39 Best 「weird fiction」 Books of 2024| Books Explorer

In this article, we will rank the recommended books for weird fiction. The list is compiled and ranked by our own score based on reviews and reputation on the Internet.
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Table of Contents
  1. Behold the Ape
  2. The Scar
  3. Lives of the Monster Dogs (FSG Classics)
  4. Tools Of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
  5. The Wasp Factory: A Novel
  6. The Drifting Classroom: Perfect Edition, Vol. 1 (1)
  7. The Natashas
  8. Collected Fictions
  9. The Incarnations: A Novel
  10. Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (P.S.) (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
Other 29 books
No.1
100

Behold the Ape

Morrow, James
WordFire Press LLC

An acerbic, entertaining caper of evolution, gangsters, Darwin’s brain, and the Golden Age of Hollywood.When Sonya Orlova, a successful 1930s horror-film actress, crosses paths with a gorilla whose brain has been swapped for the frozen cerebrum of the late Charles Darwin, the two are inspired to write and produce evolution-themed monster movies—with Sonya in her greatest role, Korgora the Ape Woman!As this offbeat and controversial Hollywood series finds a devoted cult audience, Sonia’s relationship with her strange simian collaborator acquires an intensity neither could have imagined.Then disaster strikes, as zealous opponents to Darwin’s ideas contrive to put the Ape Woman out of business.By turns satiric and romantic, madcap and thoughtful, Behold the Ape is at once an outré love story, a tribute to classic monster movies, and a science-fictional celebration of that beleaguered institution we call public education.

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No.2
100

The Scar

Miéville, China
Pan Books

A human cargo bound for servitude in exile...A pirate city hauled across the oceans...A hidden miracle about be revealed...This is the story of a prisoner's journey. The search for the island of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing beast in the seas, and ultimately for a fabled place - a massive wound in reality, a source of unthinkable power and danger. From the author of Perdido Street Station, another colossal fantasy of incredible diversity and spellbinding imagination, which was acclaimed in The Times Literary Supplement as: 'An astonishing novel, guaranteed to astound and enthral the most jaded palate...exhilarating, sometimes very moving, occasionally shocking, always humane and thought-provoking'.

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No.3
100

The twentieth anniversary of a postmodern classic, blending the gothic novel with bleeding-edge science fiction, by the author of King NyxAfter a century of cruel experimentation, a haunted race of genetically and biomechanically uplifted canines are created by the followers of a mad nineteenth-century Prussian surgeon. Possessing human intelligence, speaking human language, fitted with prosthetic hands, and walking upright on their hind legs, the monster dogs are intended to be super soldiers. Rebelling against their masters, however, and plundering the isolated village where they were created, the now wealthy dogs make their way to New York, where they befriend the young NYU student Cleo Pira and―acting like Victorian aristocrats―become reluctant celebrities.Unable to reproduce, doomed to watch their race become extinct, the highly cultured dogs want no more than to live in peace and be accepted by contemporary society. Little do they suspect, however, that the real tragedy of their brief existence is only now beginning.Told through a variety of documents―diaries, newspaper clippings, articles for Vanity Fair, and even a portion of an opera libretto―Kirsten Bakis’s Lives of the Monster Dogs uses its science-fictional premise to launch a surprisingly emotional exploration of the great themes: love, death, and the limits of compassion. A contemporary classic, this edition features a new introduction by Jeff VanderMeer.

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No.4
88

The latest groundbreaking tome from Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek.From the author:“For the last two years, I’ve interviewed more than 200 world-class performers for my podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. The guests range from super celebs (Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.) and athletes (icons of powerlifting, gymnastics, surfing, etc.) to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists. For most of my guests, it’s the first time they’ve agreed to a two-to-three-hour interview. This unusual depth has helped make The Tim Ferriss Show the first business/interview podcast to pass 100 million downloads.“This book contains the distilled tools, tactics, and ‘inside baseball’ you won’t find anywhere else. It also includes new tips from past guests, and life lessons from new ‘guests’ you haven’t met.“What makes the show different is a relentless focus on actionable details. This is reflected in the questions. For example: What do these people do in the first sixty minutes of each morning? What do their workout routines look like, and why? What books have they gifted most to other people? What are the biggest wastes of time for novices in their field? What supplements do they take on a daily basis?“I don’t view myself as an interviewer. I view myself as an experimenter. If I can’t test something and replicate results in the messy reality of everyday life, I’m not interested.“Everything within these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion. I’ve used dozens of the tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration.“I created this book, my ultimate notebook of high-leverage tools, for myself. It’s changed my life, and I hope the same for you.”

