Mind Screw/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Mind Screw in Literature include:

  • Waiting for Godot and anything else by Samuel Beckett.
  • Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, though once you realize its All Just a Dream it becomes perfectly straight forward: the nonsense is normal for dreams, there isn't really any plot just lots of witty dialogue and then Alice wakes up.
    • Not really with Through the Looking Glass, as Alice is told by the Tweedles that the Red King dreams reality. When Alice wakes up, she has no idea whose dream it really was.
  • The Wayside School series is an absurdist Mind Screw for some kids.
  • Anything in the pictures of Bamboozled. Sure, a jack-in-the-box is coming out of a... dishwasher, and a teapot is... drinking out of... himself... kaboom.
  • The Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (which actually contains something called "Operation Mindfuck"), and ended with the main character realizing that it's all a book and that nothing is real However, when he tells his friends about this, they either reject it as untrue, or dismiss it as unimportant. Also its sort-of-sequel, the Schroedingers Cat Trilogy.
    • This is lampshade-hung at the end of the trilogy, at which point the main character breaks the fourth wall to criticize the authors for placing too much importance on symbolism, and not enough on writing a satisfying conclusion.
    • Also its sort-of-prequel, Masks of the Illuminati, which is relatively conventional until the last chapter, at which point sanity is thrown out the window.
      • Technically sanity is brought in the story at the end, but it's done with the aid of lots of psychedelic drugs that the protagonist consumes with Albert Einstein and James Joyce, making the experience less than coherent.
  • Any dream sequence in A Song of Ice and Fire. Besides these there is the House of the Undying.
  • Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, which isn't so much convoluted as so ambiguous people have devoted years to figuring out whether it's an introspective psychological work or a masterful ghost story. Start thinking too hard, and you end up with the worst headache you've had this year.
  • Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves ranks with the most convoluted in any medium. You might not understand what happened in the book, but you might have trouble with poorly lit areas afterwards.
    • It basically says that the house changes based on who is in it, so Your Mind Makes It Real. Also, the book isn't about a house, but a guy who made a movie about a house which is Bigger on the Inside. The book is a book about the movie about the house. Its also got hundreds of footnotes, sometimes going for pages, and they can be severely screwed up1 some passages are also struck out, sometimes for whole pages, and there is a lot of blank space and sideways and backwards or both.
      • 1 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
    • His next book, Only Revolutionsm, makes less than 0 per cent sense.
      • Made even more screwy when, after you read through the entire book only to realize you can truly make the entire thing a circle and just start from the beginning all over again.
  • Many works of Magical Realism. Take, for instance, trying to explain Julio Cortazar's Axolotl:

So there's a guy, and he really likes axolotls. But he's an axolotl himself. But he's not, but he becomes one. Except he was always an axolotl. And so he's there in the tank with the other axolotls. He doesn't really come and visit the axolotls much after that. The end.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

    • Old Possums Book of Practical Cats is quite straightforward. So why did Andrew Lloyd Webber decide to throw in a fragment from Four Quartets as "The Moment Of Happiness"?
    • Once the magic words are explained, though, it all falls into place. In the case of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock the words were "impotent" and "whorehouse."
      • If that's how you're reading Eliot, you're kind of doing it wrong. It'd be like saying that you could boil down Adrienne Rich's "Diving Into The Wreck" with the word "lesbian".
  • Steven Brust's novel Orca ends with two of these in a row. First, we discover that Kiera the Thief, who actually narrates a lot of the book, is really Sethra Lavode, vampire, sorceress, and all-around Badass. Then, in the last sentence of the epilogue, Kiera lets slip that she's been hiding another secret all through the book: Vlad has a son. The all-around effect is that since everyone's been hiding things from each other and it's clearly established that the characters are telling stories after the fact, both Kiera and Vlad may be hiding things from us, too. Of course, Brust has something of a history of this; halfway through the first book in the series, Jhereg, we find out that Vlad is the reincarnation of the founder of house Jhereg.
  • The Brothers Karamazov is billed as a murder mystery and courtroom drama. Yet, characters make key revelations towards its conclusion (especially in Book Eleven, which features a conversation with a demon that might not be there) that qualify it as a Mind Screw. With everyone playing mindgames against each other for different reasons, peeling through the layers at the end and dissecting the motivations and the symbolism just blows one's mind.
  • Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. There's a plot in there somewhere, amongst all the sex, drugs, violence, bizarre philosophy, and Dead Baby Comedy, but this editor is damned if he can get far enough into the book to find it.
