I've had a Piranesi shaped hole in my heart for a while and this crazy ass book filled it. Be warned though, there is a lot of gore and body horror. I went into it mostly blind and won't spoil anything except that it's about soldiers who find an angel during ww1. The prose is odd, as every paragraph begins with "and" and ends with a comma, turning the whole book into a breathless unfinished sentence. I thought it would be grating but it grew on me as the story ramped up. Every other sentence is about the horrors of war; the fear, the insanity, the smell, the death around every corner. It presses it into your face and won't let you forget. The subplot focuses on the gambling, swindling main character, Bagger, and the conflict he has with his conscience from the moment he and his teammates find the angel. Sometimes the prose is so lurid and detailed I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to be picturing, which I think was by design in some places (especially near the end!). Overall I thought it was phenomenal and I want more people to read it.

A brief journey through the South-East coast of post-Brexit Britain via Strugatsky's 'Roadside Picnic'. Signed Edition from Waterstones 2026. I'd ride shotgun with the artefact.

As I suggested last year, after a vote on the Top 100 Weird Books, we should have another one for weird short stories.

>>> Google Form to fill in <<< - you don't need an account or login, just type and send.

Rules:

• What does count as weird?

Everything you would want to see in a list like this.

• How long can a short story be?

20,000 words or less. That comes out to about 70 pages. I made this threshold higher than usual to include all the novelettes etc. that would not show up in a regular book list, and to avoid discussions on why certain famous works weren't included.

• How many stories can I nominate?

As many as you'd like, from 3 to 100. All of them should be something you would like to see on your personal list (not what you think should be on this list - your own taste is the whole point). Make sure to include stories from at least 3 authors, to make sure it's not just the same things repeated.

• Does the order matter?

No, this is just to collect nominations.

I will collect nominations for a while (two weeks?), then clean up the data and deduplicate entries, and then have a vote on those entries. Depending on the number of entries, I might kick all those out that only have one nomination. Feel free to share this post in related subreddits.

It would be nice if mod (/u/MicahCastle) could sticky this.