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No.5
83

The polarizing literary debut by Scottish author Ian Banks, The Wasp Factory is the bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath.Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least:Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again.It was just a stage I was going through.

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No.6
83

The definitive edition, featuring an all-new translation and deluxe hardcover design that reestablish Kazuo Umezz’s The Drifting Classroom as a timeless horror classic.In the aftermath of a massive earthquake, a Japanese elementary school is transported into a hostile world where the students and teachers are besieged by terrifying creatures and beset by madness.Out of nowhere, an entire school vanishes, leaving nothing but a hole in the ground. While parents mourn and authorities investigate, the students and teachers find themselves not dead but stranded in a terrifying wasteland where they must fight to survive.

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No.7
81

The Natashas

Moskovich, Yelena
Dzanc Books

Béatrice, a solitary young jazz singer from a genteel Parisian suburb, meets a mysterious woman named Polina, who visits her at night and whispers in her ear: "There are people who leave their bodies and their bodies go on living without them. These people are named Natasha."César, a lonely Mexican actor, receives the opportunity of a lifetime: a role as a serial killer on a French TV series. But as he prepares for the audition, he finds himself falling in love with the psychopath he is to play. Step by step, Béatrice and César are drawn into a labyrinth of visions and warnings, haunted by a group of young women who all share the same name: Natasha.A startlingly original novel that recalls the unsettling visual worlds of Cindy Sherman and David Lynch and the writing of Angela Carter and Haruki Murakami, The Natashas establishes Yelena Moskovich as one of the most exciting young writers of her generation.

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No.8
81

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume“An event, and cause for celebration.”—The New York TimesA Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paperFor some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books.Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius.For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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No.9
80

New York Times Notable Book of 2015Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2015Finalist for the 2015 Kirkus Prize for FictionWinner of a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered PrizeHailed by The New York Times for its “wildly ambitious...dazzling use of language” and “mesmerizing storytelling,” The Incarnations is a “brilliant, mind-expanding, and wildly original novel” (Chris Cleave) about a Beijing taxi driver whose past incarnations over one thousand years haunt him through searing letters sent by his mysterious soulmate.Who are you? you must be wondering. I am your soulmate, your old friend, and I have come back to this city of sixteen million in search of you.So begins the first letter that falls into Wang’s lap as he flips down the visor in his taxi. The letters that follow are filled with the stories of Wang’s previous lives—from escaping a marriage to a spirit bride, to being a slave on the run from Genghis Khan, to living as a fisherman during the Opium Wars, and being a teenager on the Red Guard during the cultural revolution—bound to his mysterious “soulmate,” spanning one thousand years of betrayal and intrigue.As the letters continue to appear seemingly out of thin air, Wang becomes convinced that someone is watching him—someone who claims to have known him for over a century. And with each letter, Wang feels the watcher growing closer and closer…Seamlessly weaving Chinese folklore, history, literary classics, and the notion of reincarnation, thisis a taut and gripping novel that reveals the cyclical nature of history as it hints that the past is never truly settled.

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No.10
79

“H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”―Stephen KingThe most important tales of the godfather of the modern horror genre―a master who influenced the works of a generation of writers including Stephen King and Anne Rice―are gathered in one volume by National Book Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates.Combining the 19th-century gothic sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe with a daring internal vision, Lovecraft’s tales foretold a psychically troubled world to come. Set in a meticulously wrought, historically grounded New England landscape, his harrowing stories explore the collapse of sanity beneath the weight of chaotic events. Lovecraft’s universe is a frightening shadow world were reality and nightmare intertwine, and redemption can come only from below. For aficionados and a new generation of 21st-century readers , Tales of H. P. Lovecraft is a classic not to be missed.

