Looking for fiction about horrifying and unusual circumstances like Geek Love or The Tattoo Artist.

May 26, 2008 4:04 PM

Book recommendation time! Since you guys did so well the last time I looked for books, I thought I'd kick another random search at you. Looking for fiction about horrifying and unusual circumstances, like in Geek Love or The Tattoo Artist. More inside.

Books like The Tattoo Artist or Geek Love feature people in situations that are jaw-droppingly godawful yet largely self created. Geek Love was about a carnival family, the center of which created a cult where the members voluntarily underwent amputation of their limbs. The Tattoo Artist was about a 1930's couple marooned on an island in the South Seas who, as punishment for a crime, had their faces heavily tattooed. They choose to stay and eventually cover their entire bodies in tattooes.
Both of these circumstances - choosing to have your arms and legs amputated, or waking up and finding that your face has been covered in tattooes - are, to me, unspeakably awful in their irreversability. And fascinating. I am looking for more fiction about people in strange circumstances. Not really looking for messed up love affairs or people that had things happen to them, like becoming a quadraplegic in a car accident or something. I hope this isn't too random of a question.
Thanks!

posted by 8dot3 to grab bag (32 comments total)

Try almost anything by J.G. Ballard. Running Wild may serve as an excellent introduction.
posted by turgid dahlia at 4:15 PM on May 26, 2008

The Consumer, short stories by Michael Gira
posted by Jason and Laszlo at 4:17 PM on May 26, 2008

If you like the sideshow theme in Geek Love, you might like Nightmare Alley.
posted by Tube at 4:27 PM on May 26, 2008 [1 favorite]

If you liked "Geek Love" I'm pretty certain you'll also like Lynda Barry's "Cruddy".
posted by AmbroseChapel at 4:39 PM on May 26, 2008

Cock and Bull by Will Self. Here’s the Amazon synopsis, “This black comedy is divided into two parts. In the first a woman grows a penis and rapes her husband. In the second a man grows a vagina behind his knee and is then seduced by his doctor.”
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 4:52 PM on May 26, 2008

Katherine Dunn wrote two short novel/novellas before Geek Love (Attic & Truck). There were certainly at least strange or macabre moments in them, though they weren't as well structured and defined.
Life of Pi [Martel] might fit your criteria, and perhaps The Moor's Last Sigh [Rushdie]...
posted by mdn at 4:53 PM on May 26, 2008

Geek Love is one of my favorite all time books, so here are some other books/writers/short stories that I enjoyed in a similar way.

If you haven't already, I encourage you to read some Flannery O'Connor. Her short story, "Good Country People" features a girl with a wooden leg trying to seduce a bible salesman up in the hayloft of a barn. Her other stories (and the few novels she wrote) are full of eccentric, immoral, weird 1930's Southern characters who behave in unexpected ways.

Tomas Eloy Martinez's "Santa Evita" is part fiction/part non-fiction about the travels and adventures of Evita Peron's embalmed body after her death. This is decidedly not like the Hollywood musical about Evita and it is more than a little morbid. I loved it.
posted by pluckysparrow at 5:13 PM on May 26, 2008

Eve's Tattoo by Emily Prager: "On her 40th birthday, Eve, a WASP New York magazine columnist of German descent, has the ID number of an Auschwitz victim tattooed on her arm."
posted by staggernation at 6:16 PM on May 26, 2008 [1 favorite]

You might want to try Harry Crews, in the same Southern Gothic tradition Flannery O'Connor worked - and hell, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying fits the bill, too, with its family hauling mom's increasingly decayed corpse across hell and high water.

Also, there's a little-known but brilliantly horrifying satire of corporate life called The Chronicles of Doodah by George Walker that I read years ago; some of the gruesomely gag-inducing images still stay with me.
posted by mediareport at 6:23 PM on May 26, 2008

The Wasp Factory is both horrifying and unusual.
posted by Nelsormensch at 6:33 PM on May 26, 2008

I read a novel titled Her -- or possibly She -- about a conjoined twin who despises her sister. Unfortunately I can't remember the author, and with a title that generic it's difficult to track down. (No, I'm not thinking of Half Life, which I haven't read.)
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:55 PM on May 26, 2008

Wow, some of these look pretty messed up. Exactly what I was looking for. Keep 'em coming!
T
posted by 8dot3 at 7:00 PM on May 26, 2008

What about The World According to Garp, with the Ellen Jamesians, a group of people who remove their tongues in solidarity with a girl whose rapist did the same thing to her?

