Five Weird, Funny Novels You Should Read: a guest post by Jeff Strand

Jeff Strand is in full swing getting the word out for his new YA novel, A Bad Day for Voodoo, but he's stopping by Wag The Fox to offer up five book recommendations to the readers with an affinity for a blend of humor and the strange. I know my wish list just had a couple books added after reading this. Enjoy.

Five Weird, Funny Novels You Should Read

by Jeff Strand

Note that this is not a list of the five funniest novels of all time--just five funny, weird novels you should read, assuming that you like funny, weird novels.

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Yeah, I'm starting off with an obvious choice, but the books in this series (well, okay, the first three) are some of the most hilariously insane novels of all time. This isn't the place to go for laser-focused storytelling; Adams continually and cheerfully goes off on wild tangents, and that's a lot of the fun.

2. The Unnatural by David Prill. So here's the premise: it's a world just like our own, except that instead of watching baseball, sports fans watch...competitive corpse embalming! Yes, this is the tale of a young farmboy with talent and a dream. If you're always saying that you'd read more sports-themed novels if they were about trying to set the record for number of corpses embalmed in a single season, this dark and funny book is for you.

3. Bad Chili by Joe Lansdale. Lansdale has written several books featuring Hap & Leonard, and all of them mix beautiful writing with lowbrow, laugh-out-loud humor. This one opens with a rabid squirrel attack that is the funniest thing I have ever read in a novel.

4. Go, Mutants! by Larry Doyle. Nobody packs more jokes into a book than Larry Doyle. This one is a loving tribute to 1950's sci-fi movies, and though there's all kinds of over-the-top alien craziness, much of the humor is so understated that if you read too fast, you'll zip right past it.

5. John Dies At The End by David Wong. Yeah, I'm jealous that I didn't think of this title. A combination of Big, Deep Ideas and gross, demented humor. You will laugh. You will think. You will gag.