The best supernatural books that challenge our way of seeing the world

People who read The Master and Margarita will tell you that it is one of the greatest books they have ever read, but few can tell you why. It defies description.  It is truly unique. 

It opens on a blistering hot day in Moscow, a paradox in itself. The devil, seemingly out of Goethe’s Faust, is on a visit to the town. He and his strange entourage would be laughable, if they were not so lethal. Only the madness of Stalin’s paranoid Communism could have created such a story.

Bulgakov has an uncanny way of investing even the most unlikely scenes with intense realism. You never doubt him.  At times hilarious, at times terrifying, the book shows us what a fragile hold we have on reality.

What a wonderful book, which has a murderess as its heroine, and makes a mockery of the English Class System! It is still banned in a number of American schools. 

When I was a small child I was shown Tess’s grave. It was a huge empty stone sarcophagus. Where was she? In the novel she was put there by the man I regard as the true villain of the book, “Angel” Clare. She never forgets that coffin, and as she is travelling to her death, she encounters even older stones, when she spends the night at Stonehenge. 

The book is infused with the dark presence of the ancient English countryside. Hardy may be a realist, but the “dreaming dark, dumb thing that turns the handle of this idle show” is never far away.

Saint Erkenwald is arguably the earliest ghost story in the English Language. 

It is an alliterative poem by Ralph Strode, author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the finest poet of the English middle ages. The effect which it has on its audiences is mesmerising. 

They follow Bishop Erkenwald down to a bronze-age tomb in the foundations of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, with a living corpse inside. A lover of paradox, Strode saw time as simultaneously a continuum and a series of moments (atoms). Only in the moment can change occur, and a man who has been imprisoned for a thousand years be released. 

When I read the only surviving copy of the poem, I was so moved that I had to catch my own tear before it fell and smudged the ink. 

This gem of a book is a dark comedy of extraordinary originality. It explores the moment of a murder and stretches it to the length of a short novel. 

Unlike his hero James Joyce, who sometimes took himself a little too seriously, Briain O'Nolan (Flann O'Brien) remains with his tongue firmly in his cheek. As I lived and worked in Dublin I have a special association with this novel.

If you have ever travelled along the magical Vico Road, south of Dublin, you will have passed the house of De Selby, the fictional annotator of the book, whose scientific theories turn all the laws of nature on their head. In this book nothing is quite what it seems, and the underlying theme darker than the comedy suggests. 

It is a book very much for the connoisseur of the unexpected.

Another example of Irish ingenuity, FitzJames O’Brien had a wider breadth of imagination even than his mentor Edgar Allen Poe, and a pin-sharp focus in his writing. 

His stories are better known in the U.S.A., but I came upon them by accident, and was amazed. Stories such as the Wondersmith, the Lost Room, and the Diamond Lens were inspirational to other writers and filmmakers, but what is so wonderful is the variety in his storytelling. Each work is different. 

He emigrated from Cork to America, where he got caught up in the Civil War and died all too soon at 35. It was a great loss. The picture he paints of the dark side of nineteenth century New York is not easily forgotten, and the tales he creates there are both inspiring and disturbing.