Things That Make You Say WTF--The Best of the Weird Part II

Things That Make You Say, WTF?: The Best of the Weird, Part II (Books)

08/03/2005

In our last issue, I began my list of horror fiction which I considered to be "weird, but fantastic," giving a list of my favorite outside-of-the-mainstream horror films, and promising to do the same with books this time. Remember, my criteria was simple: the piece in question had to be quirky, grotesque, unpredictable, eccentric, or to put it another way, different. Anyone who has been reading in the genre as long as I have realizes that horror fiction has gravitated towards the formulaic, almost as a matter of survival, as authors in the genre find that they if they follow the latest King, Koontz, or Rice prescription carefully, their careers will take off. In other words, most writers in the genre believe in the marketing idea, "give 'em what they want." Unfortunately, what they want tends to be the same as what they've already had.

But when an author breaks the rules, that can be in itself worthy of note. When that writer does so and creates something that is of the highest quality, and not just a work that screams "this is an experimental piece," that is something worthy of high praise. Weirdness in and of itself is not admirable. Something must be good at being weird. So without further ado, here are my top five weird books:

Cisco, Michael. The Divinity Student. Tallahassee, FL: Buzzcity Press, 1999. 149p.

The Divinity Student, a “word finder” extraordinaire, travels through a nightmarish world of the dead to find the secret meanings of “lost words.” This is a brief but powerful illustrated dark fantasy is narrated completely in present tense. What it amounts to is a hallucinatory journey through the chaotic desert city of San Veneficio, where the divinity student must research old texts to record any unknown words he may find. There he finds a tome of "secret words, ghost-words and completely new," which could lead to an understanding of "the synthesis of all natural forces." Developing an alchemical formula he absorbs information from the brains of long-dead scholars, so he must of course become a grave robber. Atmospheric and poetic, written in dream-like stream-of-consciousness prose, this novel is a winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel, 1999.

Danielewski, Mark Z. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. New York : Pantheon Books, 2000. 709 p.

Although the leaves referred to in the title here may well be the number of trees chopped down to produce this at times ponderous tome, and although most people who will attempt this novel (best described as the Gravity's Rainbow of horror, if you ask me) will not finish it, this book deserves all the praise heaped upon it. Consider it the academic's horror novel, the Blair Witch Project of literature. It is at times playful, heady, satirical, dark, and even disturbing. The discovery of a thesis called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, leads to the further discovery of a weird (and rare, as in impossible to find) documentary film. The film takes as its subject a photojournalist and his family--and the strange house they move into, which has one room that is infinitely large inside, and seems to be the doorway to another realm. For good measure, Danielewski peppers this story within a story within a story with poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, fake correspondences, and annotations. According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampano's work, once you read The Navidson Record, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. File this under eccentric.

Kimball, Michael. The Way the Family Got Away. New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows, 2000. 143 p.

Those of you familiar with William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying will recognize the motif of taking a journey with a dead body in tow, which is the impetus of Kimball's book. Two children, a boy approximately 5 or 6 years old and his younger sister, relate the story of a cross country trek with a dead baby in the family trunk, and ends up with something that is gut wrenching and sad. What Kimball produces is a "road novel unlike any other that tracks the physical and emotional distance a family travels after tragedy." In this case, the tragedy is watching the infant son die of yellow fever. The family packs all of its belongings (including a coffin with a dead infant) to head north, where the extended family resides. The boy narrates the geographical distance traveled, in chapters that take their titles from the two cites that mark point A and point B. He enumerates the sale or trade of family possessions, including wedding rings and his own clothes, as the family barters to find gas money. His sister deals with the emotional distance, by constantly comparing her doll family (one of the items that is packed up—and sold—is her dollhouse and dolls) to her people family. Her main concern is bringing the baby back to life. I will not say what happens at the end of the journey, so as not to spoil what does come as a shock.

Lortz, Richard. Lovers Living, Lovers Dead. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1977. 223 p.

Albeit a little known work, this strange chronicle of a deal with the devil is ranked as one of the top 40 horror novels of all time by the Horror Writers Association of America, and deservedly so. It tells the story of a professor of Comparative Literature who is beginning to suspect that his wife, Christine, an ex-student some 20 years his junior, is harboring dark secrets about her past. To uncover these secrets, he teams up with Christine's psychologist, and the two use deception to unearth information about her even more mysterious father, whose trips to Africa and the Far East allowed him to consort with "witch doctors" and tribal chieftains. The amateur sleuths also uncover millions in Swiss bank accounts, pornographic pictures of the wife being incested as an infant (so that she could not be sacrificed as a virgin), and other sexual paraphernalia. The novel ends in ruined lives and bloodshed, and a visit by a mysterious dark figure. This is far and away one of the most unique and clever horror novels I have ever encountered, with its emphasis on characterization and atmosphere, rather than horrific imagery and shock.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987. 275p.