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No.11
79

A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAACThe Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson).Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers―they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding―but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

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No.12
78

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Seattle Times, The Kansas City Star, and Philadelphia City PaperWhat if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us?At 8:17 on a Friday night, the Illumination begins. Every wound begins to shine, every bruise to glow and shimmer. And in the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a journal of love notes, written by a husband to his wife, passes into the keeping of Carol Ann Page, and from there through the hands of five other people—a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor. As their stories unfold, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human injury and experience. With the artistry and imagination that have become his trademark, Kevin Brockmeier reveals a world that only he could imagine, casting his gaze on the wounds we bear and the light that radiates from us all.

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No.13
77

Motherfucking Sharks

Carr, Brian Allen
Eraserhead Pr

"One of the greatest things I have put in my brain." - BOOK RIOT"Motherfucking Sharks reads like it was carved into the floor of a sun-baked desert by an old testament prophet with a thirsty knife." - BEN LOORY, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the DayWhere I come from, the children sing a song:Oh the motherfucking sharks Oh they're gonna come to town Oh they're gonna kill the babies Oh they're gonna make you drowned in your bloodOh the motherfucking sharks Oh they're gonna mince the flesh They're gonna swim up and surround you Don't you know you'll never pass the test it's overOh the motherfucking sharks Oh they don't care about the gods And they don't care about the families And they don't care about the cries or tears they're killers.Motherfucking sharks Motherfucking sharks Motherfucking sharks Motherfucking sharks

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No.14
77

Prepare to lose yourself in the heady, mythical expanse of The Vorrh, a daring debut that Alan Moore has called “a phosphorescent masterpiece” and “the current century's first landmark work of fantasy.”Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast—perhaps endless—forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now, a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him. Around them swirl a remarkable cast of characters, including a Cyclops raised by robots and a young girl with tragic curiosity, as well as historical figures, such as writer Raymond Roussel and photographer and Edward Muybridge. While fact and fictional blend, and the hunter will become the hunted, and everyone’s fate hangs in the balance, under the will of the Vorrh.

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No.15
77

The Ceremonies

Klein, T.E.D.
Drugstore Indian Press

SYNOPSISHe stopped, look back, and saw it the monstrous black thing staring at him from the tree . . .This summer sees the long-anticipated re-issue of The Ceremonies, a celebrated masterpiece from a generation ago, now fully corrected by its author. Chalking up the British Fantasy Award for Best First Novel on its original publication back in 1984, The Ceremonies was hailed by Stephen King as the best horror novel since Peter Straub s Ghost Story. It is now included inHorror: 100 Best Books.From the terrifying vision of its opening scene to the breathtaking horror of its climax, The Ceremonies turns our familiar world into a place of malevolent intrigue and ominous design. In the grip of an extraordinary writer, it plumbs the darkest underpinnings of ancient myth and folklore to reveal an undying evil.For graduate student Jeremy Freirs, citified, cynical, yet prone to daydreams, summer is the time to shed a few pounds and finally get some reading done for a course on gothic literature. He's picked just the right place: the small, secluded village of Gilead, New Jersey, only ninety minutes from Manhattan but, with its antique customs and clannish traditions, seemingly centuries away. For farmers Sarr and Deborah Poroth, young members of Gilead's fundamentalist community, the summer threatens a conflict between their passionate natures and the stern dictates of their faith. For Sarr's widowed mother, gifted with second sight, it promises the frightful awakening she's dreaded all her life. And for aspiring dancer Carol Conklin, a naive country girl struggling to survive in the city, it brings not only the first blush of romance but a lucky job with a kindly-looking old man known as Mr. Rosebottom.But Rosie, as he calls himself, bears a more sinister name the Old One and a far more terrifying secret. Though the signs are all about them, he alone knows the invisible design that rules these people's lives as they dance unwittingly toward doom: for in the heat of summer an ancient corruption is stirring, an evil rooted not far from the Poroth farm, yet reaching to the city and beyond. The time has come for the Ceremonies, the monstrous rites that will unleash on a despised creation an age-old promise of apocalypse. And to see the scheme unfold, like some deadly flower, is to watch a nightmare come to life.

