“Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.”
China Mieville
These are all novels which lie to their readers, whose narrative strategies are based fundamentally upon untruth, novels which will lead you into obscurity and just dump you there, wailing. If you are, as I am, entranced by the shadows of what we can know, the uncrossable gap between the signifier and the signified, these novels are for you.
(This list, for me, essentially defines the Gothic.)
- House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski.
- Night Film – Marisha Pessl.
- The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon.
- Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov.
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marisha Pessl.
- The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe.
- Railsea – China Mieville.
- The Scar – China Mieville.
- Bleeding Edge – Thomas Pynchon.
- Jack Glass – Adam Roberts.
(The theme for this post was suggested by the Broke and the Bookish’s weekly meme Top Ten Tuesday.)
The English Student 