Books reading recommendations Eight Strange Cities Where You’ll Need More Than a Map to Survive Weird fiction loves its sprawling cities — the stranger, the better. By Sam Reader | Published on October 29, 2025 Photo by Leann K [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Leann K [via Unsplash] Weird fiction loves a cityscape. It’s a seemingly safe place to let the imagination run wild, drawing the unfamiliar from the familiar and expected—most people have been in at least one city, with its winding streets, massive buildings, odd landmarks, and bustling thoroughfares. Within the sprawling confines of an imagined city, the imagination flourishes, giving rise to everything from a history of colonialism enacted through urban planning to the inside of a madman’s head organized into buildings and districts. With modern weird fiction’s tastes once again turning towards the urban, let’s take a quick tour of eight exceedingly strange metropolises… Luriat — The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera Between its “bright doors” that allow spirits to pass in and out of the city (used memorably in a segment of Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall, which just won the Ursula K. Le Guin Award), its unusual factions (there’s a support group for fantasy protagonists who never achieved their destinies), and its vibrant (and often contradictory) history told through the constantly shifting landscape, it’s clear there’s much more going on to Luriat than annual plague quarantines and festivals. While it might not be the most stable of places (the constant power shifts mirrored in the geography make it hell to navigate), it’s a city where there’s always something interesting going on, provided there’s not another crackdown or a flying religious zealot flinging people into the upper atmosphere… The Budayeen — When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger Cyberpunk is a genre defined by its cities, and no city in cyberpunk is as lively as the Budayeen. A Middle Eastern riff on the French Quarter located next to a cemetery (filled with all the tourists and would-be tough guys who couldn’t hang), it’s the kind of place where you can get a drink, a completely new body, cybernetic software enhancements, or a shank in the kidney, all on the same block. While dangerous, it’s also one of the tightest-knit communities in cyberpunk, willing to go to war if somebody messes with one of their own. It’s a place that’s both hazardous and sinister, and bold and vibrant, sometimes within the same locale. Bellona — Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany Where to even begin? Delany’s hyper-literary surrealist novel takes place within a post-apocalyptic city called Bellona, a place where the geography shifts constantly, something is affecting the celestial bodies as seen from the city (there are two moons, and the sun appears massive), and the inhabitants might be stuck in a time loop, since the entire novel ends with a line that seems to feed back (almost) directly into its famous opening sequence in which the narrator comes “to wound the autumnal city.” Despite the chaos, nonlinearity, gang warfare, and an apparent apocalypse causing reality to warp around it, the inhabitants of Bellona do tend to stay in the city, though whether this is because they like it there or they’re unable to leave due to the aforementioned time loop and surrounding apocalypse is anyone’s guess. Malarkoi — Malarkoi by Alex Pheby Situated in the middle of the Cities of the Weft cycle is Malarkoi, the city of the Mistress. A gigantic pyramid that contains a different universe on every floor and is powered in part by infanticide, Malarkoi even out-weirds the other cities in the cycle with its tiers of mythical creatures and whole biomes within its shining confines. It’s a place so in tune with its own universal rules and its Mistress that life and death, time and space, have zero meaning save for what’s imbued in it by those with enough power. It also represents such a major escalation in Pheby’s work that the surrounding region is the staging ground for the climax of Waterblack, a book that takes place after the protagonists have supposedly moved on from it. In a world full of strange cities, that stands as even more of an achievement. Ashamoil — The Etched City by K.J. Bishop From a city so weird it eclipses a trilogy of weird cities to a city so weird that people still debate about it, trying to figure it out over two decades on. Ashamoil is a port city located on a river, a decadent fin de siecle refuge for a variety of artists and ne’er do wells, a hub for gunrunning and worse crimes among its ruins and nightclubs. It’s also a place where street performers encourage passersby to pull parasitic flowers out of their bodies, a local priest can perform miracles, and crocodile-headed humans crawl out of the river only to die on the banks. Weirdly, it’s also one of the safest places to live on this list, provided you don’t get involved in the numerous interesting things going on around you. But who would ever want that? More fun to get mixed up in in the tragic romances, miraculous resurrections, hidden artists’ ateliers, and free-flowing hallucinogens. Popolac and Poduvejo — “In The Hills, The Cities” by Clive Barker Two towering giants, made up of the citizens of competing cities lashed to massive wooden skeletons, the ritualistic combatants of Clive Barker’s short story are actually Yogoslavian cities, their 80,000 combined citizens acting in concert to carry out a battle on the plains outside their city limits. The cities themselves are fairly normal (one of them is even based on a real place, apparently), but it’s difficult to categorize this behavior as anything but “strange,” especially given the human-powered kaiju spreading death and madness in their wake as witnesses try to process these giants made out of so many human bodies. By the end of Barker’s story, they even act as singular creatures, with one mourning the other’s death, wandering into the Yugoslavian hills mad with grief, the families of their formerly human inhabitants desperate to stop them. Tiliard — The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes Ennes made a name for themselves with the astonishingly weird and dystopian Leech, and delivers even harder with The Works of Vermin, set inside a mesa-sized tree stump atop a river gorge. With the opening sentence, Tiliard is established as a strange and unnervingly gorgeous city, powered by hydroelectric barrages set into the river beneath the stump and spiraling around into a mass of verdant urban sprawl. Stranger still is the city’s “pest control” department, who regularly have to exterminate massive bug infestations that run the gamut from simple roaches to hallucinogen-spitting centipedes. It’s a twisted mix of real-life arboreal ecosystems and human ingenuity; a groaning, secretive mass of pathways, moss, fungi, roots, and ionized sap inhabited by people who are perfectly suited to live among its spiraling confines. The Well-Built City — The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford The title location of Ford’s classic Well-Built City Trilogy, the actual city itself is mainly in the spotlight in the first book and part of the second (before it’s fully destroyed), when Cley is forced to journey back there. It’s a memory palace of a megalopolis drawing on Eastern European dystopias and Russian literature, ruled by a mad scientist who designed the entire place as a mnemonic device for his research. It’s also a place where dissidents are executed in show trials by having their heads exploded using air bellows, where the government sponsors pseudoscientists in criminal investigations, and where at any moment the city’s master might decide to change procedure on a whim in the service of some strange experiment. Few places deserve the term “nightmarish” as much as the Well-Built City does—it’s is a surrealist painting come to life, with all the beauty and terror that entails. While these eight examples are personal favorites, this list isn’t exhaustive by any means—please feel free to recommend (or warn your fellow fans about the perils of) other strange, surreal, or uncanny cities you’ve come across in your literary travels…[end-mark] The post Eight Strange Cities Where You’ll Need More Than a Map to Survive appeared first on Reactor.