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No.16
77

The Daughters

Celt, Adrienne
Liveright Pub Corp

An NPR Best Book of the YearWinner of the 2015 PEN Southwest Book AwardShortlisted for the IAFA Crawford Award“Endlessly powerful. . . . Here is one you should not miss, a gratifying feast in lush, lyrical, and full-throated form.” ―NPR.orgLulu can't sing. Since the traumatic birth of her daughter, the internationally renowned soprano hasn't dared utter a note. She's afraid that her body is too fragile and that she may have lost her talent to a long-dreaded curse afflicting all of the mothers in her family.When Lulu was a child, her strong-willed grandmother Ada filled her head with fables of the family's enchanted history in the Polish countryside. A fantastical lore took hold―an incantatory mix of young love, desperate hope, and one sinister bargain that altered the family's history forever. Since that fateful pact, Ada tells Lulu, each mother in their family has been given a daughter, but each daughter has exacted an essential cost from her mother.Ada was the first to recognize young Lulu's transcendent talent, spotting it early on in their cramped Chicago apartment, then watching her granddaughter ascend to dizzying heights in packed international concert halls. But as the curse predicted, Lulu's mother, a sultry and elusive jazz singer, disappeared into her bitterness in the face of Lulu's superior talent―before disappearing from her family's life altogether. Now, in the early days of her own daughter's life, Lulu now finds herself weighing her overwhelming love for her child against the burden of her family's past.In incandescent prose, debut novelist Adrienne Celt skillfully intertwines the sensuous but precise physicality of both motherhood and music. She infuses The Daughters with the spirit of the rusalka, a bewitching figure of Polish mythology that inspired Dvorák's classic opera. The result is a tapestry of secrets, affairs, and unimaginable sacrifices, revealing a family legacy laced with brilliance, tragedy, and most mysterious and seductive of all―the resonant ancestral lore that binds each mother to the one that came before.

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No.17
77

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

Comyns, Barbara
Dorothy, a publishing project

“Comyns’ novel is deranged in ways that shouldn’t be disclosed.” —Ben MarcusThis is the story of the Willoweed family and the English village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in the drawing-room windows, “quacking their approval” as they sail around the room. “What about my rose beds?” demands Grandmother Willoweed. Her son shouts down her ear-trumpet that the garden is submerged, dead animals everywhere, she will be lucky to get a bunch. Then the miller drowns himself . . . then the butcher slits his throat . . . and a series of gruesome deaths plagues the villagers. The newspaper asks, “Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?” Through it all, Comyns' unique voice weaves a text as wonderful as it is horrible, as beautiful as it is cruel. Originally published in England in 1954, this “overlooked small masterpiece” is a twisted, tragicomic gem.

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No.18
76

How can you solve a murder when the clues are so dumb?Private investigator Trike Augustine may be a brainiac with deductive skills to rival Sherlock Holmes, but they’re not doing him any good at solving the case of a missing gazzilionaire because the clues are so stupefyingly—well, stupid.Meanwhile, his sidekicks—Max the former FBI agent and Lola the artist—don’t quite rise to the level of Dr. Watson, either. For example, when a large, dead pig turns up on Trike’s floor in the middle of the night, none of them can figure out what it means.Meanwhile, the clock is ticking as the astronomical reward being offered diminishes drastically every day.That, plus the increasing reality that their own lives are in danger, lift this astonishing debut beyond its hilarious premise—a smart man befuddled by the idiotic—and turns it into something more than just a smart homage to Sherlock (with maybe a touch of early Jonathan Lethem thrown in). It becomes a compelling and compulsive thriller . . . with the added bonus that the prose is often as breathtaking as the tale.

