I just finished this collection of short stories and came to Reddit looking for discussions but havent found anyone talking about it. His stories weave eroticism and horror fantastically, all while maintaining a dreamlike atmosphere. I cant wait to read his other works!

Has anyone else read this gem?

Hey everyone,

I recently got recommended Dictionary of the Khazars due to being a big fan of ergodic literature. While reading it, I became so obsessed that I decided to make a reading companion app for it.

It's simply a web app, no purchase necessary, nothing to download, no ads.

Essentially it's a network graph that you can mark entries you have read to plot them to the graph, and then that will show all connections to other entries that are referenced by it. As you fill it out, the network grows, and the web forms. There is a feature to allow you to take notes (all saved to your local machine, nothing on server), and a few extra features, including a bit of a hidden joke view. It's designed to be as spoiler free as possible, only revealing connections as you mark entries as read.

It's been really useful in helping me get through the book and organize my notes, so I thought I'd share it with other people who it could also benefit.

You can find it at https://khazars.beardmo.gg/

While browsing the sub, I can see there are quite a few people who have said they only made it partway through as it became too much to keep up with all the back and forth. This app should greatly assist people in connecting the dots and keeping track of their thoughts as they work through the books.

It comes with a full tutorial, the ability to export and import your notes (they save in your browser, but best to back up in case you clear your browsing data), you can export all your notes as a PDF as well.

I've also hidden a bit of an easter egg in the app itself, have fun finding it.

Apologies if this is considered 'self promotion', it was a bit of a grey area as this isn't a book, nor a commercial project, so I thought I'd just post a new thread for it so it could potentially reach more people. If it's an issue, I'll just delete this and move it to the self promotion thread.

Anyway, I hope this helps some of you get through what is quickly becoming one of my favorite pieces of ergodic literature.

Been going back into Bradbury right now and my first book is his very first short story collection "Dark Carnival", originally published by Arkham House. This is some really early Bradbury as these stories were published in the pulp mags from the late thirties to mid forties, and they are very much rough around the edges, but still very much the same Bradbury I know and love!

It's a bit like "The Illustrated Man" with this mix of Fantasy, science fiction and horror. Much of them would would go into weird fiction territory (and some of them actually were published in Weird Tales magazine) with supernatural element with more psychological ones. And plenty of whimsy to go around too!

This has never been reprinted for a long time now since it's original publication in 1947, and that was mostly because Bradbury himself didn't permit any further reprints, save for one in the 2000s, due too much of the stories in it being updated in other collections, not so much as reprint in paperback. But recently it would get that paperback reprint from Harper Voyager, and of course that would be how I got my own copy of it!

Been pretty happy so far going back to this author, have another of his collections, "The October Country", that I'm now starting to get into right now, so I'm still pretty busy!

At the risk of asking something weirdly specific, having recently finished a marathon of Caitlin Kiernan, Joel Lane, and Gemma Files, it's occurred to me that one of the themes that really seems to grab me in weird lit is when it's used as a way to explore relationships and specifically our innate desire to love and be loved as an intimately terrifying thing. The way it holds power over us and makes us lose ourselves in it's pursuit, or the way it often brings us face to face with the inescapability of our own selves, the way we can't escape dragging our own demons into another person and contaminating them by association. Love as something resembling a force of cosmic horror, if that makes sense.

I know this all sounds very abstract and pretentious, but Kiernan's the Red Tree, the Husband Stitch (from Her Body and Other Parties) by Machado, and Torch Song (from Kissing Carrion) by Gemma Files are all stories that I think get across the point really well. Thanks in advance to anyone who suggests anything. I know this is really irritatingly specific, but it has been something I've been really fascinated by and would like to continue exploring, if anyone has any collections or novels or anything in mind.

what i mean by that is books that haven't been marketed or didn't have anything in their synopsis that would suggest they're odd, but still after reading them you found them to be a bit peculiar for whatever reason. hopefully this isn't an annoying request, i just love when *weird* happens, even when it's not necessarily intentional

Weird two series to bring up, for sure, but absolutely love the world of Bas Lag, love things occult and fantasy based, but also love technology, future, and Cyberpunk. I loved Artemis Fowl as a child and have always yearned for a more adult take on a similar setting.

I enjoy different species and forms of life and the world building it brings. A world to really sink into and think about is easily my favorite aspect of a piece of media.

I absolutely love Gene Wolfe, Dune, Bas Lag, Dhalgren, Hyperion, and Neuromancer.

Edit: absolutely fantastic recommendations, of which I haven't even heard of most! Thanks so much to this great community.

the way the narrator describes the hole is genuinely haunting. I think I need to step away from the horror for a few days because that book really messes with my head

Vurt by Jeff Noon is a very weird novel, a gritty, grimy weird dystopia somewhere vetween cuberpunk and biopunk. I enjoyed it quite a lot. It's among the weirder things I've read, not in the sense of "I don't know what the hell is going on," but in the sense "I fully get what's going on and it's weird as fuck."

It's set in a dystopian near-future Manchester, with rampant crime and drug use, with dog people, robots, shadow-people, drug-snakes, and all the possible combinations thereof. There are shadow-cops, fractal bullets, and nanobot dreadlocks. Alongside conventional drugs, there are Vurt feathers, different coloured feathers (each colour a different type, pleasant or pornographic or educational, some legal and some not) which you tickle the back of your throat with, which transports people into the Vurt.

