experimental fiction novels

What makes experimental fiction experimental fiction? Is it just a weird book?

Sure, yeah, kinda. At its core experimental books are just books that toy with something, whether that is the structure or the sentence level work, or maybe it takes place in a world that is a little bit off kilter. In my own experimental fiction, I do pretty much all of those things at once, including strange naming conventions, a circuitous way of unwrapping the story, and a giant mythical bird named Paracelsus. The best experimental fiction novels are the ones that switch things around to tell the story better. What you have to watch out for are experimental books that just want to be weird books to read for no reason other than to do it. These are books that add gimmicks wherever they can shoehorn them in just so they seem different.

Or even worse, they do weird stuff because they don’t know how to do stuff the normal way. And that shit never works.

Experimental, or, non-conventional fiction fills an important niche, however. A book is just a vessel to tell a story and there are pretty much infinite ways to do that. One of my personal favorite books, Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle is a great example of experimental novels telling a story that is easy to follow, but is unquestionably different and bold in its structure.

The book starts at the end (yeah yeah, we’ve all seen that before) but then works its way backwards, chapter by chapter. What is cool is that it remains narrated by a narrator who knows the story from the present moment (essentially the end of the book) as he gently works his way back through his own maze of thoughts. He knows he has conflicting views inside himself. He knows that he doesn’t know why he shot himself. If anything, the flatness and lack of clear resolution is best served by a story that starts at an anticlimactic finish line and slowly works its way back to an equally simple beginning.

I’m doing a bad job of selling you on it but that’s because I don’t want to give a lot of it away and also because it isn’t a book I think cares to be explained. It’s just a good book to enjoy.

Hey, another good book to enjoy is my book, Donald Goines, which also sort of just ends where it ends and starts where it starts and goes where it goes, without too much concern for climax. Seriously, my book is good. It’s one of the best experimental novels ever written and the only one to include a massively fat drug dealer who jacks off in front of you. There’s also a puppeteering troupe called Society for the Preservation of Rare Birds. One of the main characters is named Honduran Emerald. Listen, it’s a great fucking book and you should buy it. The ebook is literally three dollars you have zero excuse just buy it right now.

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