Seven novels about brilliant freaks

Jane Flett is a Scottish writer who lives in Berlin. Her debut novel is Freakslaw.

Flett's fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio 4 and features in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. She is a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award, the New Orleans Writing Residency and the Berlin Senate Stipend for non-German literature. Her work has also been Highly Commended in the Bridport Prize and performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

At Electric Lit Flett tagged seven favorite novels about brilliant freaks, including:

Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis

It’s November 2008 when the monster dogs arrive in Manhattan by helicopter. Biomechanically engineered by a mad Prussian surgeon, these dogs walk upright, dine with silver cutlery balanced in their prosthetic hands, and talk intelligently through mechanical voice boxes. They are deeply uncanny, but New York has always been a city that embraces oddballs, and so the monster dogs quickly become reluctant celebrities, appearing on chat shows and hosting lavish balls. The story is told through various forms: newspaper articles, diary entries, even an opera libretto. I didn’t know I needed to read an opera written by a dog until I got my hands on this bizarre and brilliant novel, but I did, and so do you. It is perfect in every way.

Read about the other novels on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue