Five Offbeat Books of 2024

*bangs on table* More! Weird! Books!

Hello friends,

2024 is nearly over! Thank God. This year I started a fancy new job, got a literary agent, got engaged, and also spent much of the year feeling like I was being put through a French press.

Recently I found myself energized by

Emma Copley Eisenberg

’s list of “superlative” books, as opposed to “best” books. Eisenberg writes:

I wanted to find a way this year to be one more place where books can be discussed and highlighted without all the bullshit I’ve been complaining about…. Different books were, this year, desirable to me in different moods and moments and climates. And some books were not desirable to me in any mood or moment, and I think that should be part of the conversation too, especially books that were deemed very very desirable by many other people.

I’ve been thinking a lot, on my end, about my long-growing attraction to weirdness in fiction. I am extremely tired of seeing iterations on the same beats and patterns and tropes, especially in books that have been pitched to me as weird — and I’m also sick and tired of watching narratives that have been touted as dark or crazy or whatever pull their punches at the last second. (See: The movie version of Nightbitch.)

On the other hand, I’m also interested in a lot of the qualities that are often considered commercial: engaging prose, forward-moving plots, hooky taglines. Our culture seems to think that weirdness and commerciality are in opposition to each other, but I don’t think that’s the case. What I think is that those commercial qualities can and should be used as vehicles for weirdness more often than they are.

I think a lot about Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2016 Guardian interview about Eileen, where she says, “I couldn’t be like, Here’s my freak book … So I’ve disguised the ugly truth in a kind of spiffy noir package.”

Anyway, all of this to say: As a writer myself, I think a lot about how to package my own weird shit in slick commercial wrapping paper. And that’s something I’ve been on the lookout for, too, when reading this year. So, inspired by Eisenberg’s list of superlatives: Here’s my short, knee-jerk-because-it’s-already-December-30, list of books I read this year that satisfactorily managed to be commercially readable + weird at the same time:

Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

This is a book about a terrible rich family in Long Island.

The commercial: Plot-wise, this book isn’t driven by a narrative per se, but what it does have is a looming sense of impending doom that keeps you compulsively turning the pages. At one point I had to put the book down for a couple of days because I was so stressed out. This is a compliment!

Also, the characters are so rich and deep and elaborately rendered that they feel like real people (see also Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is In Trouble).

The weird: Brodesser-Akner’s voice is like no other. You can open this book to any page and be immediately seized by the voice alone. Look, I just did, here’s an example:

“You know what happens when you marry a young shiksa?” Phyllis had asked him, when, in a final plea-threat for him to reconsider, she had appealed not to his conscience but to his vanity. “You end up with an old goya.” He still didn’t totally understand what this meant, but he thought about it constantly.

Beamer went to Carl’s study, which was not being occupied for the duration of the shiva, and pulled his laptop out of his work bag, and though he had slept as little as anyone else, and perhaps owing to the drug soup that was right now rendering his liver into the consistency of beef jerky, he got to work on his screenplay. He reread the abhorrent, rejected script, hoping he would be able to dismiss Stan and Anya’s allegations of cultural insensitivity and overall vapidity.

What he found instead was a sea of shame in which to submerge himself…

And so on! A total ride! A 440-page ride!

Also the weird: Brodesser-Akner refuses to limit her interests to one thing. This is pitched as a book about “tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever,” and indeed it is!!!

Nightwatching, by Tracy Sierra

This is a thriller about a woman who has to protect her children when someone breaks into her home.

The commercial: This book is breathlessly taut and tense as hell. An unbelievable page-turner. Sparingly written.

The weird: It is just totally relentless and unflinching in its depiction of how terrifying it would be to have someone try to hurt your children. That complaint I had earlier, about how a lot of narratives pull their punches — this one does not do that. It’s also somehow an incredibly female book, not only in its protagonist but in its overall sensibility; I have yet to put my finger on what exactly I mean by that, but I am certain of it.

The Band, by Christine Ma-Kellams

A book about a psychologist who gets involved with a K-pop boyband member on the run.

The commercial: It’s a book about K-pop! Everybody loves K-pop!

The weird: It’s thinly veiled self-insert fanfiction about BTS! So ballsy!

House of Beth, by Kerry Cullen

This one’s a cheat — I read an ARC, but it doesn’t come out until 2025. It’s about a woman who moves back to her hometown and marries a dude and becomes obsessed with his dead wife. Very Rebecca.

The commercial: The book slots very cleanly into the ol’ semi-speculative-but-mostly-realist feminist horror niche (e.g. Nightbitch and Bunny, both of which the book is comped to, but also Annie Bot, Rouge, The School for Good Mothers, etc. etc.) The protagonist is very relatable. There’s a ghost; everyone loves ghosts. Plus, everyone loves Rebecca!

The weird: In addition to being a book about stepmotherhood and queerness and societal expectations and dead wives, this is also a book about having harm OCD, and that quality of the book — the narrator’s depiction of her own constant terror — absolutely crackles. And there’s a plot choice or two in the second half of the book that I would call downright audacious.

Exordia, by Seth Dickinson

This one is also a cheat, because:

The commercial: This book is not commercial. It’s an incredibly densely packed military sci-fi novel with an enormous cast of characters, a very complicated metaphysical backbone, and a cliffhanger ending, for Lord’s sake.

The weird: This book is weird all the way through. For that reason I actually did not care for it! I found it kind of unreadable! It’s like if William Gaddis wrote a Michael Crichton novel! But it’s freaky as hell. I have never seen anything like it.

Awards Eligibility

It’s sci-fi awards season! Conveniently, my one awards-eligible story just came out in early December, and I was going to tell you about it anyway. “St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test” was published in Diabolical Plots in December 2024, and is free to read:

The Likeness greeted me with pleasant warmth. I was struck by this, for the face-plate of the Likeness, though shining and beautifully wrought, is immobile, and one would not think the Likeness capable of expression. The face-plate lacked a jaw, so that it only depicted the upper three-quarters of a man’s face, and the wooden jaw moved up and down upon an iron hinge. The rest of the Likeness’s body, too, was composed of wooden limbs, each meticulously carved to resemble the corresponding limb of a human being and attached by iron hinges at the joints’ hinges. These hinges had once been regularly oiled by Father Antonio; now the Likeness oiled its own hinges and wooden body so that the grain shone, and it polished its face-plate, while the Dominican Friars performed their ablutions.

I found myself experiencing a vague sense of unease.

This is an intensely Catholic story about what it means to have a soul.

People have called it “quite beautiful,” “with wonderful use of a distinct style,” and “spooky… I’m not sure I liked it.”

Do you like it? One way to find out.

And, obviously, let me know what you think of the aforementioned books — or let me know of any good ones I’m missing:

See y’all in January, when hopefully we will all have clambered out of our respective French presses.

Happy New Year, friends. I love you all.