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No.19
76

Brian Evenson has added an O. Henry Award–winning short story, "Two Brothers," to this controversial book and a new afterword, in which he describes the troubling aftermath of the book's publication in 1994.

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No.20
76

A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it.Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can’t quite place.How he goes about bringing his visions to life–and what happens afterward–makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in recent memory.Remainder is about the secret world each of us harbors within, and what might happen if we were granted the power to make it real.

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No.21
76

Still So Strange

Downum, Amanda
ChiZine Publications

SHORTLISTED FOR A 2019 WORLD FANTASY AWARD!MONSTROUS BARGAINS AND BALLADSDrawing heavily on Lovecraftiana and myth, these are tales of devil’s bargains, love songs to monsters, and the people―human and otherwise―who inhabit liminal spaces. Ghosts, gods, and ghouls make their way as best they can, one step sideways from the mortals around them. Many are connected; some are puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit. Spanning a decade of writing, Still So Strange is Amanda Downum's first collection of short fiction, and includes stories originally released in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales, as well as original, unpublished work.

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No.22
76

The Handmaid’s Tale meets The Hunger Games in this brilliantly imagined debut set in an ancient culture where only the queen may breed and deformity means death.Flora 717 is a sanitation worker, a member of the lowest caste in her orchard hive where work and sacrifice are the highest virtues and worship of the beloved Queen the only religion. But Flora is not like other bees. With circumstances threatening the hive’s survival, her curiosity is regarded as a dangerous flaw but her courage and strength are an asset. She is allowed to feed the newborns in the royal nursery and then to become a forager, flying alone and free to collect pollen. She also finds her way into the Queen’s inner sanctum, where she discovers mysteries about the hive that are both profound and ominous.But when Flora breaks the most sacred law of all—daring to challenge the Queen’s fertility—enemies abound, from the fearsome fertility police who enforce the strict social hierarchy to the high priestesses jealously wedded to power. Her deepest instincts to serve and sacrifice are now overshadowed by an even deeper desire, a fierce maternal love that will bring her into conflict with her conscience, her heart, her society—and lead her to unthinkable deeds.Thrilling, suspenseful and spectacularly imaginative, The Bees gives us a dazzling young heroine and will change forever the way you look at the world outside your window.

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No.23
76

Now an HBO® Series from J.J. Abrams (Executive Producer of Westworld), Misha Green (Creator of Underground) and Jordan Peele (Director of Get Out)The critically acclaimed cult novelist makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy.Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite—heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus’s ancestors—they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn—led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb—which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his—and the whole Turner clan’s—destruction.A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of two black families, Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism—the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.

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No.24
76

Sudden Death: A Novel

Enrigue, Álvaro
Penguin Publishing Group

"Splendid" —New York Times"Mind-bending." —Wall Street Journal"Brilliantly original. The best new novel I've read this year." —Salman RushdieA daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas, told through a tennis match in the sixteenth century between the radical Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn.The poet and the artist battle it out in Rome before a crowd that includes Galileo, a Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw the world into flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII execute Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into those most-sought-after tennis balls. Across the ocean in Mexico, the last Aztec emperors play their own games, as the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Mayan translator and lover, La Malinche, scheme and conquer, fight and f**k, not knowing that their domestic comedy will change the course of history. In a remote Mexican colony a bishop reads Thomas More’s Utopia and thinks that it’s a manual instead of a parody. And in today’s New York City, a man searches for answers to impossible questions, for a book that is both an archive and an oracle.Álvaro Enrigue’s mind-bending story features assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bawdy criminals, carnal liaisons and papal schemes, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war. A blazingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Enrigue tells the grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era, breaking down traditions and upending expectations, in this bold, powerful gut-punch of a novel.Game, set, match.“Sudden Death is the best kind of puzzle, its elements so esoteric and wildly funny that readers will race through the book, wondering how Álvaro Enrigue will be able to pull a novel out of such an astonishing ball of string. But Enrigue absolutely does; and with brilliance and clarity and emotional warmth all the more powerful for its surreptitiousness.”—Lauren Groff, New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and Furies"Engrossing... rich with Latin and European history." —The New Yorker"[A] bawdy, often profane, sprawling, ambitious book that is as engaging as it is challenging.” —Vogue