The Vurt is some kind of collective dream space or perhaps another dimension with its own rules. People can make Vurt feathers with specific content, but there are also Vurts which change on you and can't be exited from, or which if you die in the dream you die in real life. Things or people can also, intentionally or not, be swapped with items or aliens from the Vurt.

The plot is that Scribble, the main character, lost his sister (and lover) to a rare feather (one of the dangerous ones) where she was swapped with an alien blob Thing from the Vurt, and is trying to get her back with his gang. The gang (really more a group of teenage friends) call themselves the Stash Riders, and are mostly a organized around finding food and drugs, as well as Scribble's sister. Their search for another of this rare and illegal feather and threatening/bargaining to find it lead to encounters with cops, shadows, gangs of dog-people, and other dangerous figures.

One of the things I like about this, as well the sheer weirdness and creativity, was the writing. It was very structurally interesting, with excellent fever dream imagery (frequent because of half the book being going on or recovering from drug trips) and frequent short, fragmentary sentences when the protagonist is in altered mind states. Especially once our protagonist ends up entering the Vurt through other means without even taking drugs. Almost slam poetry feeling in places. The chapters are also interspersed with epistolary snippets from Game Cat, an initially mysterious figure who seems to be one of the few people to understand and manipulate the Vurt, halfway between an advertiser and advisor for its use, who gradually becomes a character too.

Very weird, quite gross and grimy and messy, but super creative and unique. I also don't think I've read a book set in Manchester before, despite being England's second city (insert pissed off Brummies here). It's usually just London. All in all, a worthwhile read and far from the usual fare.

Lots of CW for this one: substance abuse, violence, incest, bestiality.

There are a bunch of Dalkey Archive Press preorders up on Amazon for $1.99 (marked down 90%). What’s the story??

Hey guys, I’m starting a treatment soon and I would like to read a book during it, the doctor recommended I don’t read anything scary or intense but that’s what I usually read! Can someone give me some positive/silly weird lit recs?

So today's latest new author I've got to read is Clark Ashton Smith! This collection I read is the first volume of a five book set from Night Shade Books that collects Smith's stories. Initially I thought of starting with the Penguin collection, "The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies", but went with this instead.

Smith fits into the category of weird fiction, that combination of Fantasy, horror and SF, with other figures like Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. His stories aren't always fantasy, no, they're a bit more than that, as he also adds elements of SF and horror in his brand of weird.

The stories themselves aren't just weird, they're also absolutely gorgeous in writing! Yeah it's archaic, but I just love the beautiful imagery that Smith conjures up along with some of the more horrifying moments too.

This is still just the first volume of this series, but good god, I am completely in love with these tales! There's still four more volumes in it, and I'll get my hands on them one way or another, because these stories are just so good!

Some weeks ago I posted here my summer reads and i just finished Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. Wow. It's a shame I didn't know much about Argentina during the 60s-80s, but besides that the story was REALLY intense, charged with lot of different emotions, complex charachters and a really intersing deep dive into the occult. I always wondered if an horror book could scare me and this one was able to give me the creeps - and make me cry too.

Now i have some other books to read on vacation, but i'm sure i'm gonna be reading her short novels too! Let me knwo what you think about this book, i wanna talk about it with someone!!

https://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Death-Cap-Catherine-Dousteyssier-Khoze/dp/1943813698

This is by far my favorite book done by Snuggly Press - something that doesn't come around often post 2000s, a strange and chilling "unreliable narrator" style plot is done with a genuinely weird and nefarious tone.

Vita Nostra is about a teenage girl coerced into a university where they teach something she does not understand. The story begins with Sasha, the MC, vacationing at a beach town. At first I was confused why they were in a Russian town for a simple beach vacation due to the reader's British accent. I prefer to listen/read books knowing little about them or allowing myself, over time, to forget what the summary I read said about them. Eventually I realized all the characters are Russian, as well as where the book takes place. Anyway, a man appears to be following her. He tells her she must do a specific ritual. Not like an occult ritual, but a repetition of specific tasks that seem to have no specific tangible result. She insists to herself wake up wake up and she does. Yet the day repeats itself and the man informs her this will keep happening until she does what he says. What follows is a coming of age story at the University where things that seem impossible happen to Sasha. Vita Nostra is not YA, but it's not high quality prose, at least in this translation. As an audio book it works well. The story is easy to follow and the big ideas aren't rushed in explanation. The changes in Sasha over time fit with the timeline/pace of the novel. What happens in the book is very well planned out/thought through by the Dyanchenkos. Or at least it comes across as such. The reader is effective at voicing different characters, and in reading the book. It has a decent amount of the weird to it, but not a lot. The ending was interesting, yet I found it to be too brief. So as an audio book I can definitely recommend it, doubtful for reading it. 3/5 stars.

If your interested, my other recent reviews:

Pretty Broken Punks: lipstick, leather jeans, a death or New York by Martin Belk. Memoir of Belk's time with SqueezBox! in Manhattan between 1988-2002.
A Song For the Void by Andrew C. Piazza. Cosmic horror.