  • The Book of Revelation in The Bible, making this Older Than Feudalism. Revelation has so much symbolism that interpretations of it range from "it all already happened in the first century" to "some has already happened" to "it'll all happen sometime in the future". Interpretations on who the "Beast" is ranges from the Roman Emperor Nero to the Pope to Ronald Reagan to the Mass Media to a future Skynet-like artificial intelligence to Oprah (seriously).
    • Not to mention the worst offender-- the number "666" which pop culture seems to think has a very different meaning than what it really does.
      • And there are others who think the number 666 actually means nothing and the real number should be 616.
    • And that's not even getting into the Barney the Dinosaur theories...
    • Revelation is such a Mind Screw that it's the only book never read from in Orthodox Christian services. Even the priests don't claim to understand the symbolism. (Not sure how it's dealt with in other forms of Christianity.)
    • Made worse by the author basically writing, "I don't have to make it clear, because you all know who I'm talking about, right? Right?"
    • Pft, that one book? Genesis has its share of mindscrewy stuff (Which would make an example of Book Ends)
    • A lot of the Old Testament prophets get into this territory as well, what with the flaming wheels in the sky and weird human-animal hybrids and whatnot. The New Testament (for those who believe in it) acts as a Mind Screwdriver for some of this, but much of it is just plain weird.
    • Sometimes, to understand revelation, you're gonna need more revelation, where sects/religions differ.
    • The primary academic attempt at the Mind Screwdriver here is viewing it through the lens of its Genre ("apocalyptic literature"), of which the Revelation of John is but the most famous.
    • None of this even truly touches upon what is quite possible the ultimate mind screw: The Big Cheese, Himself. Just God's very concept as an omnipotent, omnipresent, all-knowing being who existed before existence existed and will exist after existence stops existing will bust your brain if you try to think about how it could be possible for too long.
  • Don't forget Thomas Pynchon's V, which has possibly one of the 10 densest plots in any medium.
    • And don't even try to start Gravity's Rainbow...
  • Walter Moers' Zamonia novels are a bit difficult to untangle, having his merry way with the Fourth Wall and Author Avatars. First, there is Walter Moers, the real world author.
    • Then there is the fictional translator of the books, who translated them from the Zamonian language and is also called Walter Moers. He wrote the introduction to the books, mentioning the fact that he is a translator.
      • Then there is Hildegunst von Mythenmetz (Optimus Yarnspinner in english versions), who is the Zamonian author of the actual story, and also a Lemony Narrator who constantly goes on tangents before continuing to write down the story he wants to tell.
        • And to make things worse, the "City of Dreaming Books" novels are also autobiographical, which means Hildegunst appears as the main character in his own stories.
    • Most of the books are actually satires of the modern literature scene. Hildegunst constantly gets on Author Tract, and with him obviously being an Author Avatar of Walter Moers, these in-story tracts become actual author tracts. However Hildegunsts ramblings are so insane, that it is obviously Self-Deprecation on the part of Moers with the point of satirizing author tracts, by the means of an author tract.
  • The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. A series of vaguely connected short stories about decadent artists living in an alternate version of the The Roaring Twenties, linked by a mind-destroying play script whose plot we never learn, but we keep getting little excerpts. Filled with Unreliable Narrators, Ax Crazies, Cosmic Horror, and falconry. By the end of the book, it makes no sense, but is absolutely terrifying.
  • The very end of Pontoon by Garrison Keillor, starting just after Raoul dies and continuing for the last five or six pages.
  • The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. The reader is left with the sense that the novel was symbolic of something, but unsure of what exactly. The plot is mindscrewy enough, let alone the twist ending. Plus, at one point people die from seeing a colour that has never been seen before. Yeah.
  • The whole of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is written by Charles Kinbote. Or was it? Maybe it was written by John Shade using Charles Kinbote as a narrative device to tell two mixed stories of a daughter's suicide and a king's romantic retreat from his country in turmoil. Maybe Charles Kinbote is real but also insane, and wrote the whole thing from mountainous seclusion, planning to end his life shortly thereafter. Or perhaps the whole book was written by one minor character who is mentioned twice in the entire novel. It's all there in the book; who wrote it all and for what is up for grabs though.
  • William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Does Addie's monologue imply the existence of an afterlife? Is Darl a psychic, or just a psycho? And WTF was up with all the Bananas? There's even an entire chapter which consists of a character declaring his dead mother to be a fish.
