The best not-quite books for humans who are not-quite human

I grew up with and write horror stories, so it’s very difficult for a book to unnerve me; this is one of the only books I can think of that earns the honor. It is half an ecological text and half a horror story, with its romantic prose balanced by intense natural research to create a surreal, unnerving description of the natural world.

This book made me hyper-aware of everything from the grass outside my window to the cells that make up my body, and I love how it uses both existential horror and the real, biological horror of being a living creature to leave a lasting unease. Are you aware you’re breathing? Can you feel your tongue in your mouth? Your heart’s nonstop beating? You can, now.

I believe this book is one of the classic staples of surreal fiction. Its disjointed, spiraling narrative and sprawling non-linear plot lines challenge the definition of what a ‘book’ is. It uses everything from footnotes to text alignment to color schemes to make the act of reading itself increasingly difficult, which matches the house’s influence on the narrators’ memories and interests.

Reading it for me was like learning Latin or watching Casablanca–it gave context to decades of experimental media inspired by it, from TV shows to DOOM game mods. Love it or hate it, it’s a solid tool for any inhuman’s toolkit. 

I feel like the very premise of this book cuts right to the core of ‘what does it mean to be human’: the eponymous Hikaru dies on a mountain, but his body is consumed by a parasite that takes on his memories and identity. If this new version acts and thinks and looks like Hikaru, is he Hikaru? Do our memories make us ‘human,’ even when our bodies change? Can we learn to BE human?

As someone who’s experienced brain damage–and the memory loss and identity dissociation that came with it–this manga hit me deep in my soul. I’m so excited for the Netflix adaptation, and I’d recommend the book series to any new fans the show creates. 

This is a 360-page, lushly detailed, fictional narrative about a ragtag collective of kidnapped humans struggling to survive the magical, capricious influence of the fae; technically, it is not a book; it’s a rulebook for my favorite dice-playing game.

Every aspect within the book, from the short stories about its goblin markets to its essays on emotion-based magic, ultimately sets up pieces of a world that confronts its themes of ‘what is humanity’ with reader participation. My partner and I roleplayed conflicts in a bar-themed after the book’s Spring Court.

I rolled dice with other fans online and argued over the results. I commissioned art of characters I’d based on the fae. Its intimate, interconnected stories deliberately blur the line between a book series and a game series, and in this, it makes being human feel magical.

This is the least book-like book on this list, to the point where it’s difficult for me to even pitch the plot. In short, it’s a comic about four children who play a video game that turns out to have the power to destroy and reshape multiple universes.

The printed comic edition of the story is only one of several mediums it’s taken on, with the book acting as a translation for fragments of forum posts, web pages, animations, and even video games.

I added it because it rewrote my brain chemistry on what a story is, forcing me to confront how prose changes across mediums and accessibility. It’s the very definition of metafiction, and to me, it was worth it.