NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub. Wildest because it’s an autobiography, and they spill it all.
Edit: find the audiobook if you canI gift this one out SO many times!
A long way gone by Ishmael Beah was pretty dark. Story of a boy soldier from Sierra Leone explaining how you get forced into it and the terrible things they did.
The Metamorphosis of a Prime Intellect.
Wild Animus
It’s about a Berkeley graduate who takes a bunch of acid and then dresses up like a mountain Ram in Alaska and becomes increasingly more deranged.
It was on a reading list for a college class. Pirate the book if you decide to read, because the author is a raging asshole.
I only know of this book because it was included in a Showcase Showdown style…thing I saw once, where everything in the showcase was…well, if not bad, highly impractical.
Mostly bad.
Diaspora by Greg Egan, it’s one of the best thought out take on what a post human society could look like. Lots of amazing ideas in the book.
Depends in what way you mean ‘wild.’ Crazy even psychedelic, but nonetheless benign? Or are we including disturbing?
Ya
Hogg by Samuel Delany
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is an obvious but nonetheless relevant answer. What a ride.
Also Infinite Jest.
Sadly, Porn
I don’t know how to describe it, expect to be confused and offended and gaslit.
Fanged Noumena by Nick Land
Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani
Both are a naked lunch level mindfuck. Don’t treat it as a book, but rather as a stream of consciousness on the acid trip. Don’t try to make any sense, just ride the wave.
Infinite Jest - just the part about video conferencing is wild and is even mire wild when you realize it was written in the 90’s before video conferencing really existed:
“Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation […] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided.”
Der Prozess (1915) by Franz Kafka, it still is relevant today.
I went into Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? blind. Hadn’t seen the movie, hadn’t read any other Dick, hadn’t even had it hyped to me by a friend. What a series of mindfucks.
Lies, Inc. is another by PKD that will leave your head spinning.
I love pkd but haven’t read that, thx.
The only Philip K. Dick I’ve read is Flow my tears the policeman said (epic title for a book). It’s pretty linear and coherent until one point towards the end where, without question, 'ol Dick popped some acid.
If you want something really wild by him you can try Valis. Going in blind or not won’t really make a difference.
Probably some short story I read in high school but from what I can remember the first one that came to mind is Blood Meridian
Definitely House of Leaves. A story inside of a story, inside of a story, with all narrators being just a bit crazy. Text of different fonts, going all over the place and even upside down based on the story. Just make sure to get the physical copy.
Just finished this one. And honestly, it broke my brain and how I interpret other written narratives.
2nd on the physical copy. This text doesn’t work otherwise.
I came here to say this
I’ve been meaning to get his latest work which he predictably didn’t finish. Have you read it?
Oh I didn’t know about this. You’re talking about The Familiar, right? I don’t know if I’m up for another 5 books like this but now I really want to try.
Exactly so!
House of Leaves feels like reading some sort of forbidden text.
I’m pretty sure that was the intent.
Clockwork Orange