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What are your favorite literary horror, fantasy, and science fiction works? What do you think separates them from more typical representatives of their genre?
Going to second House of Leaves here -- but I think the things called "weird fiction" kinda tick all four boxes, literary, horror, fantasy, and sci-fi. Lovecraft, of course, but also I really love Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," Ligotti, Jon Padgett, and William Hope Hodgson (House on the Borderlands seems a direct influence on House of Leaves, and will likewise corrode your dreams). What all of these works have in common is that they make their stylistic peculiarities an essential feature of the work itself, and are both thoroughly experimental but also unabashedly pieces of genre fiction. Also I gotta love the Eastern European sci-fi writers -- Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, Karel Capek's War with the Newts, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic. Reasons being similar.
I really like Philip K Dick for sci-fi. UBIK and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are truly excellent, enjoyable reads. They're fun page turners that still intelligently interrogate things like faith, desire, the unconscious, etc. He's got an earnest philosophical bent that's couched in a great sense of humour. A good sense of humour is a common trait between all my favourite authors across all genres.
For science fiction, any novel from Andrew Crumey All his novels are about the various philosophical aspects of science, mathematics, literature, and how they related to each other. There is metafiction too in some works. Music In a Foreign Language, Mobius Dick, Sputnik Caledonia, The Great Chain of Unbeing, The Secret Knowledge are some of them
I read Sputnik Caledonia years ago, I think it had a vaguely Lanark vibe? Good shit though and I'll take a look at the others you mention.
There is definitely a Lanark vibe in that book. The other are very good too, some more science fiction than others (like Mobius Dick). Crumey explore science as serious subject like few in modern literature , like some other authors explore literature as subject in novels, but not in a dry, technical way. Crumey was a physicist before his work as novelist, and he for me put science and humanities together in a new way
when i think about literary horror, i think about house of leaves — the navidson record, specifically, which is an academic analysis of videos recorded in and around the house. there are sections of this book which i really dislike, but when it's good it's good. it's a brilliant reimagination of the haunted-house trope: the house itself is haunted, with inexplicable changes to its architecture, the inside eventually becoming indefinitely larger than the outside. but it's also about human hubris, too. so many men willingly go inside the house's ever-changing pitch-black tunnels, convinced that they will be able to make sense of it — for glory, or for curiosity. but it's the distance and the speculation which really makes it creepy: in-universe, this thing has swept academia by storm, with endless articles and conferences and books about what's real, what each recorded gesture or grimace might have meant. it satirises academic navel-gazing, and is quite amusing in places, but also chillingly invasive and callous. and then, you're also reading a record of a record of a record, and flipping around the book for footnotes and indices and endnotes, and things are censored or 'lost,' and there are whole forums full of people going crazy about what everything means — the form parallels the content. house of leaves is creepy in a lot of different ways. it's a huge text. it's creepy if you take it at face value as a haunted-house story, and creepier still if you choose to consider the in-universe circumstances for that story even being told — which is to do with a whole other narrator that i haven't touched on at all. the ergodic nature of the book — as an artefact, a real collection of documents — is a fundamental aspect of the horror from both perspectives. i think there's something very special about that
This question requires some definition of terms. Others will surely disagree but here are my criteria: - I call a book literary when its appeal is about more than just plot, i.e. the form or style is crafted to give pleasure in its own right, or to contribute in its own right to the overall impression left by the book rather than being there simply to convey narrative. - Fantasy I take to be stories whose plots couldn't happen under the laws of physics, i.e. there is something that defies rational explanation like magic, cryptids, supernatural phenomena, etc. - Science fiction is what I call stories set in the future, in space, or in alternate realities (including time travel stories). - Horror is a book that's meant to give you the creeps. Based on the above, here are a few titles that I think are literary (some qualify for multiple genres): Fantasy Vorrh Trilogy - Brian Catling The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov The Picture of Dorian Gray - Wilde Orlando - Woolf Days Between Stations - Steve Erickson Herma, Bull Fire, Screenplay, The Little People - MacDonald Harris The Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine - Stanley Crawford The Image of a Drawn Sword - Jocelyn Brooke But for the Lovers - Wilfrido Nolledo Midnight's Children - Rushdie The Land of Laughs - Jonathan Carroll The Vet's Daughter, The Juniper Tree - Barbara Comyns The Blizzard - Vladimir Sorokin Life and Death are Wearing Me Out - Mo Yan SF The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court - Twain Lanark - Alasdair Gray The Age of Wire and String - Ben Marcus Omon Ra - Victor Pelevin Venemous Lumpsucker - Ned Beauman The fiction of Lucius Shepard Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell Much of J.G. Ballard Too Like the Lightning - Ada Palmer Version Control - Dexter Palmer The Thing Itself - Adam Roberts Horror Dance of the Dwarfs - Geoffrey Household The fiction of Robert Aickman The Other - Thomas Tryon
I like your definition of 'literary'. The most literary book I've read would probably be Le Rivage des Syrtes (The Opposing Shore) by Julien Gracq. The plot is minimal to non-existant but you feel like you're suspended in a dream-like atmosphere. The prose is very flowery and skilfully draws out this feeling of extended rêverie.
mary doria russell's the sparrow has been haunting me for years. the amount of wrong that the expedition goes is unreal. m. t. anderson's feed is YA, but i had the same emotional response to it as i did to the sparrow they both got me to care about the characters and what they wanted (which jeff vandermeer could not manage across all four southern reach books), and the highs are so high you almost think everything will turn out okay in defiance of all evidence, but their endings are bleak horror that offer no refuge or hope