Melmoth is one of my favorite books of all time, and nothing I’ve found quite gets the dreamy, haunting atmosphere that I think mostly comes from her writing style. I also love Perry’s other novels, After Me Comes The Flood and Essex Serpent
The weirder the better. If I’m not totally sure what’s happening we’re on the right track. The Doloriad was a little too much that way a lot of the time, but I liked the writing for the most part. I also absolutely loved Wingspan of Severed Hands. Didn’t have a clue what was happening and it was great
I have a few long flights coming up, so let me hear what you got
by iamaeneas
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I think pretty much everything Jeff Vandermeer writes would be of interest to you (take a look at any of his book covers – it will tell you exactly what the book is like. I haven’t read all his stuff, but the **Southern Reach** trilogy (kind of an x-files premise, but super atmospheric, cosmic horror. I also enjoyed **Borne** which is kind of a post-apocalyptic, cosmic-horror version of *Little Shop of Horrors.*
Caitlin Starling’s **Luminous Dead** could be another… a haunting, poetic cross between *The Martian* and *Dead Space*.
If you don’t mind being really literal, Ilya Kaminsky’s **Deaf Republic** is a novel-size tale told in ALL poetry. It’s an achingly beautiful story about a small village under the thumb of a violent, oppressive army. When a soldier kills a young boy for not acknowledging him – which was because the boy was deaf and had his back turned – the whole town decides to protest in a creative way, in honor of the boy.
**The Wind Up Girl** by Paolo Bacigalupi is a dreamlike, dystopian novel set in Asia. Fossil fuels have run out, and global warming has basically finished up, leaving most of the world uninhabitable. The main character works in a lawless Bangkok brothel, and accidentally alters the course of history.
If you are up for [ergodic](https://medium.com/illumination/what-is-ergodic-literature-c4f015b4d40a) literature, these three are awesome:
– **House of Leaves** by Mark Danielewski. An atmospheric/cosmic horror about a book about a journal about a manuscript about a documentary about a house that is larger on the inside than the outside.
– **Cain’s Jawbone** by Torquemada. Exactly 100 pages long, this 1934 novel describes the circumstances of six separate murders. But – all the pages are out of order. If you can figure out the right order, you’ll know exactly what happened to all six victims. Still considered one of the most challenging literary puzzle of all time. And the writing is really haunting and disorienting, since you never know who the narrator is on that particular page.
– **The Raw Shark Texts** by Stephen Hall. If you know the premise of *Memento*, you’ll recognize the basic plot: the MC has a condition that makes him forget everything when he sleeps. He’s cared for by a psychiatrist, but he begins to find what appear to be clues he’s left himself, suggesting that the psychiatrist is not who he seems. The title of the book comes from the MC mishearing the phrase “Rorschach test,” and now he pictures the ambiguity in his life as a shark, selectively devouring the secrets it wants to keep from him.