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No.25
76

Zeroville

Erickson, Steve
Europa Editions

Zeroville begins in 1969 on Hollywood Boulevard, when a Greyhound bus drops off a film-obsessed ex-seminarian with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his head. Vikar Jerome steps into the vortex of a cultural transformation: rock ’n’ roll, sex, drugs, and — far more important to him — the decline of the movie studios and the rise of the independent director. Jerome will become a film editor of astonishing vision. Then through encounters with former starlets, burglars, political guerillas, punk musicians, and veteran filmmakers, he discovers the astonishing secret that lies in every movie ever made.

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No.26
76

WINNER, Best Collection of the Year, THIS IS HORRORNOMINATED, Best Collection of the Year, BRAM STOKER AWARDSNOMINATED, Best Collection of the Year, SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARDSThe fifteen stories in After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones explore the horrors and fears of the supernatural and the everyday. Included are two original stories, several rarities and out of print narratives, as well as a few "best of the year" inclusions. In "Thirteen," horrors lurk behind the flickering images on the big screen. "Welcome to the Reptile House" reveals the secrets that hide in our flesh. In "The Black Sleeve of Destiny," a single sweatshirt leads to unexpectedly dark adventures. And the title story, "After the People Lights Have Gone Off," is anything but your typical haunted house story.With an introduction by Edgar Award winner Joe R. Lansdale, and featuring fifteen full-page illustrations by Luke Spooner, After the People Lights Have Gone Off gets under your skin and stays there.Table of Contents:Introduction by Joe R. LansdaleIllustrations by Luke SpoonerThirteenBrushdogsWelcome to the Reptile HouseThis is LoveThe Spindly ManThe Black Sleeve of DestinyThe Spider Box (originalSnow MonstersDoc’s StoryThe Dead Are NotXebicoSecond ChancesAfter the People Lights Have Gone OffUncleSolve for X

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No.27
76

A thrillingly original novel published in thirty-three countries to worldwide acclaim, The New York Times Magazine called The Raw Shark Texts a genre-founding work of fiction.Eric Sanderson wakes up in a house he doesn’t recognize, unable to remember anything of his life. All he has left are his diary entries recalling Clio, a perfect love who died under mysterious circumstances, and a house that may contain the secrets to Eric’s prior life. But there may be more to this story, or it may be a different story altogether. With the help of allies found on the fringes of society, Eric embarks on an edge-of-your-seat journey to uncover the truth about himself and to escape the predatory forces that threaten to consume him. Moving with the pace of a superb thriller, The Raw Shark Texts has sparked the imaginations of readers around the world and is one of the most talked-about novels in years.

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No.28
76

Delicious Foods: A Novel

Hannaham, James
Back Bay Books

Held captive by her employers -- and by her own demons -- on a mysterious farm, a widow struggles to reunite with her young son in this uniquely American story of freedom, perseverance, and survival.Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace.Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive, performing hard labor in the fields to pay off the supposed debt for her food, lodging, and the constant stream of drugs the farm provides to her and the other unfortunates imprisoned there.In Delicious Foods, James Hannaham tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. Through Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, through the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, and through the irreverent and mischievous voice of the drug that narrates Darlene's travails, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose infuses this harrowing experience with grace and humor.The desperate circumstances that test the unshakeable bond between this mother and son unfold into myth, and Hannaham's treatment of their ordeal spills over with compassion. Along the way we experience a tale at once contemporary and historical that wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom, forgiveness and redemption, tenacity and the will to survive.

