Hi, welcome back to my channel. If you don't know, my name is Kat and today is a very exciting
video because we are going to talk about my favorite dark and weird reads of 2020. So as
I'm sure you know, one of my favorite things to read is dark and weird books, and especially
when they're combined in the same book. So this is actually my hardest end of the year video to film
and there was no way I was going to get it down to just 10 so I did do 15. I think 15 is a pretty
good recommendation number. So without further ado, we're going to get into it. All of these books
are dark and weird and I really enjoyed reading them. Number 15 is The Pisces by Melissa Broder.
This is a recent read that I read for the Bias Breaker Readathon and we are following a woman
who has just had this terrible breakup and she decides that she is going to house and dog sit
for her sister on a California beach. And as she is going through therapy and dealing with kind of
the breakup of a six-year relationship, she's also dealing with anxiety and depression and
throw into the mix that she ends up meeting a swimmer at night and he turns out to be
a merman. I just thought that this was so fascinating and weird--so weird. I wonder at
what point Melissa Broder decided to just throw in merman d*ck? Because that is totally a thing in here.
The merman part starts below the groin so your questions are answered in here for sure about the
hows and whys. But this was very intriguing and I can't get it out of my mind. If that's
interesting to you, then go ahead and spend some time with this fishy book. Okay, I'm done, I'm done.
Right so number 14 is Ring Shout by P Djeli Clark. We are following a trio of women
who run rum in the south. They also happen to be monster killers and the monsters in this world are
KKK members who have gone off the deep end and they turn into these hooded monsters.
And these three women kill them with various types of weapons. And our main character
is one that has a magical sword that has the power of all of their black ancestors kings and queens
and slaves passed down through them to this sword. One of the strengths of this novel was the pacing.
It was so fast as well as taught me a lot of things that I didn't know about the south and I
was wondering throughout reading it... Do you think KKK members are actually reading this novel?
Because I wonder what they would have to say about it? But I thought it was really weird, really worth
it, and recommend it. Number 13 is Lost Boy by Christina Henry. Christina Henry is kind of my
favorite horror fantasy retelling author. So this is a Peter Pan retelling. And it is starting to
rain so if you hear that sorry but I have to film. We have an open house inspection today because we
are moving in two weeks so I'm trying to get these videos filmed for you lovely people, so we're going
to continue on. This is a very dark Peter Pan retelling where Pan is essentially stealing kids
from their world and bringing them to Neverland. So one of the greatest things about this book is that
you are seeing it through the point of view of Peter's best friend, the first boy that he
brought through kind of the veil to Neverland. And at first, the boy is so enamored with Peter
and then over time he realizes something is very wrong here. And yeah this was a great read.
I read it with Jordaline and we both loved it. Number 12 is The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade
Thompson. This is following Molly Southbourne who when she bleeds clones of herself pop up and try
to kill her. And I'm not gonna say much more than that. It's very short, it's very gory, very bloody,
and the ending was quite nice, in my opinion. I mean, not quite nice as in oh that's so cute nice...
nice as in I thought it was extremely well done. Number 11 is Hold Back the Tide by
Melinda Salisbury. This is not your average vampire novel. This is set on a small
lakeside village and we are following Alva. Things are starting to creep out of the forest near
the lake and her father, who is the lake monitor, is tasked with finding out what's happening and
then no one listens to him and things go from there. This was super creepy and the end was
excellent. I think for me, books that are dark and weird... you can be as dark and weird as you
want, but you need to cinch that ending. I am looking at you Bunny. I'm still mad about it.
Oh yeah, if you want to know my most disappointing, Bunny was like number two on that list because
such high hopes and then the ending was a hot mess. But anyway, Hold Back the Tide definitely has an
awesome ending and I really recommend it. Number 10 is My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa
Moshfegh. This one was my first Ottessa Moshfegh but I really really enjoy her writing style.
She writes women in such a gross and captivating way... viscerality... is that even a thing? Where she is so
into their mind that you feel like you are right there with the character. And in this one we're
following a woman who kind of has it all. She has a beautiful New York apartment, she has a great job,
and she has a banging body. And she just decides like she's just kind of over everything. So take ennui
and dial it right up to 11. She decides that she is done. She's gonna take a year off from
life and she's gonna get her doctor to prescribe her pills so that she can sleep a year away.
