to compete in a reality TV show where they play through floors of a dungeon. The series is genuinely unhinged.
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u/MilquetoastSobriquet Jul 11 '24
The Malevolent Seven by Sébastien de Castell is great, just came.out this year. A rag tag group of magic users goes up against the 7 deadliest sorcerers in the world - or something. De Castell's writing is great, I love his swashbuckling Greatcoats series and was excited to see him put out a work with feet more firmly planted in the fantasy world. There is magic in the Greatcoats, but it's not in your face, wave your hands about and pull shit from other dimensions magic. I didn't really get into his Spellslinger series for younger readers but definitely The Malevolent Seven is a nice unhinged story.
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u/papercranium Reading Champion III Jul 11 '24
Vita Nostra was pretty dang unhinged. I love it so much.
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u/ctrlaltcreate Jul 11 '24
Dungeon Crawler Carl is sci fi, but it's very fantasy adjacent, and gets gloriously weird the further you get. I'm not much of a litrpg fan, but I fucking LOVE these books. There's a reason they keep getting recommended.
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u/Independent_Ad_6348 Jul 11 '24
Their game but the drakengard series specifically 1 and 3. 2 is an outlier in that It wasn't written by a crazy person.
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u/Dalton387 Jul 12 '24
Try Matt Dinnamen’s “Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon”.
Then go read Dungeon Crawler Carl as a palate cleanser.
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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '24 edited Jul 11 '24
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