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No.29
76

The Gone-Away World

Harkaway, Nick
Windmill Books

The Jorgmund Pipe is the backbone of the world, and it's on fire. Gonzo Lubitsch, professional hero and troubleshooter, is hired to put it out - but there's more to the fire, and the Pipe itself, than meets the eye. The job will take Gonzo and his best friend, our narrator, back to their own beginnings and into the dark heart of the Jorgmund Company itself.Equal parts raucous adventure, comic odyssey and Romantic Epic, The Gone-Away World is a story of - among other things - love and loss; of ninjas, pirates, politics; of curious heroism in strange and dangerous places; and of a friendship stretched beyond its limits. But it also the story of a world, not unlike our own, in desperate need of heroes - however unlikely they may seem.

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No.30
76

“Ingenious, sensual, gleeful. . . . It demands of its readers only imagination, and rewards them with hilarity, terror, and marvels.”―Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless BrooklynNora and Blanche are cojoined twins. Nora, the dominant twin, thirsts for love and adventure, while Blanche has been asleep for nearly 30 years. Determined to shed herself of her her sister’s dead weight, Nora leaves for London in search of the mysterious Unity Foundation, which promises to make two one.But once Nora arrives in London, the past begins to surface, forcing her into a most reluctant voyage into memory―a search for meaning and understanding, that will push Nora to the brink of insanity. Grotesque, funny, and dazzlingly told, Shelley Jackson’s first novel is an imaginative and touching portrait of two lives in a cleft world yearning for wholeness.

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No.31
76

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • “[Han] Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation.”—Entertainment Weekly“Ferocious.”—The New York Times Book Review (Ten Best Books of the Year)“Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff“Provocative [and] shocking.”—The Washington PostBefore the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself.Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.One of the Best Books of the Year—BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly

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No.32
76

The Last Illusion

Khakpour, Porochista
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

In a rural Iranian village, Zal's demented mother, horrified by the pallor of his skin and hair, becomes convinced she has given birth to a 'White Demon'. She hides him in a birdcage and there he lives for the next decade. Unfamiliar with human society, Zal eats birdseed and insects, squats atop the newspaper he sleeps upon, and communicates only in the squawks and shrieks of the other pet birds around him.Freed from his cage and adopted by a behavioural analyst, Zal awakens in New York to the possibility of a future. An emotionally stunted adolescent, he strives to become human as he stumbles toward adulthood, but his persistent dreams in 'bird' and his secret penchant for candied insects make real conformity impossible.As New York survives one potential disaster, Y2K, and begins hurtling toward another, 9/11, Zal finds himself in a cast of fellow outsiders. A friendship with a famous illusionist who claims - to the Bird Boy's delight - that he can fly, and a romantic relationship with a disturbed artist who believes she is clairvoyant, send Zal's life spiralling into chaos. Like the rest of New York, he is on a collision course with devastation.

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No.33
76

After 15 years of designing more than 1,500 book jackets at Knopf for such authors as Anne Rice and Michael Chrichton, Kidd has crafted an affecting an entertaining novel set at a state university in the late 1950s that is both slap-happily funny and heartbreakingly sad. The Cheese Monkeys is a college novel that takes place over a tightly written two semesters. The book is set in the late 1950s at State U, where the young narrator, has decided to major in art, much to his parents’ dismay. It is an autobiographical, coming-of-age novel which tells universally appealing stories of maturity, finding a calling in life, and being inspired by a loving, demanding, and highly eccentric teacher.

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No.34
76

I Crawl Through It

King, A.S.
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Four teenagers are on the verge of exploding. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender: senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of past trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope, but no one is listening.So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will even build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away...but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it.The genius of acclaimed author A.S. King reaches new heights in this groundbreaking work of surrealist fiction; it will mesmerize readers with its deeply affecting exploration of how we crawl through traumatic experience--and find the way out.