This would have been probably four and a half or five if not for a particular plot twist at the very end
which I didn't agree with. However, the whole novel was so strong and honestly a 2020 mood if I'm
being honest. So really recommend this one. It was definitely quite weird and I also did pick up
another by Ottessa Moshfegh because I loved her writing style just so so much. Number nine is
Elizabeth by Ken Greenhall. This is one that I read for the vintage horror challenge from Spooky
Smart B*tches and I was not prepared for exactly what I was getting into. So we are following a
young 14 year old girl named Elizabeth and in her mirror she sees an old dead fae named Frances.
And Frances starts to kind of get in Elizabeth's head and not make her do things but she's very
suggestible. So she suggests things that...she should do. And you're never quite
sure if it's actually happening or if this is just Elizabeth's reaction to trauma that she has gone
through in her life. There are a lot of different ways that you could read this novel and I think
all different ways that you read it are equally valid. But there's a lot of room for interpretation
which I personally love. As well as this cover is just freaking beautiful. Number eight is Earthlings
by Sayaka Murata. I feel like I don't exactly need to talk about this that much it's been in a bunch
of my recent videos. It was our book pick for Bias Breaker. And I'll just give you the rough
down low on it. This is following a young girl named Natsuki who is treated really poorly by her family.
She seeks solace with her cousin Yuu when they are visiting her grandmother during the summer
and things escalate. And she feels just totally isolated and alienated from society and she views
everything in a very disassociative and alien perspective. And then we fast forward and she
is an adult, as is Yuu and as is her husband. And this book is very dark. It has basically all the
triggers in the world. So if you liked the themes of Convenience Store Women but you wanted it to be
basically a 100x darker and 100x weirder, this one would be for you. Number seven
is The Electric State by Simon Stalenhag, who is a Swedish writer and illustrator. So this is
following a young girl who is traveling across a dystopian America where this huge multinational
company who made robotics and those head sets you can wear (like think Ready Player One)... everyone
became addicted to them and now a lot of people are plugged into the online world and their actual
bodies have decayed. And she is traveling across the country to a destination and you're not sure
why. But the reason I picked this up is one I love that premise but there isn't that much text.
Instead what you get is just absolutely stunning illustrations. So it's very dark and it's very
dystopian in the best way possible. So that'll be... it's about three quarters image and then a
few paragraphs per page. And I just love this. I loved the ending. I thought it was so creepy
and a little open-ended. I loved it. Like how is this not amazing? I love his illustration style,
I love his color palette that he chooses. It's just horrifying honestly. Like look at this.
It is stunning. Number six is Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford, who is an Irish writer. So this
is following Ada and her father, and Ada and her father are not quite human. They are beings which
can cure people. So when people are ill they come to their house and they pull
the illness out of them and bury it in the ground or if someone is sick enough they bury the person
in the ground and it cures them. So Ada is looking kind of for her place in the world.
She doesn't have many friends. She doesn't really connect with people. She hits it off with one man
and I don't want to spoil anything. It is just properly weird. So if you like body horror, just
like weird characters in weird instances, like people putting their hands into someone's body,
lifting out an illness and then the illness is like skittering along the wall kind of weird...
that is what I'm talking about. I really enjoyed it. I thought that it was wonderfully atmospherically
weird and also like hauntingly sad. And the ending I thought was done really well.
It's one of my favorite open endings. I recommend it, it's definitely weird but it is
well worth it. Number five is The Machine by James Smythe. Now this one is following Beth. She lives
along the coast and her husband has been sick after he came back from the war. He had PTSD really
really bad and the government had these black boxes where you could delete memories and you
could put in stock memories and cure your loved one and basically erase their PTSD as well as any
unhappy memories associated with war or whatever they're struggling with. So Beth and her husband
go to get this treatment and then the government recalls the black boxes because the impact of them
is just too dangerous in the general population. And instead, Beth decides that she is actually
going to buy a black market box and put the memories back into her husband one by one,
slowly building him up back to the man that he was. As you can imagine, things don't go as planned.
This book just took so many turns and twists and at first, the first third, I thought was boring.
I was like what is gonna happen? And then, after that, I was hooked and I couldn't put this book down.
And the ending was just like wow wow I'm so glad that I stayed here. I'm so glad, I'm so glad.
This was wild. Number four on this list is Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, who is an
Indigenous American writer. I thought this was brilliant. And it was so weird and I loved it.
So we were following a woman named Cedar Hawk Songmaker who was from an Indigenous family but they
gave her up for adoption and she was raised by two liberals who are upper middle class.
