One of the craziest books I ever read was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. My memory of it persists to this day, and I read it all the way back when I was in high school. It’s about a professional Bolshevik revolutionary named Rubashov, who has dedicated his entire life to the Revolution, including assassinating people he knew whom the Party had designated “enemies of the people.” Rubashov now finds himself caught in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. At first, he is resistant, hoping his lifelong loyalty to the Party will exonerate him. Then, as his interrogation proceeds, he realizes that his doom is a forgone conclusion. He spends the last 100 pages of the book rationalizing to himself why the Party and the Revolution should demand his execution. It’s a real mind-twister of a book.

One of the great things about Moby Dick is the way Melville interweaves the language of the King James version of the Bible with language that is nearly Shakespearean in its poetry. That’s a hint that Melville is doing a lot more than telling a story here. How you interpret his allegory is what it’s all about.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame. Actually, that’s just the first clause of the most impossible run-on sentence ever to start a novel – it makes you want to give up before you read anything more.

Perhaps Bulwer-Lytton’s most famous novel was The Coming Race, a sort of sci-fi fantasy about this “superior” race who went underground and lived beneath the earth’s crust. They had this strange power called “vril.” It was Heinrich Himmler’s favorite novel.