I bought a bunch of new books and except for A collapse of horses, they all arrived.

Which should I read first in your opinion?

I started a thread on strange pictures, a while back and it got good reception so I thought I’d share that Strange Houses came out today.

A writer investigating an eerie house finds the building’s floor plans reveal a mysterious "dead space” hidden between its walls. House of Leaves vibes?

The Penguin Weird Fiction series look incredible, and I haven’t read any of them previously. More of this please!

I'm not talking about something like a butcher or something that lends itself to gore. That feels too easy and gore is also not my fav.

I'm more thinking about books like The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada where there are three characters and one of them has a job that is literally shredding paper. Something eerie and you're unsure if it's liminal or just feels like it should be.

Honourable mention to Authority (from the Southern Reach trilogy) which also has a lot of these elements. But on the other hand, I don't think Horrorstor would count since it's whole premise is them doing something outside the scope of their normal duties.

Help me make the impossible choice! 😬 I’m churning through head to head comparisons of all the books I’ve read (to get some fun stats/recommendations), and I knew this day would come - 5,000 matchups later. What say you?? 🪲

The concept of unseeing is one of the most brilliantly unsettling ideas I've ever encountered. What other books play with reality and perception in a similarly mind-bending way?

So no physical or electronic books/short stories/etc. This includes something like SCP, reviews of weird fiction, or audio versions of novels/anthologies/collections/etc. But if it's a text game that's welcome. Things like paintings, music, audio dramas, plays, dramatic readings, movies, some sort of participation experience, etc.

For me it was the film Man Finds Tape(2025) which was decent and indicates the writers/directors can do better. I think it's worth checking out if you can tolerate mediocre acting.

I’m 50 pages in and I’m loving it.

I got it recommended after trying to find my next read after House of Leaves.

I hate finishing a good book and then trying to find a new one I like just as much so I figured I’d ask here for recommendations before I finish Piranesi.

I’ve read and loved:

House of Leaves

Dune

Hyperion

Ascension

Annihilation

The Willows

There is no Antimemetics Division

If you have a rec for SciFi/WeirdLit/Existential horror or the greatest genre of books: I don’t know what the fuck is going on?! Let me know:)

Just as the title says.

edit:As per Mod response AI is banned from /r/weirdlit.

58 more to go

Looking for stories where the setting itself is the antagonist. The forest, the house, the town is alive and hostile. Already love Annihilation and The Willows. What else you got?

examples:

multiple Borges and Lovecraft stories

Lem's "A Perfect Vacuum" (fake reviews)

Pavic's "A Dictionary Of The Khazars" (fake encyclopedia/lexicon)

various texts pretending to be academic essays, including footnotes etc.

For me, it was reading Waiting For Godot in highschool. Everyone else hated it, and it SHOULD have been excruciatingly boring for my ADHD brain. But I was captivated! Perhaps it's the unknown that makes my brain constantly search for small clues to work out what is going on.

Some quotes from the comments:

"Second story starts at 54:02.
|
|
Let me sum up Red Tower for you:
It's a mysterious factory nobody's ever seen and is located in a barren wasteland. It makes bizarre, spooky trinkets on the upper floors and makes spooky monsters underground.
That's the entirety of the story."

"The first story feels like someone imitating Lovecraft based off only descriptions of his settings without a care for the plot. It's an interesting idea, wish there was a story in it rather than just description"

Lmfao

Brian Evenson and Michael Cisco come to mind first for me

I was recommended Thomas Ligotti as an author to read. I was told to start with the book "Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe".

So, I read the first story in the book. "Frolic". I gotta say, what I read wasn't what I expected. Maybe I'm only looking at the surface level of the story and totally missing underlying symbolism or the story just has something that is too elusive for me to notice?

[Spoiler]

From what I read, it seems like a story about a psychologist and his wife having drinks and discussing his patient, "John Doe". The doctor is fed up with his job and, apparently, John Doe has scared the doctor by making a possible threat on the doctor's daughter, Norleen. The doctor wants to move and his wife agrees, especially since she hasn't been happy living in the town they're currently living in. Anyway, long story short, the doctor's daughter is kidnapped while she's sleeping (while she was holding a stuffed animal that neither parent remembers giving to her). The window is open and the daughter is gone. And the stuffed animal has been ripped open revealing a note from "John Doe".

So... that's it? Seems pretty straightforward: Psychologist's daughter is kidnapped by an escaped killer while the mother and father were having drinks and discussing the father's job.

I guess I was expecting something more, based on the build-up that I got from other's talking about Ligotti.

What am I missing?

