The world According to Garp and anything written by John Irving
Shortly after college I binge-read almost all of John Irving’s books. It seemed that everyone I knew was reading A Prayer for Owen Meany and Cider House Rules was made into a movie. All of Irving’s novels were cleverly written and populated with the quirkiest characters imaginable. I laughed a lot while I read, but I also shuddered because all of the books are really kind of Creepy. Filled with ether-addicted abortion doctors, midgets, and dancing bears they were excellent fodder for nightmares. Years after reading The World According to Garp, I still get an icky feeling every time I look at a gear shift – I will leave that one up to your imagination. In fact, it was after finishing The World According to Garp, I read them all out of order, that I realized that I needed a break! I have not read Irving’s most recent works because I am still recovering from the earlier ones. I will continue on one day because Irving is a masterful storyteller and every now and then a creepy book is just what you want. If anyone has thoughts about the more recent Irving offerings, I would love to hear.
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
A couple of years ago, when this book became The Book, I got an audio version and listened to it on my trip home from Florida. It was a pretty good choice for a long road trip. The story held my attention, and I did not figure out the twist until the end. As I believe the author intended, I both sympathized with and was repulsed by the alcoholic narrator, Rachel. Likewise, I couldn’t quite get a bead on whether or not her husband/ex-husband, Tom, was a creep or a decent man brought to the end of his tether by Rachel’s behavior. That sense of not knowing whose camp you are in, and of course the feeling that you too have been on a drunken bender, is the thing that makes this book the shuddersome work that it is.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
For some reason I had skipped, or perhaps avoided, this book for years. Not until a good friend gave me a copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran and told me that I needed to re-read The Great Gatsby (fortunately the work of an afternoon, and yes a little weird in its own right), and read Lolita before I started, did I take the plunge. Obviously, this book is supposed to be creepy, pedophilia is about the creepiest topic out there. Of course the thing that makes Lolita truly disturbing is that is is written from the perspective of the pedophile, and in a way that makes him almost….sympathetic? In the end you feel very concerned that you are not somehow more disturbed by him. I am glad that I read it, upsetting though it was, because it is such a cultural reference point .
Skeletons at the Feast and others by Chris Bojalian
Skeletons at the Feast is primarily disturbing because it takes an intimate look at the lives of people trapped inside the Third Reich at the end of WWII. This book is historical fiction, romance, and at moments tragic comedy all blended together. There are really three separate stories entwining in epic upheaval at the end of the war. A young Prussian woman, Anna, and her family become refugees as they flee the violence, a Jewish man poses as a Nazi officer after escaping a transport to a concentration camp, and a French Jewish woman tries to survive inside a camp. Though the scenes and subject matter are nothing short of nightmarish, I actually loved this novel. There is so much great literature written about WWII that it is sometimes hard to find a stand out, but for me this is one. Inspired by my love of this book I tried to read others by this Bojalian, and while the subject matters and characters were nothing short of triumphs of imagination, the books were simply too bizarre for me. Before you know Kindness and Double Blind both left me perplexed and with an overwhelming feeling of ickiness. Has anyone read any of the others? What were they like?
Never let me Go by Kazou Ishiguro
After reading Ishiguro beautiful novel The Remains of the Day, for which he recently won the Nobel Prize, I immediately checked the library for anything else he wrote and found Never Let Me Go. I was expecting something very similar to the earlier work that I loved so much, but I got a bit of a surprise. The tone and tempo of Never Let Me Go are similar to that of The Remains of the Day, but certinaly not the almost sinister subject matter. Half the unpleasantness is not knowing about it, so if you are of a mind to read Never Let Me Go I suggest you stop here, but what seems initially like a sad love story quickly devolves into a dystopian nightmare. The main characters actually turn out to be clones of living people. They were “created” for the purpose of having spare organs on hand for their “real selves”. I found this novel almost crushingly sad and am always upset when I think of it.