Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a  Chemical Boyhood, by Oliver Sacks. The writing style isn't weird, just the man's autobiography. Not that I didn't enjoy it, but you sure can't make up fiction stories any stranger than people's real lives! First line: "Many of my childhood memories are of metals: these seemed to exert a power on me from the start."

Part of back blurb: "We meet Sack's extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his "Uncle Tungsten," whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets aobut passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes--in his own home laboratory..."

It reminded me a little of The Snowflake Man, biography of Wilson A. Bentley, by Duncan C. Blanchard, about a man in Vermont who spent most of his life photographing snowflakes in the shed.

The wierdest book I've ever read was "Coldheart Canyon" by Clive Barker.  It had old Hollywood ghosts, medieval lords, hunters and ordinary folks. 

I'll see your "Coldheart Canyon" (very strange in the classic Barker tradition) and raise you Hal Duncan's "Vellum." Leave it to a Scotsman to reinvent wierd.

I had no idea Sacks had written his autobio - thank you!

I've got Scream for Jeeves, which is a Jeeves and Wooster/H.P. Lovecraft crossover parody.  There's also The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a lovely little alphabet book of children's deaths by Edward Gorey.  "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/B is for Basil assaulted by bears..."  I'm not even going to get into Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

Sticking with Clive Barker, I loved his Abarat books. Very weird.

A Wodehouse/Lovecraft crossover? That's the most intriguing premise I've heard in a long time.  Must check it out.

Scream for Jeeves isn't actually quite as funny as I think it could have been, but something about turning "Charles Dexter Ward" into "The Rummy Affair of Young Charlie" cracks me up every time.

Edward Gorey is awesome. :)

Secret Dead Men, by Duane Swierczynski, was pretty bizarre.  But I'm thinking I really have to look up the Wodehouse/Lovecraft book.

So are these books being mentioned like the literary equivalent of the movie Eraserhead?  Probably the most inexplicable books I've read were the ones for my genius & madnss philosophy class; Hunger by Knut Hamsun and The Piano Teacher by ElfriedeJelinek.  Didn't reallty enjoy either of those.

But I love Edward Gorey, my calendar is all Gorey art, and my favorite story of his is "the Beastly Baby".

Uncle Tungsten is one of my favorite books... but then, I'm a chemist.