Five top novels that read like bad trips, fever dreams, or reality warps

Lindsay Kent, a.k.a. The Hallucinarrator, is a multimedia storyteller whose work explores the luminous edges of consciousness and culture. Over the past decade, she's directed three international feature films, produced a Hulu documentary on LGBTQ+ families, and created branded films for nonprofits and Fortune 500s alike. Her 2014 documentary "Going Furthur" retraced the arc of America's counterculture through a psychedelic lens, and her docuseries, "Plant Medicine," follows an Ayahuasca retreat center in Costa Rica. A few years ago, Kent returned to her first love―fiction. Blending the vision of a filmmaker with the curiosity of a psychonaut, her stories blur the boundaries between science and spirit, cinema and literature. At the heart of her work lies a singular mission―to bridge the gap between reality and the beyond, welcoming more seekers into the mystery through stories anyone can access, and everyone can feel.

Kent's new novel is My Twin the Murderer.

At CrimeReads the author tagged five "favorite trippy novels, where time distorts and nothing is what it seems." One title on the list:

Mona Awad, Bunny

Samantha Heather Mackey, an isolated outsider in a prestigious MFA program, is drawn into the glittering orbit of the Bunnies—a clique of unsettlingly sweet, wealthy young women whose saccharine charm masks something deeply bizarre. What begins as a razor-sharp satire of elite creative culture gradually warps into a surreal descent where artistic ambition, obsession, and identity blur into something increasingly monstrous, as the boundaries between performance and transformation start to dissolve.

I love this book. It has everything sharp and vicious I loved about Heathers but somehow gets even weirder. What makes Bunny so effective is the way it takes pastel, hyper-feminine aesthetics and slowly turns them unsettling. Awad fills the novel with surreal social dynamics, abrupt tonal shifts, and just enough dream logic to keep you constantly questioning what’s real—is this performance, delusion, or something supernatural?

The pacing is fast, strange, and increasingly unhinged, pushing sweetness so far that it becomes disturbing, then grotesque.

Read about the other novels on the list at CrimeReads.

Bunny is among Catriona Silvey's five Gothic novels about cults, Isabelle McConville's six novels for novelists, Chris Wheatley's six top dark academia novels, and Gnesis Villar's seven books about the struggle of being a writer.

--Marshal Zeringue