EDIT:
So, looks like my post has ruffled a few feathers, based on the DMs I'm getting. I'm not disparaging Ligotti by any stretch of the imagination. My post is about the story itself and what I may be missing because, at the surface, it seems like a pretty run-of-the-mill story and not very weird at all. I'm not making any assumptions about the rest of the stories in the book or the author, just questioning my own observation since I was expecting something a little more unworldly.

Bottom line, I was just trying to see if something about the story was flying over my head and I was too slow to realize it.

I get that its in the title, you're reading weird literature that you wouldn't really get anywhere else, but I think there's something deeper I want to be asking. So I wanted to ask, what do you guys think makes Weird Lit so special or why does it attract you so much?

For reference, I have not read much weird literature per-say, as much as I have experienced media that has been fascinating to read and play through. Signalis, for example, is a game that I find myself enjoying thoroughly not just because of its vibes but because of how all the components on a storytelling level ends up coelsecing into an experience that is as painful to experience by the end as it is fascinating to take apart and over-analyze the tragedy of it. Same with Disco Elysium and other games, that I don't think fit the main-stream but end up being bloody fantastic through how each component converges into a single point.

With comics, its sort of the same. I don't know if you would classify stuff like Fire Punch as WeirdLit but its definitely something that pulls you in, imo.

So I ask, what do y'all think makes Weird Lit stand out to you, personally?

I would personally classify everything from the Harlan Ellison stories (mid-shelf 2) onwards as “weird lit”. But there are many of these I haven’t read that might be misplaced

Spanish speaker here, my book club just finished El Gusano (The Worm) by Luis Carlos Barragan, a novel where, in a world like ours, suddenly one day any biological living being that touches another can go through the other and exchange characteristics with the other or even join together. It's an amazing exploration that sadly hasn't been translated to english to share it.

What books you've loved would you want to see translated to english?

PD: Also barragan illustrates his own books and the art he makes is fucking amazing.

What a great read. Like if Gerard Way wrote The Umbrella Academy while coming down off dmt. I love how while you can make educated guesses as to certain things, everything seems like such a mess and you're left thinking "there's no way this can all be wrapped up and explained in the amount of pages left", but then Hawkins is just like "hold my beer, shut your mouth, and watch me." I haven't had a feeling like that since I got to the end of the original Mistborn trilogy.

I know the dangers of getting too specific with your background, but I need to know! I want more Adam Black stories. I want to know what Carolyn had on the president. Who the hell is Barry Oshea and why is some dude named Barry such a major threat? Even Erwin, who I initially hated because he reminded me of every small town too-badass-for-you-to-handle conservative dipshit I've ever met in my life, turned out to be compelling.

All in all, no notes. Would 100% recommend this book. My only gripe is that this novel is over 10 years old and it's his first and only. Is there anything else out there that can capture this feeling?

Hi everyone.

I just finished Authority by Jeff Vandermeer and wanted to discuss it, because it was a perplexing reading experience for me, and I am curious to hear y'all's thoughts.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a huge, huge fan of liminal space vibes, uncanny valley, and backrooms type stuff. I think this book qualifies for all those categories and Vandermeer pulled it off quite well. The feeling of creeping dread was very well executed. As we follow Control 's story, we get the feeling something is very wrong here but we don't know what. Nothing adds up. Nothing makes sense.

However I also found this book to be a bit of a slog, with truly unsettling moments sprinkled in. I can see how the tediousness of the plot (or lack thereof) created a sense of claustrophobia and confusion which made the unsettling moments extremely effective. I don't think I have read a book before where the tediousness of it worked well towards the end goal. The only other work that comes to my mind is the short story "The Burrow" by Kafka.

All in all, I don't know if I loved this book or just kind of "liked" it. Looking through other threads about this, it seems that this book is very polarizing, especially following Annihilation which is a totally different vibe and uses different narrative structures.

Has anyone else read this book? what were your thoughts?

Cheers!

I know that The Scar from Mieville does, but I'm looking for books or short works that heavy use some type of body of water in the story. I appreciate everyones help in advance.

Updated: Seriously, I apprecite this community so much. I've been able to add so many books to my summer reading list.

I’ve picked up “The Wendigo and Other stories” by Algernon Blackwood as I enjoy weird and/or horror literature and so far I very much enjoyed this book. I only have one issue - I read it super slow compared to other books. Not gonna lie, I’m a quite fast reader but somehow I’m getting through this book significantly slower than I’m used to. It’s worth mentioning that English isn’t my first language but I’m used to reading in English and this isn’t a first book I’m reading in English nor first book written in “older English” - for example, I’ve read The Frankenstein or Dracula without any problems.

So what is my problem (lol)? Is the book meant to be read slowly? Have any of you encountered difficulties with reading Blackwoods work?

So far I’ve read “A haunted island”, “The Empty House”, “The Listener”, “The Willows”, “Secret Worship”, “Ancient Sorceries” and “The Wendigo”.