The best books that will make you feel lost and obsessed by a haunted world

A house that is not a house but a world; a drowning, empty, echoing world with one lonely, endearingly innocent wanderer, endless statues, occasional birds—and the remains of the dead.

Dreamlike but lucid, sharp enough to cut, Piranesi is a relatively slim book (you could read it in one deeply absorbed afternoon) but the world it evokes is vast.

It sounds like distant seabirds as heard from a dark room, and it tastes salty, like blood or the sea.

I think everyone finds themselves helpless to describe this book without using some synonym of “rich”—it’s a story thick with stories, about what it means to tell and be told stories.

Olondria brims with the literary history of a world that doesn’t exist—but of course, it does exist, both in the sense that all stories about other worlds are about our own (having been written in it and therefore inescapably pointing at it) and in the more literal sense that it’s right there on the page in black and white, in words and silences.

And Olondria is about exactly that: the magic and the violence of reading, and a ghost trying to tell a stranger a story, which is just what writing and reading are like.

You know how you go somewhere you’ve never been and you feel hollow in your bones, like you’re more fragile there, you might blow away in a strong wind or just melt down if this place doesn’t learn to recognize you?

Amatka is like that, and it’s about that. We follow someone trying to diligently do a perfectly normal market research gig in place where everyday objects must be clearly labelled and the labels reinforced constantly, otherwise they dissolve into slush.

She has to keep putting things in their place, but she’s not too good at that, because she’s always been out of place herself.

I mean, isn’t that exactly what life is like? And then it all falls apart.

Technically—very technically—this is the conclusion of a trilogy, but it’s more three standalone novels that have some things to say to, and about, each other.

The first book, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, was hugely influential on me as a reader and writer, and on speculative fiction as a field. This one, two decades later, is the most direct about the mutual imbrication, the bidirectional haunting, between our world and theirs.

Swanwick’s Dragon books do indeed feature dragons, except the iron dragons are mechanical, warplanes bonded to their human pilots, in a version of Faerie that has fully integrated vile modernity and knows our souls all too well. 

Death in Spring is a tiny book containing a bigger, more intricate world than many a doorstopper, for all that the whole story set in a small, nameless hamlet.

Life there too is made of strange, violent rituals, only not the ones we know. We follow a boy growing up and learning them, and being scarred by these mysteries—what do they fill the mouths of the dead with, before they are killed and put into a tree forever? (It’s cement.)

Rodoreda wrote in Catalan, and Tennent’s translation is fluid and beautiful.

Perfection is a rare thing; if you want to see what that looks like, here you go.