Books reading recommendations Eight Strange Stories Celebrating Strange Works of Art From haunted mosaics to burning paintings to crime as performance art… By Sam Reader | Published on March 30, 2026 Detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” Comment 0 Share New Share Detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” Art in fiction can be magic. Well, art in general can be magic—it would be silly to argue that art can’t transport us to other worlds or introduce us to images we’ve never seen before. In fiction, though, art can really be magic, with paintings leading to other worlds, operas that predict the future, and whole conspiracies centered around the theft and destruction of paintings. To help illuminate the fascinating relationship science fiction and fantasy lit has with the art around it, I’ve assembled the following list of eight unusual literary works of art that pay homage to other unusual works of art—both in their odd and transfixing qualities, and in the joy, emotion, and pain that goes into every stroke of the brush or note of the music. The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes The Works of Vermin is one of the best fantasy novels of the past five years, and part of that’s due to its sense of theatricality—a quality that resonates with the city of Tiliard’s obsession with art as a whole. The book follows an exterminator on a desperate quest to stop a massive centipede from devouring paintings whole, while the city’s wealthy patrons bet on whether their favorite performer will make it through an entire opera alive. One character’s internal monologue references narrative conceits while another has whole operas memorized, and so much of the bizarre totalitarian government rests purely on aesthetic. It gives the world Ennes creates such a wild texture and genuinely makes the setting feel alive, steeping the plot in the strange artistic rituals of fashion, music, perfume, opera, and painting as much as it does weird conspiracies and bureaucracies in the stump-based city’s pest control sector. Strange Pictures by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion The enigmatic Japanese YouTube sensation Uketsu proves his eerie aesthetic translates well to the written page with his second book, a set of linked stories centered around a series of drawings and the people who drew them. After a prologue where a psychologist tries to analyze one of the drawings, we’re plunged into a story of hidden secrets, familial trauma, and the unnerving meanings behind the sketches depicted in the text. As each new story adds to the twisted saga and the simplistic drawings gain new, more horrifying weight, something sinister creeps into the images. While the presentation isn’t particularly complex, the picture that slowly emerges gets more and more upsetting, allowing our imaginations to fill in the blanks even before the horrifying reveals. Coldheart Canyon by Clive Barker Barker’s an author who works visual art into much of what he does—it helps that he’s an accomplished painter and sculptor along with his other multi-hyphenate skills—and so it’s difficult to pick exactly which of his works to go with, for this list. Coldheart Canyon is a solid choice. Not only is it about a disfigured and reclusive actor living on a property haunted by the ghosts of Old Hollywood and their wild parties, but also features a haunted wall mosaic that opens into an alternate dimension called the Devil’s Country. Of all the novels where Barker plays with the lines between his work—the grotesque horror, modern gothic, and lavish dark fantasy—Coldheart Canyon is perhaps the book that gets the balance absolutely perfect, a whirl of gods, monsters, magic, and the humans caught in the resulting storm. Void Corporation by Blake Butler One of art collector Alice Knott’s paintings is stolen and destroyed using a flamethrower; video showing the deliberate destruction of the work is then uploaded to the internet. Alice, a reclusive heiress who somehow missed the initial theft despite being home the entire night, is sent into a spiral as she tries to unravel a web of conspiracies and her own buried trauma centered around the home invasion. From the opening destruction of art shot like a snuff film, Butler’s tone is both intimate (Alice’s intrusive thoughts and rituals are deeply uncomfortable for anyone who’s been where she is mentally) and voyeuristic (the narration’s gleeful depiction of everything from a media circus to Alice’s internal thoughts) as it explores art’s place in our own interior landscapes, and in the greater framework of class and imagination itself. The Crime Studio by Steve Aylett Aylett’s absurd novels and stories cut a swath through the landscape of indie lit in the early 2000s, with each new work introducing readers to the author’s fevered writing, strange visuals, and sentences that feel like new inventions of language. The Crime Studio, his debut work, is a collection of interrelated stories detailing the lives and deaths of the citizens of Beerlight, a futuristic dystopian city where crime is considered the ultimate art form. Aylett’s crime-and-culture approach to noir becomes a playground for some of his wildest absurdities—everything from a burglar who approaches his crimes as performance art, a serial false confession artist who method-acts his way through crime scenes, and a supermodel whose vague expressions are better at deterring violent criminals than any other method of security. If it sounds silly, it is, but within that silliness lies a dark, savage humor and a clear appreciation for art. City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte A wild sex comedy set across the city of Prague, City of Dark Magic follows musicologist Sarah Weston and a variety of eccentric researchers (is there such a thing as Light Academia? This series would definitely qualify!) as they try to restore Lobkowicz Palace to its former glory and catalog the manuscripts of Ludwig van Beethoven. This quickly spirals out of control as a diminutive man with a pillbox full of hallucinogenic toenails (fashioned out of a copper nose that once belonged to Tycho Brahe) sends Sarah, her fellow researchers, and a prince involved with the foundation on an alchemical journey to discover ancient secrets, explore the occult underbelly of Prague, and rack up public indecency charges like they’re collecting trading cards. It’s not always the cleanest of stories, but for something light and fast-moving, Flyte’s version of Prague is a lot of fun. Memory and Dream by Charles de Lint When Isabelle Copley was a student, she could bring forth spirits from her paintings. But between her abusive relationship with her troll-like former mentor Rushkin, the death of her best friend Kathy, and her horror at what her own gift has wrought under Rushkin’s manipulation, Isabelle turned her back on portraits entirely, living a reclusive life as an abstract painter. A posthumous letter from Kathy and a mysterious bus terminal key suddenly open up the old wounds in her life, forcing Isabelle to pick up her paintbrush and confront her past once again. De Lint bounces between past and present as he unravels the strands that brought Isabelle to this point…in the process he creates a beautiful but wrenching story of grief, trauma, and exorcising the present by finally resolving the past. Through All Our Heavens by Olivia Hawker In Civil War-era America, a painter by the name of Helen Bywater awakens to a massive celestial event outside her window, granting her a unique vision in her paintings. In 2053 America, one split by a different conflict, with the west blockaded from the east, an art historian named Derryn Witt finds Bywater’s paintings of a strange future—her own present—just as a massive solar flare, an EMP event, and a terrorist attack shut down her technology and force her to flee the university. Transfixed by Bywater’s paintings, Witt finds her own connection to the past strengthening, the bond between her and Bywater growing. Hawker’s own painterly eye brings beauty to both Bywater’s paintings and the surrounding landscape, creating a transfixing tale that unfolds across two time periods.[end-mark] The post Eight Strange Stories Celebrating Strange Works of Art appeared first on Reactor.