What book have you read that had the weirdest concept?

Question

I read a book (of course, I can't remember the title or famous author) that was supposed to have been a suspense novel, but turned out to be mixed with the "butterfly theory" and "chaos theory." Within the first four pages, a newly-wed husband pushes his new wife over the railing onto the rocks, below, while hiking just because he had a strong urge to do so. He spent the rest of the book killing or hurting random people just to see if he could get away with it again. Meanwhile, in another place, a baby boy is born who has extraordinary eyes. Not that it mattered, b/c he ended up losing both of his eyes to some kind of viral infection. He then developed the ability to go thru different dimensions. When it was pouring rain outside, he could walk between the raindrops and stay dry. Also being able to go into alternate universes, he pushed the killer into an alt. universe to get him off the earth. It was a very weird book that I forced myself to read to broaden my horizons. How about you?

Answer 1

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

The easiest way I can describe it, is that it's the story of a house that's 1 inch larger on the inside, than it is on the outside (impossible, in case you're wondering why that's so weird). Alternately it follows the main character, Johnny Truant, who works in a tattoo parlor. Johnny has a blind neighbor in his apartment complex that dies, and Johnny finds this man's notes and diaries, which all seem to reference a documentary about this strange impossible house. However, as far as Johnny can tell, the documentary does not, and never did, exist. So, through the use of footnotes, alternations between Johnny's story as he investigates the authenticity of his neighbor's notes and the notes about the documentary themselves, correspondence between Johnny and his mother who is in a mental hospital, the story about the House unfolds, sometimes yielding pages that contain only photographs, or a single word, or a paragraph that spirals away from the center of the page.

It's worth reading, even if in the end you chalk it up as "gimmicky", but if you're like me, it'll join the ranks of your favorite books.

For extra fun, download or purchase the album "Haunted" by Poe. The songs are closely related to the book (Poe is Mark's sister), and the song "Hey, Pretty", is actually a word for word reading of one of the book's chapters by Mark Z. himself.

Answer 2

I read a science fiction book about this odd race of beings that communicated only very basically and had minimal needs and cognitive skills, but had become aware of changes in their environment and some were becoming more intelligent as they tried to fix it. It was called "Flux" by Stephen Baxter. Eventually the book switched viewpoints and you realized the "beings" were some kind of energy particles inside a small star and the changes they sensed were technologically advanced humans preparing to harvest the star's energy for a spaceship. I had trouble getting through it because the quarks (or whatever) were so primitive, but it was such a well-thought out concept I made myself finish it. Madeleine L'Engle touched on a similar theme in "A Wind in the Door", where Meg and a cherubim travel inside her brother's cells to convince the mitochondria to continue their traditional ways in order to cure his rare disease, but this book really took the idea to its limits.

Answer 3

The Dark Half by Stephen King was definitely the strangest book I've ever read. It's about a man, Thad, who is an author. Apparently, when he was a child he was a twin, but the twin never developed fully and was disposed of. Later in life, this twin comes to life as a grown man to wreak havoc on Thad and his family. It's a pretty crazy book, worth the read, but crazy.

Answer 4

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

This sums it up... barely!!!

Timequake (which he refers to as Timequake One) describes a rerun in time of a decade's length, where people have to do exactly what they've done for the past ten years a second time, aware of what is happening but utterly incapable of doing things any differently. The real disaster of the timequake ocurrs when it is over on February 13th, 2001, when free will kicks in again. The population, so used to running on automatic pilot for ten years, is slow to respond to the sudden need for purposeful action. Free will is back, but nobody does anything with it. Planes and automobiles crash, people fall down midstride; general chaos ensues for a time.

Answer 5

The novel _Murphy_ by Samuel Beckett. The book itself is absurdist - the characters' intentions are impossible to understand and the plot's impossible to follow. The main character, Murphy, is a man who, most notably, finds peace in tying himself naked to a rocking chair in the dark for time to think and whose prostitute girlfriend wants to get married. He goes to work at an insane asylum and befriends one of the patients, an old man with whom he often plays chess. Then one night Murphy ties himself up naked in his rocking chair and burns to death because someone somewhere forgot to turn off the gas and he had a lit candle nearby.

Perhaps also _At Swim-Two-Birds_ by Flann O'Brien, or _The Calcutta Chromosome_ by Amitav Ghosh.

Answer 6

The Picture of Dorian Gray. So wacky and weirdo...the mind that wrote it must have been dark and dreary to have nothing to think of but dark concepts like what is in that book. Also, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson. I read the unabridged version and it just got weirder and wackier as the pages went on. I was surprised, too, b/c Stevenson's Kidnapped was very good.

Answer 7

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (I don't know if I spelled the title correctly). It was about this guy who turns into a cockroach but maybe he doesn't. His father is really mean to him and so maybe he just thinks he is a cockroach. I read it a long time ago but it is still wierd.

Answer 8

"The Wild Boys" by William S. Burroughs

Can't really describe it. Just go to a bookstore and pick it up sometime. Just flip to any page and read a segment. It isn't for light reading, that's for sure.

Answer 9

The metamorphisis by Franz Kafka. It is about a guy that goes to sleep and wakes up a giant cockroach.