And she's at the point now where she has lived her life with them but she is looking
for connection in her past. The only problem is is that she is pregnant and in the world right now
people and animals are de-evolving which is a huge problem because it means that not only are
animals going backwards but so are fetuses and babies that are being born. So because she is
pregnant, her family is really worried that if she goes to meet her birth family that she will run
into trouble. And I'm not going to spoil anything but that is just the very very beginning of the
book. This book took so many different routes. I wasn't sure what was going to happen, and again,
I thought the ending was absolutely beautiful, brilliant, 10 out of 10. Number three on this
list is the Mindf*ck series by S. T. Abby. I can't stop talking about this series and I feel like
no one is actually listening because the covers are so bad. The covers are bad, yes I get it. They're
terrible. But this is rated like 4.77 on Goodreads as of filming which is insanely high.
Okay this is Killing Eve if you know that show. This is about Lana who is a female serial killer who's
getting revenge on people who messed her up and hurt her family 10 years ago. She's been plotting
her revenge and she's freaking getting it. And then one day, she's in a cafe and she hits it off
with this great guy named Logan. Lo and behold, he is the FBI agent who is tracking down her serial
kills across states and it goes from there. I loved this series. I wouldn't call it a series, I
think it's more like each one is about 100 pages and there are I think five so I just count it as
like a one book, one long book. But technically it is a series. But please do not listen to the covers.
If you don't believe me, I believe Mina Reads read it recently (she read the first one) and she
also really loved it. So I'm here just like S. T. Abby please redesign your covers so people actually
read this series which is amazing. It has a female serial killer, and it has justice, it has some
romance, and it has some great gruesome torture scenes. Like what more do you need in life?
Number two is another one that I read for Bias Breaker. This is Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo, who
is a Finnish writer. And her imagination... brilliant. So this is following Angel who is a 30 year old
gay photographer in Finland and he is going home one night and he stumbles upon a group of
teenagers who are beating up an animal. He shoos them away and then takes the animal up to his
apartment. It turns out to be an adolescent troll and from there the story has kind of two sections.
One thread is Angel's story and one thread is interspersions of troll lore in Finnish literature.
Very interesting, very very interesting. And in Angel's thread, he is deciding what to do with
the troll, how to feed it (because it is refusing all types of food), and how he can best care
for it/get it back to its national habitat. I just thought that this book was super weird and
captivating. I could not put it down. I wanted to find out what was going to happen to this poor
troll. It's also weird seeing things through Angel's point of view because he on the one hand
is having sexual relations with all of these men but then he also starts to think about the troll
and view it kind of as an erotic thing. He never does anything but it's about like the feral
creature (I guess) and him wanting to capture like the essence of the feral creature that is just so
mythological almost. So it was so weird and I really enjoyed the reading experience and like the
journey that Sinisalo took me on because she has done that two out of two times now.
And I really recommend her if you're looking for someone whose imagination is just out of every box.
Like she doesn't even know what a box is. I love her writing and I will be reading more. I think
the only other thing she has is [a New Weird eco-speculative novel called The Blood of Angels].
But yeah super looking forward to it and I highly recommend this if it sounds interesting to you.
Number one on this list might not be a surprise. This is Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica,
who is an Argentinian writer. So this is following Marcos, who works at a special meat
packaging plant. And special meat is another word for "human" because in this world a
virus has gone around that has made animal meat poisonous. So instead, humanity largely shifts to
factory farming humans into different grades of meat for consumption. And wow this book is so dark,
so so dark. So you're viewing the world through different settings through Marco's point of
view. So at one point, he's going through the factory to work, he's giving a tour of the factory,
he is at a hunting party, he's at a dinner party, and then he is also gifted as a thank you
one of the special grades of meat which is a young woman who he is supposed to kill and eat except he
decides that he's not going to do that. And things go from there. This is extremely brutal, extremely
dark, so if you can't stomach things like that (gore, cannibalism) then just stay far away from this one.
If you can, I think there is a lot of really important discussion on how we treat living things
and how we treat humans and also like humanity in general and how great we can be but mostly how
terrible we can be. So yeah I really recommend it but it is hella dark so if that is not
your jam then don't pick it up. But if you're not into dark and weird... that's what this list is so...?
I really enjoyed all of these books. This is one of my favorite videos to film all year. Please do make
sure to let me know which dark and weird books you read this year that you really loved. I am always
looking for more. Upcoming videos for you are my Best Books of 2020 as well as my Mer-ry January
TBR, which is a mer-themed TBR which is all about the ocean, the sea, mermaids, sirens, pirates, sailors,
ships, diving, scientific research under the ocean, coastal themes... all of that. So I cannot wait. I am
so thrilled, so excited, totally jazzed. And I will talk to you soon in another video. Bye~