Book picks similar to
This Degenerate Little Town by Thomas Ligotti
horror
poetry
surreal
second-tier-favorites
Echoes
Laura Dockrill - 2010
Between the covers of this book lie worlds you’ll never want to leave, stories familiar and yet strange, and characters old, made new… Dip inside to discover today’s Princess and the Pea, the modern Hansel and Gretel, twenty-first century ghouls, monsters and more. Darkly humorous and bone-shatteringly terrifying – this collection of tales will reel you in and won't let you escape its spell…
The King in Yellow - True Detective Edition: Tales of the Carcosa Mythos
Ambrose Bierce - 2014
Chambers, Ambrose Bierce, and H. P. Lovecraft. This anthology, edited with an explanatory introduction by a noted weird fiction scholar, collects the tales of those writers that are relevent to True Detective. Unlike other ebook collections, that contain dozens of unrelated stories, such as Chambers's victorian romances and random Lovecraft stories that have nothing at all to do with True Detective, this anthology includes only those stories that directly reference The King in Yellow, Carcosa, and other important themes. This is the only collection that contains all of the stories by these authors that reference Hastur, the ancient god of Carcosa, who appears among the tattoos on Reggie Ledoux. It also includes the correct Lovecraft story that connects all of these works with the Cthulhu Mythos. This is the ideal collection for those who want to understand the many references to early weird fiction that have appeared in True Detective.
The Strange Bird: A Borne Story
Jeff VanderMeer - 2017
But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape.But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The sky itself is full of wildlife that rejects her as one of their own, and also full of technology—satellites and drones and other detritus of the human civilization below that has all but destroyed itself. And the farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful that have outlived the corporation itself: a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. But of the many creatures she encounters with whom she bears some kind of kinship, it is the humans—all of them now simply scrambling to survive—who are the most insidious, who still see her as simply something to possess, to capture, to trade, to exploit. Never to understand, never to welcome home.With The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer has done more than add another layer, a new chapter, to his celebrated novel Borne. He has created a whole new perspective on the world inhabited by Rachel and Wick, the Magician, Mord, and Borne—a view from above, of course, but also a view from deep inside the mind of a new kind of creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.
Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
Ben Loory - 2011
In his singular universe, televisions talk (and sometimes sing), animals live in small apartments where their nephews visit from the sea, and men and women and boys and girls fall down wells and fly through space and find love on Ferris wheels. In a voice full of fable, myth, and dream, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day draws us into a world of delightfully wicked recognitions, and introduces us to a writer of uncommon talent and imagination.Contains 40 stories, including "The Duck," "The Man and the Moose," and "Death and the Fruits of the Tree," as heard on NPR's This American Life, "The Book," as heard on Selected Shorts, and "The TV," as found in The New Yorker.A selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and the Starbucks Coffee Bookish Reading Club.Winner of the 2011 Nobbie Award for Best Book of the Year."This guy can write!" –Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451
In Heaven, Everything is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch
Cameron PierceBlake Butler - 2013
From his early experimental films created as an art student in Philadelphia, to his foray into digital film with Inland Empire, Lynch's filmography is as diverse as it is influential.Featuring Thomas Ligotti, John Skipp, David J (of Bauhaus), Ben Loory, Nick Mamatas, Amelia Gray, Kevin Sampsell, Blake Butler, and many others, In Heaven, Everything is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch is a tribute to one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.
Lost in Cat Brain Land
Cameron Pierce - 2010
A desert inside a dead cat. The ghost of Franz Kafka. Primordial entities mourn the death of their child. The desperate serve tea to mysterious creatures. A hopeless romantic falls in love with a pterodactyl.From a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where robotic gargoyles are law, to a blighted suburbia where the elephant god Ganesh seeks revenge on a man and his android wife, Cat Brain Land is a place of domestic despair and nightmare foreboding. Where sirloin steaks enroll in daycare and ex-lovers return as tiny dolls.This is a land of camel people and the Lord of Meat. The farther into Cat Brain Land you get, the more difficult it will be to get out.
Windeye
Brian Evenson - 2010
The characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Brian Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans can persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel. Fugue State was named one of Time Out New York's Best Books of 2009. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, including one for the title story in "Windeye," Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Department.
Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories
Karen Russell - 2013
ClubA Washington Post Notable BookAn NPR Great Read of 2013From the author of the novel Swamplandia!—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—comes a magical and uniquely daring collection of stories that showcases the author’s gifts at their inimitable best. Within these pages, a community of girls held captive in a Japanese silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms and plot revolution; a group of boys stumble upon a mutilated scarecrow that bears an uncanny resemblance to a missing classmate that they used to torment; a family’s disastrous quest for land in the American West has grave consequences; and in the marvelous title story, two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try to slake their thirst for blood and come to terms with their immortal relationship.Vampires in the lemon grove --Reeling for the Empire --Seagull army descends on Strong Beach, 1979 --Proving up --Barn at the end of our term --Dougbert Shackleton's rules for Antarctic tailgating --New veterans --Graveless doll of Eric Mutis
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Aimee Bender - 1998
Bender's prose is glorious, musical, and colloquial, an anthology of the bizarre. In 'The Rememberer', a man undergoes reverse evolution -- from man to ape to salamander -- at which point a friend releases him into the sea, while in another story a woman gives birth to her mother. A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips?Contents:The rememberer --Call my name --What you left in the ditch --The bowl --Marzipan --Quiet please --Skinless --Fugue --Drunken Mimi --Fell this girl --The healer --Loser --Legacy --Dreaming in Polish --The ring --The girl in the flamable skirt.
Scorch Atlas
Blake Butler - 2009
Entire neighborhoods drown in mud, glass rains from the sky, birds speak gibberish, and parents of young children disappear. Millions starve while others grow coats of mold. But a few are able to survive and find a light in the aftermath, illuminating what we’ve become. In "The Disappeared", a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. A boy swells to fill his parents’ ransacked attic in "The Ruined Child". Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler’s full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William H. Gass, yet imbued with Butler's own vision of the apocalyptic and bizarre.
The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions
Jeffrey Thomas - 2017
I envy those of you making your first acquaintance with this author.” – From the introduction by Matthew Carpenter Respected as one of today’s leading figures of weird fiction for his striking imagination, versatility, and deeply emotional stories, Jeffrey Thomas here offers up fourteen searing tales. Included are the haunting and surreal "Ghosts in Amber," in which a man is compelled to visit a mysterious derelict factory that harbors chilling secrets; "Jar of Mist," which focuses on a father who, in seeking to understand his daughter’s suicide, encounters a dream-like other realm; "Those Above," which imagines an alternate Victorian society controlled by vast monstrous entities from beyond; and the title novelette "The Endless Fall," which concerns an astronaut who crash-lands on an unknown forested world where time seems to work in an alien way, and where he finds he is unfortunately not alone. “With brutal elegance and chilling subtlety, Thomas pulls his readers into his dark visions immediately from every opening line.” – Paul Di Filippo, in ASIMOV’S “Jeffrey Thomas’ imagination is as twisted as it is relentless.” – F. Paul Wilson “In time he will, in this reviewer’s opinion, be listed alongside King, Barker, Koontz, and McCammon.” – Brian Keene
Weird Tales: 101 Weird, Strange, and Supernatural Stories (Civitas Library Classics)
Various - 2012
May of these stories are from the pages of Weird Tales and other classic magazines which brought the work of masters like H.P. Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, and many others to the public. Includes an active table of contents.
The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies
Clark Ashton Smith - 1935
P. Lovecraft into calling him "perhaps unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living” or compel Fritz Lieber to employ the worthy term sui generis. Clark Ashton Smith—autodidact, prolific poet, amateur philosopher, bizarre sculptor, and unmatched storyteller—simply wrote like no one else, before or since. This new collection of his very best tales and poems is selected and introduced by supernatural literature scholar S. T. Joshi and allows readers to encounter Smith’s visionary brand of fantastical, phantasmagorical worlds, each one filled with invention, terror, and a superlative sense of metaphysical wonder.
Exterminator!
William S. Burroughs - 1973
A perfect servant suddenly reveals himself to be the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Science-fantasy wars, racism, corporate capitalism, drug addiction, and various medical and psychiatric horrors all play their parts in this mosaiclike, experimental novel. Here is William S. Burroughs at his coruscating and hilarious best.