Your (or someone’s) favorite weird mysteries

Time for another Tag Mash using the accumulated tagging intelligence at LibraryThing.

When I did the tag mash of “favorite, weird, mystery” , I was thinking more along the lines of “weird mystery” – talking goldfish witness the crime! the victim isn’t dead, just messing with quantum physics! – rather than “weird and mystery.” The results are definitely more the latter, and, in almost all cases, really aren’t mysteries at all.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Perfume by Patrick Süskind
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges
Everything is Iluminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey

Hitchhiker’s Guide does have an important question that needs answering, and Everything is Illuminated is about a family mystery (and it’s certainly weird.) Either one person or many people think that Thursday Next is representative of weird, and I suspect he’d agree. Haruki Murakami’s books are surrealist – another good word for weird.

But where are the oddball detectives? Where are the white chalk outlines around suspiciously murdered gardeners with talking plants? Where are the alien police who are tailing a suspect and take a wrong turn and end up on Earth?

I could always give in and read House of Leaves, which I think may be the one book on this list closest to a weird mystery, but then the real mystery would be how the book was responsible for my death. (Solution: I’ll have died of fright.)

-Andrea