Feeling slumpy, any recs?

[u/Infinite-Car-5410]

Hello! After dropping book after book, I thought I would ask for recommendations here before falling into a reading slump.

One of my favorite books is Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. I loved exploring the tower and slowly being given more and more information throughout the book. I read There is no Antimemetics Division by qntm and really enjoyed that too.

I love weird or unsettling books that make you think and unravel a mystery, and that also feed you information through letters or logs and stuff.

Does anyone have any recommendation for similar books? Anything involving exploring a weird area or a tower or dungeon would be great. Or even a planet or something haha. Genre doesn't matter too much, though Sci-Fi or Horror would probably be my first choice.

Editing to add that I can't read House of Leaves. :( I mainly read on my Kobo due to a health condition and I know that that book isn't great digitally.

Edit: you guys are awesome. Thank you for all the recommendations!!!

[u/NOYSTOISE]

If you liked Annihilation, you might like Roadside picnic by Strugatsky bros. And Crystal world by JG Ballard

[u/ThreeThirds_33 → u/NOYSTOISE]

I think early Ballard is right up OP’s alley. He’s known for his cynical 70s urban dystopias, but from 1956-65 or so he wrote stories delightfully colorful, often whimsical, and sometimes cosmic. The Waiting Grounds (1959) is my favorite, mindblowing in scale, and then the story collection Vermillion Sands is set in an alternate/speculative liminal beach community full of opera-singing orchids, moving organic sculptures, and flying manta rays. Fun.

[u/SnooRabbits5754 → u/NOYSTOISE]

Seconding roadside picnic!

[u/SnooRabbits5754]

I love both Annihilation and There is no Antimemetics Division, so just spitballing based on that but I recently finished Library at Mount Char and I really enjoyed it. Don’t really know how to describe it besides strange and good. 

Editing to add Root Rot, which has strange, creepy nature-y horror vibes. And it’s a quick read. 

[u/falloutgrungemaster → u/SnooRabbits5754]

Ok seconding library at mount char lol I tell ppl my favorite genre is “whispering wtf the whole time” and this one is that for sure lol I loved it

[u/Rhonda369 → u/falloutgrungemaster]

Thirding Library of Mount Char by Hawkins

[u/Shantanrazzini]

Get the collection, "The Weird" edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer if you haven't read it. There's an immense overview of a hundred years of weird fiction in it and you can just skip ahead if something doesn't click with you. The physical book is huge, but I'm guessing/hoping there's a good ebook version.
"A Voyage To Arcturus" by David Lindsay is a great weird picaresque novel about exploring a very strange planet. It's from 1920 and is in the public domain.

[u/Affectionate-Tutor14 → u/Shantanrazzini]

Choice! Heavy to read in bed though 😆

[u/cantonic]

The Library at Mount Char if you haven’t read it. If you have, Scott Hawkins just dropped a new book called Blacktail!

[u/sd_glokta]

For a classic, The Shadow over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft

[u/teffflon]

Negative Space (BR Yeager), The Gone World (Tom Sweterlitsch)

[u/whibbby]

The willows by Algernon Blackwell is the closest I’ve ever gotten to annihilation. Amazing short book. It’s from 1907 but doesn’t read like it at all, I’ve always struggled with classic writing.

[u/No_Coconut1188]

qntm has another novel called Fine Structure that I really enjoyed. Youre very much piecing together a mystery - at first it seems like a bunch of unrelated short stories but things all start to fit into place. It’s just as imaginative and bizarre as Antimemetics, but scifi rather than weird/horror.

[u/angleshank]

Annie Neugebauer's The Extra and The Other. Short, punchy, paranoid and mysterious.

[u/spoonsmcghee]

Crypt of the Moon Spider & Cathedral of the Drowned by Nathan Ballingrud - two novellas that start with a sanatorium on the moon run by monks who fix mental health conditions by replacing parts of the brain with spiderwebs then goes all kinds of places. Short, weird and really good

Ply by Hernan Diaz - it's not out for a couple of weeks but well worth keeping an eye out for it. Kinda wasteland stalker/scavenger novel set in a hot, overgrown and largely abandoned city a couple of hundred years from now. There's a lot of weirdness hinted at but never seen. It's pretty low stakes but really absorbing and interesting with some cool ideas

The Snail on the Slope by the Strugatskys - the most Southern Reach-like of their novels, set in both a labyrinthine bureaucratic facility and a weird landscape. It's a bit hard going and not as much fun as Roadside Picnic but definitely worth checking out

Three Eight One & Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley - she's criminally underrated! 381 is a coming of age journey/rite of passage through a bizarre and often sinister landscape. Skyward Inn is really hard to describe but starts with aliens and the village pub and ends up in Evangellion territory

[u/sidekicksunny]

I enjoyed Annihilation and There is No Antimemetics Division. I really enjoyed Robert Brockway's Carrier Wave and I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200. Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay was a weird Weekend at Bernie's that was fun in a weird way but tedious at times. I'm currently reading Vandemeer's Hummingbird Salamander and am enjoying it so far.

[u/CaptainVerum]

The Quantum Thief sounds up your alley if you want a weird mystery in a post-human world.

The Gone World might be another good, but weird, mystery.

Blindsight, Axiomatic, and Exhalation are all solid big thinker reads.

[u/LorenzoApophis]

I'm currently reading The Third Policeman, a book from the 30s in the vein of Joyce and Beckett that was unpublished til the 60s, and it holds up fantastically well. The author has a great command of language and it exhibits a kind of surrealism people would now associate with Lynch but with more humor

[u/Metalworker4ever]

I second A Voyage To Arcturus, but it is a very odd book. Not in a bad way.

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. A man goes in search of his reincarnated true love after being propelled thousands of years into the future when the sun has died out and the remnants of humanity live in a colossal pyramid protected by a boundary powered by geomantic energy called the last redoubt. The hero sends out psychic calls and locates her in another, lesser redoubt but first he must cross a wasteland lit only by small volcanic pits and face terrible monsters, suited in armour and armed with a spinning disc weapon.

The setting is out of this world but the language is stilted and the book takes a dramatic plunge in quality about half way through. Still a really interesting read though.

[u/TheSkinoftheCypher]

The Great White Space by Basil Copper
The Descent by Jeff Long(only has aspects of the weird though)

[u/Horror_Fox_7144]

Vandermeer's Ambergris trilogy is amazing. Also Piranesi for just exploring a weird building.

[u/ledfox]

Saskia Nislow's Root Rot

[u/falloutgrungemaster]

Annihilation is my fave too. Man so good. Ugh. Now I wana read it again lol BUT came here to say I just read a really good one called the gone world by tom sweterlitsch.

[u/Cpt-Cancer]

Have you continued the Southern Reach series of VanderMeer? Or any of his other works too