From lusty krakens to Satan burgers, literary tastes are getting weird

Read any strange books lately? Sometimes it seems that fiction is getting wackier and wackier. Bonkers books are not exactly new (Tristram Shandy? Naked Lunch? Finnegan’s Wake?), but publishers and booksellers are putting new labels on their titles to attract readers who just won’t settle for the same old, same old. These titles range from high literature to pulp fiction, but they are all aiming to surprise, bamboozle, disturb and delight.

Bizarro fiction

Lots of books are a bit bizarre (think of anything by Gogol), but with bizarro books, the main appeal is their weirdness. The genre strives to be strange, fascinating, thought-provoking and fun. Independent publishing companies Eraserhead Press, Raw Dog Screaming Press and Afterbirth Books adopted the term in 2005: they promote an underground bizarroisation movement, award prizes in their Wonderland Book Award and host an annual BizarroCon (described as the writers’ retreat from hell).

In Satan Burger, a cult 2001 novel by Carlton Mellick III, Satan opens a burger joint where people trade their souls for burgers. But as a reviewer notes, there’s a lot more going on that he can’t quite sum up. Mellick is a prolific author: he’s also written The Haunted Vagina, The Cannibals of Candyland and Every Time We Meet at the Dairy Queen, Your Whole F---ing Face Explodes.

Ergodic literature

These are books where the reader has to make a “nontrivial” effort to traverse the text. Because why settle for an easy read when you can do it the hard way?

Surprisingly, perhaps, the genre includes some bestsellers. House of Leaves, a 2000 novel by Mark Z. Danielewski, is a story about a story about a story about a film about a house with a black hole in it. The New York Times called it “a vast exploration and meditation on the paradoxical spaces that open out from – or as – our awareness… his book is funny, moving, sexy, beautifully told”.

Another ergodic novel is Hopscotch by Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar. This 1963 work is a stream of consciousness tale that can be read in two ways, according to two chapter sequences, leading to multiple endings. Cortázar’s fellow writer and friend Ariel Dorfman wrote in The New York Times in 2014 that it was a foundational text of a generation, an earthquake of language: “We need, Cortázar said, to throw reality out the window and then throw out the window as well.”

A more recent novel, Susanna Clark’s Piranesi, is actually quite a short and easy read – on the surface. A mysterious young man finds himself eking out a primitive life in a vast labyrinthine ruin of great architectural halls and statues, washed out by huge oceanic tides. It’s ergodic in the way it appeals to the intellect, the imagination and the emotions.

Oulipo

Most wacky genres come from the US, but oulipo is tres French. Short for ouvroir de literature potentielle (workshop of potential literature) it was born in 1960, when a bunch of French writers and mathematicians decided to see what would happen if they wrote with very difficult handicaps.

They all loved maths problems, puzzles, trickery, wordplay and conundrums, and wanted to use them to create new literature. One of the founders, Raymond Queneau, described Oulipians as “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”.

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Perhaps the most famous oulipian tale is Georges Perec’s A Void, a clever and entertaining postmodern detective novel which throughout its 300 pages never uses the letter “e” (and nor does the English translation). Not content with that, Perec (above) went on to write The Exeter Texts, a novel in which the only vowel used is the letter “e”.

Solarpunk

You’ve heard of cyberpunk and steampunk, right? Solarpunk is another futuristic science fiction genre, but it avoids the gloomy dystopias of cyberpunk or the Victorian-era technology of steampunk to give us a sunny version of worlds to come. Hey, maybe we can reach a sustainable future with renewable energy from the sun, a re-wilded planet and happy post-capitalist communities devoted to preserving nature. We can dream…

It might have been Ursula le Guin who kicked off this genre with works such as Always Coming Home and The Dispossessed. More recently, there are anthologies like Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future and a couple of cosy feel-good novels from Becky Chambers (A Psalm for the Slipstream Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy), whose heroes include a non-binary tea-serving monk and a robot named Splendid Speckled Mosscap, searching for a way to help humans.

Slipstream

A mish-mash of science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction that pushes the boundaries of these genres. It’s described as “the fiction of strangeness” or writing that makes “the familiar strange or the strange familiar”. Less in-your-face than bizarro, more of a slow burn, it looks back to the stories of Kafka and Borges for inspiration. Well-known writers said to write slipstream include Haruki Murakami, Kelly Link and China Miéville.

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Helen Oyeyemi’s 2021 novel Peaces is described as dazzling, disorienting and inscrutable. Two lovers travelling on a train with their pet mongoose discover it’s an upside-down sort of ride with a mystery at its heart. It’s about who you are and how others see you.

Weird romance

One of the most wildly popular genres with young women readers is romantasy, a blend of romance and fantasy. But we’re already way beyond elves, vampires and werewolves as dream lovers – that’s so yesterday. Your irresistible and heroically endowed hero may be any kind of monster: a minotaur, a dinosaur or a kraken. “He took me in his tentacles …”

It gets weirder. One rising subgenre is sentient object romance. Think of stories like The Frog Prince or Beauty and the Beast, but where the enchanted hero has been turned into an everyday household item that is strangely alluring … in Unhinged, by Vera Valentine, a woman is getting it on with her front door, which turns into a guy.

The queen of sentient object romance and purveyor of “sentient smutty smut” is Holly Wilde. Her titles include Laid by the Lint Trap Monster and Banging My Birthday Bear.

For readers who prefer a more mature hero, there’s a subgenre of erotic Santa Claus romances such as The Naughty List by Ellie Mae MacGregor, where Santa is a silver fox with big hands and thick thighs. Ho Ho Ho meets Oh Oh Oh.

Wacky anthologies

Callouts for submissions from literary journals and anthology editors are getting curiouser and curiouser. Those who specialise in fantasy and horror want to be surprised. French Press Publishing invited werewolf stories “with one small caveat: Make ’em different”. Hellbound Books’ anthology of Creature Features wanted scary stories without the usual ho-hum culprits – spiders, rats or giant centipedes. “Killer koalas, anyone?”

Perhaps the strangest callout, from Microcosm Publishing, was for “speculative feminist fiction about disability and bicycles”. It’s for the anthology series Bikes in Space, “a powerful tribute to feminist sci-fi about bicycles … Heroines find meaning and freedom on two wheels in the confines of a gated space society and in the ravaged earth left behind. Racers compete in deep space and on otherworldly planets.” The publishers claim their little volumes (12 so far) have launched a new genre. The disability volume comes out next year.

Furry Sleuths

If all these bananas books sound too unsettling, why not relax with this variant of the cosy mystery genre where your detective, or your detective’s sidekick, is a dog, a cat, a mouse or some other adorable and sagacious beast. They are often bestsellers, it’s not just kids who read them and they are licensed to use terrible puns. Popular series include Miranda James’ Cat in the Stacks books about a librarian and her rescue cat, Diesel, with titles such as Hiss Me Deadly and The Pawful Truth.

The buddy cops format gets a twist in Spencer Quinn’s Chet and Burnie mystery series, where Chet the dog is the detective and police officer Burnie is his human sidekick. And there’s an Australian series, the Monty Dog Detective Mysteries, by Louisa Bennet (aka L. A. Larkin). She’s inspired by her two pet golden retrievers.