Strange books you've read...

[Svengoolie 3]

Ok,  forget good or bad (but good is of course better)  and just name some books you've read that are just strange

I'll open with Norman Spinrad's "the iron dream".  Have you ever wondered what kind of book Adolph Hitler would have written if he bad emigrated to america in the early 1920's,  made a living as a SF pulp artist and eventually wrote an epic sci fi masterpiece?  No?  Well Norman spinrad answered that question with the iron dream,  a novel set in an alternate earth where hitler did those very things.

The iron dream is basically a fantasy version of hitler's life and WW2 written as a post atomic war pulp sci fi fantasy novel. It is not pro nazi in any way and viciously parodies hitler,  nazism and the germany that let them flourish. It's a gripping novel in some ways,  and can be hard to put down. I can understand why it was banned in Germany for quite a while.

Basically 1000 years after an atomic war, "the fire",  earth is overrun with degenerate subhuman mutants and the evil mind controlling "dominators". Onky in the republic of Heldon does true humanity exist as a free people.  But the insidious doms are plotting the enslavement of the last bastion of true humanity and only the  purest human hero can save the human race from their evil schemes.

[Svengoolie 3]

I read the "godzilla in hell" comic and man, was it weird...  

As the title implies godzilla literally end up in hell.  Yep, a dantean inferno,  where he must fight man and his kaiju enemies.  Along the way he apparently rejects god as represented by I believe mothra and her moth winged angels, who call on him to submit and serve  ad nauseim,  then has to fight the devil,  resorting to some extreme ways to do it.  After defeating satan he returns to earth,  I guess.

This was a weird story,  featuring a mix of dantean and buhhdist hells. I donct know how godzila  figured in a battle between good and evil while rejecting both. Apparently.

Honestly I couldn't make a lot of sense of it, I guess not  doing Hardcore drugs has some disadvantages once in a while.

[pennywise37]

From a Buick 8 by Stephen King is a pretty weird book too  but that one i did actually love and it took me i think a week to read

[316zombie]

punctuation is your friend, pennywise37. 

[pennywise37]

sorry about that, that's one thing i've never been good at one of the reasons why i never have really sought out to be a writer, the period's are never in the right place nor are the comma's for that matter

[316zombie]

i'm just teasing, my thing is generally too much punctuation.

[pennywise37]

oh i didn't take offense you aren't the first one to point out at how i type at all, so why lie about it ya know? even at my age 40 i'm still not good at stuff like that  oh well

[RCMerchant]

Lotsa books about UFO's are the weirdest s**t.
Anything by John Keel is beyond weird.

[pennywise37]

i love Piers Anthony and he's done a lot of weird sh*t too

[RCMerchant]

i love Piers Anthony and he's done a lot of weird sh*t too

Piers Anthony is great.

[RCMerchant]

Anything by HP Lovecraft. I first read him in 1973. I was just 11 years old!

[The Burgomaster]

I read BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley several months ago. It's about a society of test-tube babies where everyone is genetically engineered to fulfill specific roles in society. People take drugs and lie around like zombies when they aren't working. Monogamy is bad; promiscuity is good. Everyone flies around in helicopters. The whole book is a frustrating bummer and doesn't have any likable characters. I loved 1984, but I didn't like BRAVE NEW WORLD at all.

[pennywise37]

i ended up downloading all of Piers Anthony's books currently i'm re-reading his Xanth Series i own some of them and stopped reading him for a few years, than i picked one of them up and each time i tried i just could not get into the book any of them, so than it dawned on me that i lost touch with the characters and who they are and the series itself so i thought ya know what? I"ll start at the beginning again so i started with A Spell For Chameleon

now i'm on Castle Roogna that i think i have about a little over 100 pages left. i really need to finish that thing too

[lester1/2jr]

the ballet dancer Vasily Nijinsky's biography is extremely weird. I don't know if he was illiterate or just wrote very weirdly but he was also somewhat insane towards the end of his life. It was edited to take out al the gay stuff but a recent edition corrects that

[pennywise37]

i hate censorship and i haven't read that one but i always believe that a book should be what the writer intended it to be. did it help the novel or hurt it i wonder?

Christina Crawford her book on her mom which i have a copy of i dunno which version it is i think it's the original version, they have since released it  the way that she presented it to the publisher way back when. and i haven't read that one either but i hear that it's really badly written and the original novel is actually a better novel and better written cause she had help with that version.

this new version was before she had any kind of help.  Stephen King has done some weird ass novels too like a favorite of mine Insomnia  that's a really weird one.

and i did love Dream Catcher but many seem to hate it and that's fine let's face it that's a weird one too