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No.35
76

The Alligators of Abraham

Kloss, Robert
Civil Coping Mechanisms

It's the skull-fucking you didn't know you needed.-Liberty Hardy, Book RiotTHE CULT CLASSIC RETURNS WITH A NEW DEFINITIVE EDITIONRobert Kloss's The Alligators of Abraham is a fever dream built from the fly strewn corpses of armies, the megalomania of generals, the madness of widows, the fires of mourning, the fury of the poor, the indifference of the wealthy, and the ravenous hissing of those alligators who have ever plagued the shores of our national nightmares. The Alligators of Abraham is a Civil War epic unlike any other.A novel as lyrical as it is precise in its depiction of the struggle to maintain dignity.-Adam Braver, author November 22, 1963Robert Kloss's words gnaw into the collective dark underbelly unconsciousness of the 19th century which, in many ways, we've never entirely gotten over in America.-Rebecca Brown, author of American Romances

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No.36
76

The Orange Eats Creeps

Krilanovich, Grace
Two Dollar Radio

* National Book Foundation's '5 Under 35' Selection.* NPR Best Books of 2010: A Hidden Gem.* The Believer Book Award Finalist."The exhilaration of such a novel is nearly beyond calculation. If a new literature is at hand then it might as well begin here."—Steve Erickson, from his Introduction"The book feels written in a fever; it is breathless, scary and like nothing I've ever read before. Krilanovich's work will make you believe that new ways of storytelling are still emerging from the margins."—NPR.org"Grace Krilanovich’s first book is a steamy cesspool of language that stews psychoneurosis and viscera into a horrific new organism — the sort of muck in which Burroughs, Bataille, and Kathy Acker loved to writhe."—The BelieverIt's the '90s Pacific Northwest refracted through a dark mirror, where meth and madness hash it out in the woods. . . . A band of hobo vampire junkies roam the blighted landscape—trashing supermarket breakrooms, praying to the altar of Poison Idea and GG Allin at basement rock shows, crashing senior center pancake breakfasts—locked in the thrall of Robitussin trips and their own wild dreams.A girl with drug-induced ESP and an eerie connection to Patty Reed (a young member of the Donner Party who credited her survival to her relationship with a hidden wooden doll), searches for her disappeared foster sister along "The Highway That Eats People," stalked by a conflation of Twin Peaks' "Bob" and the Green River Killer, known as Dactyl.With a scathing voice and penetrating delivery, Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps is one of the most ferocious debut novels in memory.Grace Krilanovich has been a MacDowell colony fellow and a finalist for the Starcherone Prize.

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No.37
75

The Beautiful Bureaucrat

Phillips, Helen
Henry Holt & Co

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2015NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by Time Out, Bustle, The Atlantic, Electric Literature, Kobo, Kirkus and more..."Riveting... thrillerlike...drolly surreal...Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn't afraid to ask the deepest questions." The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice"A joyride..." -Karen RussellNAMED A MUST READ OF THE SUMMER by the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Bustle, The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, HelloGiggles and more...A young wife's new job pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe in a first novel Ursula K. Le Guin hails as "funny, sad, scary, beautiful. I love it."In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings-the office's scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond. Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder-luminous and new.

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No.38
75

Paper Tigers

Walters, Damien Angelica
Dark House Pr

In this haunting and hypnotizing novel, a young woman loses everything--half of her body, her fiancé, and possibly her unborn child--to a terrible apartment fire. While recovering from the trauma, she discovers a photo album inhabited by a predatory ghost who promises to make her whole again, all while slowly consuming her from the inside out.Damien Angelica Walters is the author of Paper Tigers (Dark House Press, 2016) and Sing Me Your Scars (Apex Publications, 2015). Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year's Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including Cassilda's Song, Nightscript I, Cemetery Dance Online, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Apex Magazine. She's also a freelance editor and, until the magazine's closing in 2013, she was an Associate Editor of the Hugo Award-winning Electric Velocipede.

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No.39
75

"Winterson is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent deeply abides." — Vanity FairFirst published to great acclaim in 1987, this arresting, elegant novel from Jeanette Winterson uses Napolean’s Europe as the setting for a tantalizing surrealistic romance between an observer of history and a creature of fantasy. Jeanette Winterson’s novels have established her as one of the most important young writers in world literature. The Passion is perhaps her most highly acclaimed work, a modern classic that confirms her special claim on the novel. Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice’s compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meet their singular destiny.In her unique and mesmerizing voice, Winterson blends reality with fantasy, dream, and imagination to weave a hypnotic tale with stunning effects.

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