The Incredibly Strange Book Thread

[Kiki5435]

I like a streak of artistic movement running through a book, which means that in my travels through the literary world I've fall upon one or two writers of extremely peculiar fiction.

I don't really mean books that are self-consciously daring e.g. Joyce, rather those that propose the author's imaginativeness is at a slight tilt to the rest of the cosmos.

A typical illustration would be Jasper Fforde's splendid Thursday Next series. Set in an alternative 1980s. Thursday a cause of the Literary Division of Spec-Ops investigating book related to crime in a world where it is easy to move between books and "reality". Her experience is a place where Wales is a Socialist Republic, croquet is a fashionable spectator sport, dodos aren't extinct, the Crimean War has been active for 130 years and there is a Toast Marketing Board. I've only read the first two and thought they were both brilliant.

My nomination, however, is going to "Scepticism, Inc." by Bo Fowler. Attached is a description from Amazon:

The narrator of this brilliantly first novel was made on November 3, 2022, in an business estate on the outskirts of Chelmsford. After three weeks of childhood he is sent to work in ShopAlot, St Pancras, next to the most celebrated little church in the world. He's a supermarket trolley with a faith in God.

In the Christian church he meets Edgar Malroy, founder of Scepticism Inc., owner of the Metaphysical Betting Shop, soon to be the richest man on the planet. Edgar takes bets on metaphysical propositions and never loses; but Edgar's Achilles' heel is his love for Sophia, a ridiculously beautiful woman who thinks she is a messenger from God.

What would you propose as the oddest book you have ever read?

 

[Will]

It would have to be a toss up between any one of Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth/Louie Knight books and Mark Gattis' Lucifer Box novels. Both series are enjoyable, but Pryce's stuff is a favourite of mine for its pastiche of hard boiled detective fiction which he pulls of so well it actually ends up bettering its source material whilst still remaining damn funny.

Pryce's books actually remind me slightly of Jasper Fforde's works in that they're set in an alternative world-version of ours focussed upon an independent Wales, with many similarities but also its own wars, heroes and associated goings on. There are five books so far in the series, and all are very enjoyable and funny, but do really need to be read sequentially to get the gist of what's going on, as some of it is quite strange indeed...

This from Amazon on Aberystwyth Mon Amour, the first book in the series: "Schoolboys are disappearing all over Aberystwyth and nobody knows why. Louie Knight, the town's private investigator, soon realises that it is going to take more than a double ripple from Sospan, the philosopher cum ice-cream seller, to help find out what is happening to these boys and whether or not Lovespoon, the Welsh teacher, Grand Wizard of the Druids and controller of the town, is more than just a sinister bully. And just who was Gwenno Guevara?"