Gaétan Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 1998

A deliberately difficult book to form any kind of mental dialogue with, its talkative narrator being a nameless teenage girl whose weird father dies in the first paragraph. With her and her brother never having been beyond the boundaries of their home, her perspective is particularly unique and discomfiting when she becomes forced to deal with the outside world. She also has a gender identity problem, and this is totally embedded into her narrative to the extent that the reader also becomes unsure, and from there the nightmare gets progressively worse. An impressive, disturbing and cunningly told story, with very menacing undercurrents.  PY

MORE ON GAÉTAN SOUCY : THE CANADIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA   |  WIKIPEDIA

Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 1937

Hedayat’s writing has been banned in Iran since November 2006 so The Blind Owl, his most famous book, is the obvious first port of call. It begins with a mysterious woman’s murder by a rather deranged man in the ancient Persian city of Rey, then follows his own dreamlike self-portrait as a man who has lost his grip on life. The book is either a veiled, opium-drenched, mysogynist rant with similarly high levels of angst and self-loathing or, as is widely believed, a Kafkaesque masterpiece. I expect the truth falls somewhere in between but I won’t default towards the latter opinion, as it’s still a very hard book to figure out without learning a little more about Hedayat, who commited suicide not long after writing The Blind Owl. A deliberately uncomfortable read that also defies proper categorisation, it’s out there on the margins of European-influenced literature but only of any real value to existentialism: if you also read Kafka you'll get much more out of it.  PY

MORE ON SADEQ HEDAYAT : WIKIPEDIA

S.P. Somtow, Dragon’s Fin Soup, 2002

Theodore Sturgeon once called Somtow “One of the most gifted masters of colour and spectacle”, though reluctant about being labelled an ‘ethnic’ writer he long resisted writing creative fiction about Thailand. It was Fred Pohl who convinced him otherwise. Several stories in this collection of eight are notable: the truly excellent ‘The Bird Catcher’ won the World Fantasy Award for best short story, ‘Dragon’s Fin Soup’ has been optioned for a film by Japanese cult director Takashi Miike, and there is also the notably good virtual reality caper ‘The Last Time I Died in Venice’. For the most part Somtow’s preference for horror comes through as his strongest suit, and his cultural schizophrenia means he can effectively translate some distinctly Thai supernaturalities into some very well-written and crystal clear English. Recommended.  PY

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