    • The fish chapter actually does make a lot of sense; at the beginning of the novel, Vardaman catches a fish. Since Vardaman is so young, this is the first time he's seen a dead animal, and death is still an alien concept to him. When his mother dies, he doesn't fully understand what this implies, so he can only think of it in relation to what he's already experienced. When Vardaman says "My mother is a fish", he's actually trying to say "My mother is dead."
    • To add to the Faulkner list, The Sound and the Fury. Does Benji serve any purpose besides narrating the first part of the novel? What the heck is up with the last chapter? And don't get me started on Quentin.
  • Jorge Luis Borges drifts around between a bunch of genres, but spends a considerable amount of time in Mind Screw. One such story - entitled Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - is about the narrator finding an article in an encyclopedia about Uqbar, a country that doesn't exist, which in turn has literature about Tlön, a world that doesn't exist - but by the end of the story, the real world has started to fade away, leaving only Tlön. I think.
    • "El Otro, El Mismo" ("The Other, The Same"), in which he - as an older, middle-aged man - meets himself as a teenager on the bank of a river. Each sees the river as the location they are in at that point in their/his life (half a world apart) and they attempt to figure out if they are both real or if one of them is dreaming or hallucinating, and if so, which one. Eventually, Borges speculates (from the older man's POV) something about time being a circle and he had somehow crossed through the middle to intercept the boy while he was dreaming... Not only is the reader left wondering about the two, but also if Borges actually had this encounter in real life and decided to write about it.
  • Happens a lot in Gravity's Rainbow, especially what exactly happens to Slothrop, the chapter set in Hell, Slothrops' sodium pentathol dreams, and the ending where the final V2 rocket kills you, the reader
  • Pretty much anything by Carlton Mellick III, titles include Razorwire Pubic Hair and Satan Burger, which are pretty much what the titles would lead you to expect.
  • Trying to dissect Only Revolutions, eh? Well, break out the LSD and textual criticism cognoscenti, let's get this party on! (Note it's by Mark Z. Danielewski.)
  • God's Debris by Scott Adams consists entirely of a dialogue between a delivery man and a crazy guy he has a package for. Apparently, the book was laced with hypnotic suggestions and, in the foreword, asks you to identify the single fault in the crazy guy's logic. The sequel, the Religion Wars, on the other hand, provides more comfortable mind screws in the form of a Xanatos Roulette, Memetic Mutation, and What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic, as well as having an actual plot.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series is another example. Although it is convenient that you can start reading any of the books at any point in the story, put it down and walk away, and come back a year later. Nothing will make sense, but that's okay, because nothing makes sense in that series anyway. And that's the point.
  • The closing chapter of Robert Sheckley's Mindswap hits this trope full on. The hero ends up trapped in the "Twisted World" but believes himself to have successfully returned home.
  • Just about anything by Philip K. Dick, but especially apt is The Unteleported Man, in which the protagonist makes the journey through a strangely one-way teleporter to the planet Whale's Mouth. Soon afterward, he's hit by an LSD dart, and the world dissolves into Mind Screw for the rest of the novel.
  • Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, which is the ultimate embodiment of this trope. The plot is covered in about a tenth of the chapters in the book. The rest tell a series of unconnected vignettes, describe minor characters in excessive detail, give allegories for the main plot, and teach you geometry. One chapter was described by Joyce as "A chattering dialogue across a river by two washerwomen who, as night falls, become a tree and stone." Some chapters feature random doodles in the margins. The first sentence is the ending part of the last sentence, making the book circular. Finally, it's written in a combination of a phonetic Irish accent, random puns that you need a doctorate in ancient mythology to understand, and general stream of consciousness. In short, it makes no sense. Which is awesome. Joyce stated that it was supposed to be a dream-like "night book" in comparison to his "day-book," Ulysses, which described a day in the life of some ordinary Dubliners but whose style and construction is almost as weird as
    • Also by the same author is the more coherent but still rather mind screwy Ulysses. As a good comparison on how mindscrewy Ulysses must be: everyone who watches Evangelion tends to form the opinion that Mr. Anno is depressed and has mother issues. With Ulysses, Carl Jung read it, and concluded that Joyce was schizophrenic.
      • Apparently, one of Joyce's family was schizophrenic; and much of the inspiration for his use of language and symbolism came from them.