Sethe and her children cross the Ohio River to freedom in the 1840s but are soon tracked by a bounty hunter. Sethe, determined that she and her children will never be slaves again, does the unthinkable: She attempts to help her entire family escape slavery through death. She succeeds in freeing her infant daughter Beloved in this manner, by sawing off her head, but ultimately Sethe cannot be free from the curse of slavery or from Beloved’s ghost, who returns to destroy her entire family. Experimental in its technique, including the use of disembodied voices interspersed in the narrative, this amazing novel was the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. It is a highly literate masterpiece that tells a story of slavery through the all too often dismissed genre of horror. Jonathan Demme made Beloved into a film of the same name in 1998.

Honorable Mentions:

In this graphically violent masterpiece, a serial killer is loose on the streets of San Francisco, and only two people have any idea what he looks like: the girlfriend of one of his victims who is visited in her dreams by ghosts, and an aging reporter who is taken into confidence by the killer. But what journalist Donovan Moon is not prepared to learn is that as disturbing as the ritualistic mutilations of the victims may be, what is more unsettling is that it seems the victims were all vampires.

Bakis, Kirsten. Lives of the Monster Dogs. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. 291p.

In the New York of 2009, 150 “monster” dogs arrive by helicopter and chartered plane, dressed in the clothing of nineteenth-century Prussian burghers, speaking through surgically implanted voice boxes, able to perform the tasks of humans by virtue of prosthetic hands and enhanced intelligence. The dogs come from a remote village in Canada where German followers of a mad visionary, Augustus Rank, have worked since 1882 to create a superior race of canine soldiers that will possess the intelligence of men but the courage and loyalty of dogs. Eventually, the dogs rebel against their masters and, in need of a place to go, choose New York, the quintessential melting pot.

Barron, Diana. Phantom Feast. St. Petersburg, FL: Barclay Books, 2001. 269p.

This dark fantasy is about a small New York town that is besieged by the ghosts of captive animals that died when P. T. Barnum’s warehouse burned down decades earlier. Two dwarves, twin midgets, and a morbidly obese phone sex operator living in the twins’ parents’ mansion possess a dark secret: They can animate the animals in their paintings to take revenge on the people who insult them. When two members of the motley crew also discover how to leave their human bodies and shapeshift into phantom animals, no one is safe from being gored, trampled, or eaten alive.

Cullen, Mitch. Tideland. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 2000. 192p.

Jeliza-Rose’s elderly father takes her to live on his mother’s property in rural Texas after a drug overdose kills her morbidly obese mother. Upon arrival, he too dies, leaving this eleven-year-old with the mind of three-year-old to survive as best as she can with nothing but four Barbie heads for company. This is the tale of an unforgettable ingénue that is gothic, eerie, and compelling.

Jacob, Charlee. This Symbiotic Fascination. New York: Leisure, 2002. 394p.

Thirty-seven-year-old Tawne Delaney isn’t the kind of woman that men see as beautiful. Large and plain looking, she remains a virgin despite her age. Only one man shows any interest in her, co-worker and serial rapist Arcan Tyler, a man who is controlled by a triumvirate of animal spirits. Enter a hideously ugly nosferatu who hypnotizes, rapes, and mutilates women--and who can promise Tawne the power of seduction. Against the backdrop of a city haunted by a brutal serial killer, Tawne, now a vampire, and the werewolf Arcan pursue a relationship. That is until the ghosts of Arcan's victims make their presence known in this imagistic narrative.

Rosen, Selina, ed. Bubbas of the Apocalypse. Alma, AK: Yard Dog Press, 2001. 210p.

In the year 2025, a strange virus lays waste to civilization as we know it, turning almost everyone into a zombie cannibal. But the working classes, who consume vast quantities of low-priced barbecue sauce laden with preservatives, have been rendered immune to this virus. Now they must survive in a world where Yuppies would turn poor white people into the new white meat. This collection of stories by different authors functions as a loosely jointed novel that explores this theme. Rosen’s editorial contribution is as unusual and witty as her own fiction.