Eclectic Recs No. 10

Weird books with unreliable narrators.

I’m listening to Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (out today). Though it took me a few chapters to acclimate to the audiobook narrator, I’m invested in the story of Celia Dent, a young woman who works at a telephone company by day and fantasizes about killing her husband at night. As nineteen-year-old Celia unlocks forbidden parts of her psyche, her confidence grows—but is she reliable? Like many narrators in the weird, slightly comic, surrealist book oeuvre, she hints at past traumas and hears voices. Her husband seems abusive, she lost her mother at an early age. As she grows more erratic, the plot is like a car crash. You don’t want to look, but you can’t look away. Evil Genius reminds me of three other off-kilter, verging-on-horror novels. If you enjoy weird, head-scratching, page-turning stories, today’s list of Eclectic Recs is for you.