what are your favorite weird books?

The title says it all. I’m talking about great, weird, fringe-y books like “High Weirdness by Mail,” “Steal this book,” “Principia Dischordia,” “Trance Formation,” “Coffee, Tea, or Me”, “Apocalypse Culture” one and two, and more.

Those are mine.

Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas
Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72
The Curse Of Lono

All by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
The Crime Studio by Steve Aylett

The Book Of Weird By Barbara Byfield

Bought.
(I can’t believe it never occured to me to buy that book. I loved the film)

In addition to the Principia Discordia, I like the Illuminatus! Trilogy and The Book of the SubGenius, and Three-Fisted Tales of “Bob”, another SubGenius book including contributions from such luminaries as Mark Mothersbaugh, Robert Anton Wilson, and William Burroughs. I’d like to read High Weirdness By Mail or Revelation X as well, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Does Lizard Music count for anything?

I have Apocalypse Culture although I can’t say it’s my favorite. I don’t like the attitude that author/editor Adam Parfrey seems to project and I think he’s a poor writer.

I also have *Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century * , and even though author Greil Marcus’s writing style will give you a headache and I disagree with about 80% of what he says, I like the book. I learned a lot from it anyway.

Then there is *Hitler: The Occult Messiah * by Gerald Suster, who claims Hitler was a black magician whose rise to power was caused by the demons he unleashed. Uh, yeah, right…but still an interesting reading even if you believe it’s a load of BS. One of the more bizarre Hitler bios.

Of course! As does The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, which I consider a work of comedic genius. It works on several levels, and if you read it every few years (I started in 5th grade) you pick up on something new every time. Of course, pretty much any of Daniel Pinkwater’s books are wonderfully weird – don’t let the “young adult” label scare you off.

I’d also recommend anything by R. A. Lafferty. You pretty much have to take a fan’s word on it, because there is absolutely no way to describe his writing. Harlan Ellison once affectionately dubbed him a “madman,” and that’s about right.

Wow, I havn’t thought of that book in years. My mom used to work for the public library and I was the test case on all sorts of new books. This was one of them. One of my favorites too.

I would say anything by Robert Anton Wilson would fall into this category. The Shroedinger’s Cat Trilogy is probably my favorite.

I’m going with Illuminatus! and Lords of Chaos (about the rise of the Norwegian Black Metal Scene).

Great Mambo Chickens and Transforming the Human Conditions – a collection of stories about the Extropians. Great fun to read and thought provoking, too.

Populuxe – an examination of the culture of the 50s and 60s via its artifacts. Predates Wolfe’s “From Bauhaus to Our House” and gives you a pretty good idea what we lost when we let our architects get all European and stupid on us.

Alien Agenda by Jim Marrs. Hoo! Good stuff.

Sex & Sunsets by Tim Sandlin- the main character is a delusional schizophrenic and the book mimics his condition; also, the entire book it turns out is the set-up for a punch-line (i.e. if you ever read this book, DO NOT read the last page first)

The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon by T. Spanbauer- a very bizarre book about an omnisexual male prostitute in turn-of-the-19th/20th-century Idaho

Sarah by J.T. Leroy- a book about messianicism and gourmet cooking in the modern world of truck stop prostitution (aka “lot lizards”).

Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. A spy (?) whose brain has been modified to facilitate his peculiar profession befriends the daughter of a mad scientist. He has to save the world from evil monsters, but in the mean time his own mind is in the process of irrevocably separating into two halves.

It’s a real genre-buster. Hard-boiled detective novel? Post-cyberpunk? Sciffy thriller?

I have lots of these- HIGH WEIRDNESS, 3-FISTED TALES, P. DISCORDIA, GREAT MAMBO CHICKEN. Also the Hay-Turner editions of The Necronomicon & The Rlyeh Text. Books by VonDaniken, Brad Steiger, John Keel. Wilson & Shea’s ILLUMINATUS Trilogy, also SCHRODINGER’S CAT. More Illuminati, Conspiracy, etc books (even the infamous Protocols). APOCALYPSE CULTURE & CULT RAPTURE by Parfrey (some other content in AC II just kept me from buying that).

But for sheer weirdness, I think THE TRIAL OF GILLES DE RAIS totally stands out. SHIVERS!

“Why Cats Paint” and the companion volume ‘Why Paint Cats.’

The utterly bizarre Mr. Landen has no brain takes the top spot for me. I’m trying to describe it and I just can’t.

“Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions” by Edwin A. Abbott is possibly the weirdest book you’ll ever read. It’s about these different universes where the people exist in different numbers of dimensions (Flatland itself exists in 2 dimensions, for example). It’s just so bizarre you have to like it.

Since we’ve already got ALIEN AGENDA, I’m going to pur forth RULE BY SECRECY, a conspiracy primer that actually makes sense. It’s well written, draws logical conclusions (assuming that the author’s sources are true) and works backwards in chronology to make keep the reader from going “whaaa?”

If you’re in the mood for waaaaay out there conspiracy stuff, pick up anything by David Icke. It’s a hoot. And, all controlled by aliens from the Lower 4th Dimension (which is something like the Lower East Side I gather) and best of all…there’s no way to prove any of it. Fevered, incoherent, nowhere near internally consistent, but you will tremble when you find out what Princess Diana was doing in the tunnel, weep when you find out that it’s too late and wet yourself in terror when you realize that the US is still under British Maritime rule.

Uh, the last one isn’t too shocking. It’s actually kind of stupid. Icke’s really “up with people” and bases his theories around movies he’s recently seen (in The World’s Greatest Secret (?), you can see the progression from STARGATE to THE ARRIVAL to X-FILES and his next book was entirely based off the MATRIX IIRC. He even references the movies in the text.

Marrs is actually a really good writer and only mildly up with people.

Will have to check out the Black Metal book.

I’ve been enjoying Rule by Secrecy for the past few days or so, and I find it generally enjoyable and occasionally fascinating. The ground Marrs stands on seems to be firmer in some parts than others, though. The section on the origins of World War I, for instance, was extremely convincing, whereas his examination of the occult roots of the Nazi party struck me as somewhat out there. He seems anxious to cram every last “alternative” take on world events that he can into this book, which makes me more cautious the farther I go.

Entertaining as hell, though.

Yup. An original Victorian-era genre-buster. The whole thing seems to be sort of a religious allegory and social commentary in the form of extremely bizzare science fiction (check out the social order in flatland - not to mention the role of women!).

My favorite bit? When our friendly Square, taken on a tour of the dimensions, meets the inhabitant of zero-dimension-land, and can’t convine him(?) that anything exists outside himself. :smiley:

Another bizzare allegory is The Man Who Was Thursday by Chesterton. A dectective novel about anarchist terrorism - at least, at first. It just keeps getting more and more bizzare … a masterpiece.