Enjoy weird fiction overall, sci-fi and "horror" (in a very general sense). I like some Lovecraft, VanderMeers, Ballard, China Miéville, Samanta Schweblin, late William Gibson, Mariana Enríquez... what recent books or writers caught your eye that may loosely fit the term or are similar to works of the above authors? Can be in English, Portuguese or Spanish.

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes. Very reminiscent of Miéville and VanderMeer.

Beyond the Aquila Rift.

Bunch of short stories 2 of which were made into the love death and robots series.

checked Hiron Ennes, @AbouBenAdhem seems really interesting!

I don't know any of the mentioned authors, but Blindboy Boatclub comes to mind instantly. He writes short stories and some of them can be really weird and some more like horror. I think he's got three books out now.

The Vorrh by Brian Catling. Very strange, dark historical fantasy set in colonial Africa. Exquisite, poetic prose and powerful imagery, one of my favourite books in recent memory.

Ack-Ack Macaque is pretty weird.

If you like it, there are 2 more books (I haven't read the 3rd yet).

I read a lot of anthologies, one I read recently was Dark Fantasies, which was a collection of folk, domestic and urban horror, that was pretty strange and scary, worth picking up if you find it.

or Spanish

Borges, if you haven't read any of his works yet.

Kelly Link's short stories are weird

• Magic for Beginners
• Get in Trouble

The first story is often not that weird, but she is fantastic at magical realism. They aren't scary though. I recall for instance one story being about a cannon.

Love Borges since late teens, actually... with Poe the author that open my curiosity to such mode/mood of literature.

thanks!

sounds great!

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Not weird in its theme but more in its execution, the entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.

someone mentioned Kelly Link to me the other day as "essential" ... i'll surely be looking it.

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The Pandora Sequence by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom. Some of the weirdest shit I've ever read, especially in The Jesus Incident where -

I recently read Carrier Wave by Robert Brockway. It's strongly inspired by World War Z and King's The Stand, and while neither of those two are particularly weird this one adds its own twist on a not-quite-zombie apocalypse.

Ever read anything by Joe R. Lansdale?

The Laundry Files by Charles Stross are explicitly Lovecraftian and somewhat weird, though not as weird as any I've read by China Miéville. I also recommend one of Charles Stross' short stories called A Colder War.

This one is real weird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hothouse_(novel)

I think this is a rather cliche answer but since no one's mentioned him yet I'll put in a plug for Phillip K. Dick. I don't think I've ever encountered weirdness done as well as he does it. My favorites are Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but he has a lot of books and as far as I can tell, they're all weird af.

If you just want plain weird, George Saunders was pretty weird, but haven't read much of his.

I really like Izumi Suzuki's work, which gets pretty weird also, Gibson-esque I think.

I also love Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, weird in many ways but not sure in the way you mean.

Exordia comes to mind also, though I didn't enjoy it that much.

• Self-Reference Engine by Toh Enjoe - this one stretches the limits of what a novel even is, it's not like anything else I've ever read

• The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts - the inhabitants of a generation ship rebel against the controlling computer to take charge of their lives

• Transfinite Man by Colin Kapp - starts like a cloak-and-dagger detective novel, almost tropey, then goes off the rails into speculative science fiction

• Ubik by Philip K. Dick - a classic of surrealism, often referenced directly and indirectly by other works

• Permutation City by Greg Egan - ultimately an exploration of self-determination and personal trauma in a digital world - who do we become, if we have the freedom to be and do anything?

• The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson - in my opinion the most compelling of Sanderson's work

• Einstein's Bridge - a fictional exploration of the Einstein-Rosen bridge set in a timeline where the Superconducting Super Collider was not cancelled

• Unflattening by Nick Sousanis - philosophy in a graphic novel, an exploration of identity and self-knowledge

Asking around gave me this shortlist of suggestions:

• Agustina Bazterrica (in Spanish)
• Suzan Palumbo’s short fiction collection Skin Thief
• Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin’s Wax & Wane
• Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
• Kev Lambert’s You Will Love What You Have Killed

The first story in magic for beginners (the one about the library, i think it's the title story) is one of my favourite stories ever.

