Riot Recommendation: 60 of Your Favorite Strange and Compelling Books!
Condom dresses and space helmets have debuted on fashion runways. A dead body becomes the trend when a coat made of human skin saunters down fashion’s biggest stage. The body is identified as Annabelle Leigh, the teenager who famously disappeared over a decade ago from her boyfriend’s New York City mansion. This new evidence casts suspicion back on the former boyfriend, Cecil LeClaire. Now a monk, he is forced to return to his dark and absurd childhood home to clear his name. He teams up with Ava Germaine, a renegade ex-model. And together, they investigate the depraved and lawless modeling industry behind Cecil’s family fortune.
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t watch that ball drop on NYE 2019 and think to myself, “Know what? This year we’re gonna stay inside a lot, fight over science, and debate the necessity of the USPS!” Alas, 2020 had other plans. While longing for a future in which the weirdest plot twists are in the pages of my book and not just my Twitter feed, I asked you all to share the strangest, most compelling books you’ve ever read—and over 400 of you replied! I distilled those responses down to a manageable size to share with all of your fellow weirdos. Without further ado, here are 60 of the strangest books you’ve ever read!
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
The All of It by Jeannette Haien
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Bats of the Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Bloodchild by Octavia Butler
The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Boy Toy by Barry Lyga
The City and the City by China Mieville
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Color Of Bee Larkham’s Murder by Sarah J. Harris
A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill
The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund
Ducks Newburyport by Lucy Ellman
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
Eye of Cat by Roger Zelazny
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
Jerusalem by Alan Moore
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
Kangaroo Notebook by Kōbō Abe
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
The Last days of Paris by China Mieville
The Library on Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Lullaby by Chuck Palaniuk
The Magus by John Fowles
A Medicine for Melancholy by Ray Bradbury
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill
Night by Elie Wiesel
Night Film by Marisha Pessl
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Obscene Bird of Night by Jose Donoso
The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia
Perfume by Patrick Suskind
Prologos by Jonathan Bayliss
Reincarnation Blue by Michael Poore
The Revisionaries by A.R. Moxon
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt
The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Suffer the Children by Craig Dilouie
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
