The best books about reality becoming unreal

Reading H. P. Lovecraft’s best stories, I always start to feel as if I’m digging away at the accepted reality of modern man, peeling it back to reveal another, older, truer reality hidden underneath. It’s an eerie process. In that final reality, I find the Old Gods are still waiting. Over the course of the past 10,000 years, perhaps they only blinked an eye. But now, each page I turn brings them closer. That abysmal reality of the Old Gods is only hinted at in the stories – Cthulhu is a presence rather than a character – but I don’t doubt for a moment how dangerous it is, because Lovecraft makes us believe, deep down, that their return is inevitable.

It might sound strange, but one of the things I like most about Shirley Jackson’s writing is just how brutal she is with her characters! When I first met Eleanor Vance, the lead character in The Haunting of Hill House, who’s seeking her ‘cup of stars’, I was absorbed in the slightly strained and unsettling interior monologue that lets us into her view of the world. From the start, I got the feeling of something about to snap… But personally, I’m usually rooting for the characters in the books I read, so I still hoped Eleanor might find those stars of hers. Then she agrees to visit Hill House. And maybe the house’s haunted reality does give her a glimpse of those stars, somehow – but in brutal fashion?

I can’t think of another book that bends and blends competing realities as well as Slaughterhouse-5. Vonnegut shows us the mundanity of a 9 to 5 optometrist, the horrors of war (in this case, the fire-bombing of Dresden), time-traveling sci-fi, and mental breakdown – each of these realities plays off the others until I can’t be sure where one ends and the next begins. It’s a high-wire act, in that respect, one that could easily fall flat. I think Vonnegut makes it work, not only because of his skill but also because, after trying for ages to write a book about his experiences in WW2, he found a story and structure that lets him capture all the madness and horror (and bleak, deadpan, absurdist humour) of everything he saw.

Reality always seems to be something of a moving target in Philip K. Dick’s books. No other writer gives me the same kind of thrilling vertigo as I get when I enter into his worlds because no other writer treats the idea of reality so skeptically. Everything in Dick’s fictional world is open to doubt, corruption, or complete overthrow – there’s really no safe place for his characters, or us, to stand. I think Ubik is the book where he takes this to the extreme, pushing those feelings of anxiety and dislocation until it’s very close to being a horror story. In Ubik, I find myself facing technological ghosts and vampires. Of course, this being Dick, I’m never completely sure which characters fall into which category – and neither are they.

I’m often attracted to characters who seem to be haunted – whether by places, people, or their own past. Stanislaw Lem ups the ante a good deal by having his cast of characters apparently haunted by the entire ocean of the planet they’ve landed on. But that isn’t why I find Solaris so moving and intriguing. Just as we’re starting to orientate ourselves to how the planet can bend reality for the astronauts who are based there, Lem throws an entirely unexpected question into the mix – what if the ‘monsters’ don’t realise they’re ‘monsters’, what if they’re as bewildered by the situation as the ‘victims’? That blindsided me (which is another thing I like stories to do) and, for me, it adds a special layer of poignancy to the book.