Or in Y: The Last Man, where a group of women who call themselves the Daughters of the Amazon remove a breast like the ancient Amazons were supposed to have done?
posted by exceptinsects at 7:21 PM on May 26, 2008

Every story in Benjamin Percy's collection Refresh, Refresh involves blood. I don't know if that was an intentional theme or not. I'm not into blood for blood's sake, but I liked these.
posted by booth at 7:25 PM on May 26, 2008

Oh, hey, if you're into comics, you could try Mai-Chan's Daily Life, which can be quite easily found online, but I'm only going to give you a link to the artist's Wikipedia page because no way am I even going near Google to search for that at work. Remember to read it from right to left!
posted by turgid dahlia at 8:25 PM on May 26, 2008

Also, try Georges Bataille's Story Of The Eye and Isidore Lucien Ducasse's The Songs Of Maldoror.
posted by turgid dahlia at 8:29 PM on May 26, 2008

Try Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey, Music for Torching by A. M. Homes, and Dogs of God by Pinkney Benedict. These and Geek Love are probably my favorite books of all time, and just for the reasons you've mentioned. Happy (twisted) Reading!
posted by LizardOfDoom at 8:30 PM on May 26, 2008

Almost anything by Chuck Palahniuk. In particular I would look at Choke as a starter.
posted by skewedoracle at 10:39 PM on May 26, 2008

Ian McEwan! His earlier work involves some pretty bizarre stuff. Try "First Love, Last Rites" or "In Between the Sheets" (short story collections), or novella "The Comfort of Strangers" (try to forget the atrocious movie). Another very good short story collection involving, aptly enough, strange situations: "Stranger than Fiction", by Kelley Link.
posted by parkerama at 11:49 PM on May 26, 2008

Ian McEwan! His earlier work involves some pretty bizarre stuff. Try "First Love, Last Rites" or "In Between the Sheets" (short story collections), or novella "The Comfort of Strangers" (try to forget the atrocious movie). Another very good short story collection involving, aptly enough, strange situations: "Stranger things Happen", by Kelley Link.
posted by parkerama at 11:53 PM on May 26, 2008

sorry, didn't mean the Will Farrell/Emma Thompson movie (see my first post). Ack. Sorry! :)
posted by parkerama at 11:54 PM on May 26, 2008

"The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka.
posted by krautland at 3:30 AM on May 27, 2008

David Foster Wallace, particularly Infinite Jest and the much more straight-forward Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
posted by carmicha at 7:43 AM on May 27, 2008

Stephen King's Survivor Type is a very gross example of what you seek. If you Google it you can find the text online (I think it may have been linked from Metafilter before).
posted by Gortuk at 7:43 AM on May 27, 2008

Roald Dahl's short stories. Tales of the Unexpected, Kiss Kiss, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar... So creepy, so disturbing. Why oh why did my parents let me read those at such a young age?
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:32 AM on May 27, 2008 [1 favorite]

Seconding J.G. Ballard, but I would start with Concrete Island.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:33 AM on May 27, 2008

Octavia Butler's Kindred. It's about a modern Black woman (well, modern when it was written in the '70s) who repeatedly goes back in time to slave days because of a strange tie she has to a slave owner's son.

It's not so patently off-the-wall as Geek Love (which I also loved), but incredibly engrossing in that oh-god-what-horrible-thing-is-going-to-happen-next way, while at the same time, it touches on much deeper issues.
posted by faunafrailty at 9:24 AM on May 27, 2008

Oh I LOVED Kindred. I also read Survivor Type (per Gortuk) which is nast but fascinating in the same way that Geek Love et al was.
posted by 8dot3 at 9:55 AM on May 27, 2008

Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted. It has a Canterbury Tales-like structure, where the various characters tell individual stories, set within a framing story. Both the framing story and some of the individual stories have the elements you're looking for.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:09 PM on May 27, 2008

I just read Oryx and Crake which is futuristic but still involves some rather horrific circumstances (and it's a great book!).
posted by suki at 2:30 PM on May 27, 2008

House of Leaves fits the bill, I think. Also, it's hardly riveting reading but J. K. Huysman's novel À Rebours touches on many of the themes you're interested in.
posted by whir at 4:13 PM on May 27, 2008

I'll second Emily Prager. A Visit From The Footbinder is a collection of her short stories and it is awesome in its grotesque wit. And you should read it anyway, for the remarkable story about the "anti-rape device." Off the wall.

And it's not quite on the mark, and not likely a novel suggestion either, but Kathy Acker comes to mind.
posted by ifjuly at 7:44 PM on June 4, 2008