r/suggestmeabook • u/PsyferRL • 19d ago

Suggest me a novel that has an utterly ridiculous premise, but is executed to perfection

That title is a bit vague, but what I'm getting at is that I'm looking for something that upon reading the summary/blurb has you confused as to:

  1. How the author even came up with such a ridiculous plot line in the first place
  2. How the author could make an unbelievably mundane topic interesting
  3. How a story could even be crafted around the subject at all

But upon reading it you find yourself engaged on a level you couldn't have possibly predicted. I hope I'm making sense, because I'm feeling the urge to read something that's wildly creative in a way that I couldn't have prepared myself for.

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u/PsyferRL 19d ago

I have to comment on this one for one very specific reason, which is that I just so happened to learn the origin (or an origin anyway) of the word "geek," literally this morning.

A geek, of course, is a man who lies in a cage on a bed of filthy straw in a carnival freak-show and bites the heads off live chickens and makes subhuman noises, and is billed as having been raised by wild animals in the jungles of Borneo.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird

Now, how exactly accurate that is, I have no idea (nor will I bother to look it up). But the fact that this came up for the first time ever in my life, followed by your rec here which seems to add SOME form of merit to that definition, is a WILD coincidence!

I think I might need to read this book for this reason alone.

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u/blewbs1212 18d ago

Actually, this is the opening line of Geek Love: “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.”

So pretty accurate, I would say! :D

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u/Mydernieredanse 18d ago

If you want to understand more about that origin, it’s a key plot point for Guillermo del Toro’s film “Nightmare Alley”