As far as fiction goes I tend to fall on either end of the spectrum: utter butter pop novels or insanely ungainly tomes. Neither side tends to trigger my blues. I'm either turning the pages too fast or too busy looking up the word enfilade to get sucker punched by some subtextual dark cloud. But the following works linger somewhere in the middle, accessible enough to pull you in, dark enough to push you back.
5. The Information by Martin Amis – A superbly funny and smart story about a bleak and unhappy protagonist who loses at life. The night after I finished this, I leapt out of my bed, convinced that a gigantic black spider had dropped from the ceiling onto my stomach.
4. The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall – Crammed with wordplay, including a shark built out of letters that floats through the pages, this book is like Memento starring Will Shortz. Just thinking about it makes me dizzy. What a wonderful construct. But somehow, some way, it pushed me into a deep little hole of alienation.
3. And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris – An entertaining read. A familiar setting. A moving experience. But the final sentence, which has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with how one has internalized the book, hit me in the gut with a sledgehammer.
2. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno – A very quick read, thank God, as the entire time I felt like killing myself.
1. Oblivion by David Foster Wallace – An absolutely brilliant collection, stuffed with so much sadness above and below the text that I felt genuinely depressed for about a month after putting it down. To this day, I still refuse to read the final story, The Suffering Channel, about a man who shits out works of art, as I’m worried it will complete some horrible circuit in my brain.
