Books like Brian Catling

Like the Vorrh, Tutuola’s bush is not scenery but a sovereign reality, endlessly generating monsters, bargains, deaths and transformations. Its episodes follow the inexorable logic of folktale and nightmare rather than conventional fantasy world-building.

Tutuola’s idiosyncratic English is sparer than Catling’s baroque prose, yet equally capable of making invented mythology feel unearthed rather than composed. Published in 1952 and famously championed by Dylan Thomas, this Yoruba-inflected landmark still feels startlingly free. Anyone captivated by the Vorrh’s sense that the oldest stories remain dangerously alive should experience it.

Donoso offers the bodily grotesquerie, unstable identities and metaphysical dread of The Vorrh without providing the relief of a navigable world. In and around a decaying religious institution, servants, aristocrats, monsters and storytellers become entangled until voices and bodies seem able to infect one another.

This is a major achievement of the Latin American Boom, but far stranger and less domesticated than that label suggests. Donoso’s nested narration creates a suffocating architecture of shame, class, superstition and metamorphosis. If Catling’s deformed bodies and uncertain histories fascinated you, this masterpiece pushes those obsessions to an unforgettable extreme.

A physician and a mercenary flee a ruined frontier and arrive in Ashamoil, a city of assassins, artists, corrupt religion and inexplicable visitations. What begins with physical danger gradually loosens into something more elusive: art alters reality, spiritual hunger becomes grotesque, and images acquire the authority of events.

Bishop is also a visual artist, and her prose has the tactile precision Catling’s admirers will recognize—faces, streets and wounds seem modeled rather than merely described. A World Fantasy Award finalist that became a cult touchstone of the New Weird, The Etched City is unpredictable in exactly the right way: not random, but governed by laws the reader can sense without ever mastering.