1. We Spread by Iain Reid

Penny, an artist, has lived in the same apartment for decades, surrounded by the artifacts and keepsakes of her long life. She is resigned to the mundane rituals of old age, until things start to slip. Before her longtime partner passed away years earlier, provisions were made, unbeknownst to her, for a room in a unique long-term care residence, where Penny finds herself after one too many “incidents.”

Initially, surrounded by peers, conversing, eating, sleeping, looking out at the beautiful woods that surround the house, all is well. She even begins to paint again. But as the days start to blur together, Penny—with a growing sense of unrest and distrust—starts to lose her grip on the passage of time and on her place in the world. Is she succumbing to the subtly destructive effects of aging, or is she an unknowing participant in something more unsettling?

Goodreads rating: 3.76 [22,216 ratings / 4,114 reviews]

I read this last year, and I still think about it! I love how open this is; it’s really up to the reader to decide how much of what unfolds is real. Is there something sinister happening, or is this all a symptom of dementia? Or both?

2. Bunny by Mona Awad

We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn’t we?

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

Goodreads rating: 3.47 [289,768 ratings / 65,086 reviews]

There are not enough stars to rate how much I loved this book! This is THE ONE that reignited my excitement for not only reading but close reading and taking the time to really consider a text! I think it’s has such a low average because it went TikTok viral and a lot of readers picked it up who were not primed for how weird and ambiguous it is! It’s what I love about it – is any of this really happening, or is it all in Samantha’s own head?

All the Mona Awad books I’ve read so far (see All’s Well, and Rouge) have some strange ambiguity to them, but Bunny is the only one where the reader truly has no clues whether any of this is happening in the reality outside of the main character’s POV.

3. Foe by Iain Reid

We don’t get visitors. Not out here. We never have.

In Iain Reid’s second haunting, philosophical puzzle of a novel, set in the near-future, Junior and Henrietta live a comfortable, solitary life on their farm, far from the city lights, but in close quarters with each other. One day, a stranger from the city arrives with alarming Junior has been randomly selected to travel far away from the farm…very far away. The most unusual part? Arrangements have already been made so that when he leaves, Henrietta won’t have a chance to miss him, because she won’t be left alone—not even for a moment. Henrietta will have company. Familiar company.

Goodreads rating: 3.70 [35,728 ratings / 5,954 reviews]

I didn’t think this was as punchy or tricksy as We Spread, but it’s still an intriguing and sinister bit of ambiguous fiction! WTF is this “mission”? Who is this stranger? And why is he so fucking creepy? If you read it, read the text as there are some clues that will get lost in the audio format.

4. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

Goodreads rating: 4.22 [409,041 ratings / 64,906 reviews]

I hate it when I end up featuring the same books in lists so close together, but I can’t leave this one off! This book is a masterpiece. It’s beautiful and you should give it a try, if you haven’t. And you must go into it knowing nothing because the fun and the power of it is in knowing absolutely nothing!

Some I have not read, but would like to…

Most of these came from asking ChatGPT to suggest books with ambiguous plots and metaphysical uncertainty. A couple I had heard of, but most of them I hadn’t! I tried to research via Goodreads reviews to figure out if they fit the bill of ambiguous plots. I think they do, but since I haven’t read them, I can’t guarantee it.

6. Valis by Philip K. Dick

It began with a blinding light, a divine revelation from a mysterious intelligence that called itself VALIS. And with that, the fabric of reality was ripped open and laid bare so that anything seemed possible, but nothing seemed quite right. Part science fiction, part theological detective story in which God plays both the missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime, VALIS is both disorienting and eerily funny, and a joy to read.

Goodreads rating: 3.91 [32,059 ratings / 2,335 reviews]

I will soon stop threatening it and enact a PKD revival on my reading list soon! PKD wrote a lot of weird shit, but this one I’ve seen described as his most metaphysical, and ChatGPT suggested it for its “metaphysical uncertainty.”

8. The Seas by Samantha Hunt

The narrator of The Seas lives in a tiny, remote, alcoholic, cruel seaside town. An occasional chambermaid, granddaughter to a typesetter, and daughter to a dead man, awkward and brave, wayward and willful, she is in love (unrequited) with an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. She is convinced that she is a mermaid. What she does to ease the pain of growing up lands her in prison. What she does to get out is the stuff of legend. In the words of writer Michelle Tea, The Seas is “creepy and poetic, subversive and strangely funny, [and] a phenomenal piece of literature.”

Goodreads rating: 4.02 [8,770 ratings / 1,427 reviews]

I do love some magical realism, and a lot of readers say they had a deep emotional reaction to this book.

10. Ice by Anna Kavan

In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive “glass-girl” with silver hair. He crosses icy seas and frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, all to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden and save her before the ice closes all around. A novel unlike any other, Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction, a prescient warning of climate change and totalitarianism, a feminist exploration of violence and trauma, a Kafkaesque literary dreamscape, and a brilliant allegory for its author’s struggles with addiction—all crystallized in prose as glittering as the piling snow.

Goodreads rating: 3.65 [11,152 ratings / 1,942 reviews]

Apparently, this is a science fiction classic, but I’d never heard of it! It sounds very interesting, reviews are effusive, and it’s only 160 only pages.