Amongst the fiction you've read which work would you say inspires the most complete set of mental images?

Question

Does any one author stand out for you in particular?

Answer 1

Let's turn back the clock a bit. Ray Bradbury. THE Master.

Answer 2

I love Anya Seton's "Katherine."

When I pick up that book, I am instantly transported to Medieval England; complete with all the sights, sounds and (unfortunately, sometimes) smells. Sometimes Seton's descriptive style almost goes overboard - but it never quite does. I always sigh when I reach the last page because I don't really want to "go home" yet, even though the story's done.

Diana Gabaldon is also another great one for capturing scenes and characters in just a perfect way.

Answer 3

Some of the earliest books by Stephen King were truly scary because of the stark imagery. Pet Semetary, The Stand, and alot of his short stories were truly frightening...Robert Ludlum writes some fantastic spy novels with lots of imagery as does Tom Clancy, the author of Red Storm Rising and The Hunt for Red October...

Answer 4

It would have to be the books of Brett Easton Ellis for me, apart from his last one Lunar Park.

His descriptive talents are above and beyond anything I ever read in any other book, even if most of his book don´t have a real plot.
Highpoint is I think American Psycho, which just sucks you into the (imagined?) world of Patrick Bateman, the main character. Everything gets explained in detail, the clothing, the food, the sex, the murders and violence... only the emotions are left out, which probably makes it easier to stomach now and again.

Answer 5

My current favorite, is "The Mists of Avalon", by Marion Zimmer Bradley. So vivid, colorful, imaginative, creative........I tried to watch the sad made for TV movie done of it.......what a disappointment. With such an illustrated book, you should never try to ruin it with someone else's interpretations of the story. It is never the same. The only good thing I have to say about the movie: Angelica Houston. She was PERFECT for the role of Viviane, but unfortunately, they downplayed her role signifigantly. I didn't even finish the movie: the book created that much of an image in my head, it just didn't seem right. I'll keep it to my imagination.

Answer 6

A woman of privilege Harriet Doerr wrote just three books in her brief career. She was accepted to the Stanford Creative Writing Course in her early seventies, wrote her first book at 76 and continued writing until her death at 94 (or there about). Her stories and sentence structure created a free flow of images that brought back memories of my own experiences. As she once said,"I will not stop writing a sentence until it is perfect".

"Stones for Ibarra"
"Consider this, Senora"
"The Tiger in the Grass: Stories and Other Inventions"

Answer 7

Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs
Chuck Palahniuk's short story guts was something else
You want some mental images read it..People have actually
passed out during readings of this story
you can find the story online here
http://www.seizureandy.com/stuff/guts.html

Answer 8

i think "infinite jest" by david foster wallace.

it has the girth (it's like 1300 pages) to cover most of the emotional territories, provides pretty well fleshed out (as opposed to vulgarly paraded) human conditions, has blood and sex and humor.

it also--because one of the minor (and dead) characters was an avant-garde filmmaker--has, in the appendix, a list of movies that (because of their optical innovations and the director's inceasing insanity) require a lot of imagination to understand.

the descriptions often use trajectories, axes, etc. to describe action (but not in a bland robbe-grillet way; they are frequently laugh-out-loud funny...crime fighting nuns, for example) so THAT requires a different kind of mental imagery that the complexity of the rest of the book uses to work its way into your pants.

i mean brain.

i mean heart.

the book is amazing, and well worth the time investment.

Answer 9

I would say Dune, by Frank Herbert. The original Dune, not everything else that followed and is by his son (or sons? I never could follow the lineage there). The movies and other various media that was based on the book do it no justice, because itself it is a very powerful work that is far from being as light as these movies portray it.

Answer 10

Kim Harrison's "The Hollows' Series, Jeffrey Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme series,. and Anne Bishop's The Black Jewels trilogy come to mind. Each have very vivid imagery that sticks with you.

Answer 11

Through A Glass Darkly by Jostien Gaarder...that book is just wow