Since i mentioned short stories, If you like short stories get your hands on all the Ted Chiang you can (not anything like kelly link, but I think of him as the Chopin of short sci-fi.

Since i'm on a roll you may like "there is no antimemetics division" which is a little horror-sih may also be up your alley.

+1 for Philip K. Dick. My favorites are probably Counter-clock World and A Scanner Darkly

Another one that wasn’t mentioned yet is Stanisław Lem. The Futurological Congress totally blew my mind.

Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson.

The story follows Hiro Protagonist—a pizza delivery driver in a fractured, hyper-capitalized future reality and an elite hacker/swordfighter in the virtual "Metaverse".

If you like that, his other books are fantastic, especially Cryptonomicon, Anathem, and Diamond Age.

It's well-known and well-studied, but also infamous as a book few people ever actually finish because it is so weird: Gravity's Rainbow.

I finished it. I'm not sure what I gained by reading it, outside of having a better understanding of what an acid trip might feel like. Very weird.

Other mainstream but weird recommendations: Mexican Gothic (highly recommend this) and A Night in the Lonesome October

It's a great novel but I wouldn't call it "weird"?

The science in Permutation City is truly mind-warping, if you really try to wrap your head around it. One of my favourite books.

Egan's short story collection Axiomatic is full of heavy concept scifi in a similar vein to it.

DCC is the opposite of weird fiction, it is incredibly formulaic and tropey.

Oh, I actually forgot about A Scanner Darkly! I think that was the first PKD novel I ever read. Gonna have to give it another read. I don't remember it all that well but I distinctly remember how I felt at the end of it, which was weirded the hell out.

i read a few from Carlton Mellick III, they're pretty weird. some are translated to spanish: https://carltonmellick.com/books/

other bizzaro fiction in english: https://www.bizarrocentral.com/bizarro-books/

for weird horror, my favourite that might just be weird enough for the question is The Seven Days of Peter Crumb by Jonny Glynn

I’d give “Still Lost: Tales from 2080” by Sam Miller a shot. It’s not too incredibly weird but is just off beat enough to be outside the norm and utterly delightful

House of leaves is my all time favourite mindfuck horror literature. I just recommend going hard copy over ebook as the formatting is super important. I can't really describe it except to say I can see how Backrooms could be inspired by it.

I'm commenting so I may come back to this later.

It's hard to go wrong with Jeremy C. Shipp. I loved Vacation but it's hard to get ahold of at the moment. Their most recent work is The Merry Dredgers which I haven't read yet but looks fantastic.

I just reread house of leaves. It's very good.

The first time I read it, it was right after taking like Theory & Criticism 400 in college, so the academic prose seemed just normal. I lent it to a friend who hasn't read anything more advanced than Harry Potter in decades, and it really gave her brain a workout.

It's worth it. The story is fascinating and it's a good mental workout.

You're the only other person I've ever encountered who believes the emperor's soul to be Sanderson's best work. I really do think he thrives with the short story / novella length fiction in general, and it's a shame he's always going for the opposite. Emperor's soul crams so much depth into such a compelling little story, I can't believe how often it's overlooked.

I haven't seen it mentioned yet so I'll throw in my rec: the spear cuts through water. You know how they say you need to know the rules to break the rules? This book is a masterclass in that. It does so many things that novels simply aren't supposed to... And the execution is flawless. The story is compelling, but I was most engaged with the way it was written. It felt like nothing else I've ever encountered - not because the ideas were new (nesting narratives, shifts in perspective, genre twists, etc) but because I've never seen so much of it executed so well together.

My all-time favorite novel is Blindness by Jose Saramago. I have only read it in English, but it was originally published in Portuguese as "Ensaio sobre a cegueira".

From Wikipedia: "It centers on an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in a nonspecific city, and follows multiple unnamed characters as they navigate the social breakdown that swiftly follows."

Ever read Blindsight by Peter Watts?

The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley

Super weird and fucked up SciFi and really good

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory and then all his other works.

Iain M. Banks if you're looking for this SciFi works.

I haven't read those authors so I'm not sure if it's the same type of weird, but I recently read Hyperion which is both weird and good.

Gideon the ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Escapeology by Ren Warom

Weaveworld by Clive Barker

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil was a lot of fun.