      • To clarify where Jung got that idea: every chapter in Ulysses is written in a different style, as though they were written by different authors. One chapter has the structure of a classical music sonata; another features sharp cuts between different characters; another ends with the main characters getting so drunk that one of them thinks he is Siegfried from Wagner's Ring and the other has a hallucination of his dead son. Every chapter is thematically linked to a chapter from the Odyssey (hence, "Ulysses") as well as to parts of the body and a bunch of other stuff that Joyce felt like throwing in.
  • Polish science-fiction author Stanislaw Lem was particularly fond of this, and uses it to varying degrees in many of his books and stories. He occasionally lampshaded his Mind Screw plots by having his characters react to them with increasing bewilderment and confusion. His bitingly-satirical "Ijon Tichy" character exists almost entirely within this trope. Throughout the various Ijon Tichy books, one is never sure whether Tichy is a brilliant but highly eccentric scientist and space explorer, a madman with elaborate and grandiose delusions, or simply a self-aggrandizing teller of tall tales with a particular moral or philosophical lesson; particularly since all of the stories are first-person narratives told from Tichy's own perspective. The best example is The Futurological Congress, which involves the use of drug-induced perception modification on an enormous scale; and Tichy, like the audience, is never really sure what is real and what is hallucination. The ending leaves the protagonist musing about the nature of reality and perception. One of the voyages in The Star Diaries ends with Tichy's descent into madness and incoherence; but whether this is merely a temporary condition caused by the extended isolation of the voyage, or a revelation of his true condition as a lunatic (and all his other voyages as delusions), is never explained.
  • The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a classic 19th century Mind Screw. It doesn't help that it's in high school text books.
    • It's heavy on symbolism, but I wouldn't exactly call it a Mind Screw...
    • Try 'early feminist tract'. An educated woman is locked in a room by her husband, and loses her mind.
      • It was actually a common practice at the time. Doctors believed that depression was caused by too much stress and a "rest cure" of lying in a bed doing nothing would help the patient get better. (Which does make you wonder how many state of the art modern treatments will come to be seen as barbaric and counterproductive.)
  • The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. Not only is every single of the three stories mind-screwing in itself, they get even weirder when you consider Paul Auster's statement that they were essentially one and the same story told three times from differend perspectives.
  • Harry Potter. Everything is symbolic; Hedwig is the saint of orphans, holly -the wood in Harry's wand- represents purity/good, etc. Most of the symbols are too obscure to make a good mindscrew, but they are there.
    • A very mild version of the trope, but one which seems to be trying for an effect outside the book, occurs in the final volume of Harry Potter, when Dumbledore and Harry have a discussion inside Harry's head/at King's Cross station.

Dumbledore: Indeed, this is all happening in your head, but why on Earth should that mean it is not real?

    • The Department of Mysteries in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The Department of Mysteries is basically a group of people who specialize in analyzing Mind Screwy subjects. Here's a brief run-down of all the weird rooms there:
      • The Brain Room. A room with a tank of brains. If removed from the tank, they extend tendrils of thought to attack and constrict the person who touched them.
      • The Hall of Prophecy. A room filled with shelves and shelves of prophecies.
      • The Space Chamber. A dark room filled with floating planets.
      • The Time Room. A bright room filled with clocks, Time-Turners, and a crystal jar where living things cycle through birth and death.
      • The Death Chamber. A dark room. In the center is an ancient stone archway with a black veil hanging in it. This archway serves as a portal between this world and the afterworld.
      • The Love Chamber. This room is always kept locked and cannot be opened by magic. Inside, the people study The Power of Love, the most mysterious and powerful subject of study in the Department of Mysteries.
    • So Harry's wand is made of holly wood... well, at least that's where Harry ended up.
  • Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys. Until the end you never know if the protagonist is insane or if she really is a member of The Organization, an outfit that sounds like the MIB on serious medication.
  • The majority of Haruki Murakami's work uses this to some extent, but After Dark has it in place of the plot.
  • Armageddon II: The B-Movie, by Robert Rankin. Actually justified in the book itself by the flywheel of the Earth wigging out. (For the curious: we're talking a book in which Elvis is not only alive, but is hunting down the Antichrist with the help of a talking, time-travelling sprout, and that's the part that makes sense.)
    • Just generally, everything Robert Rankin has ever written.
    • The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code is another one, in which you begin to wonder whether the crazy person is the main character, everyone in the world except the main character, Robert Rankin, or yourself.
  • Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. Recurring symbols include the colour red, trout fishing in America itself - as an activity, as a character, as an adjective - and mayonnaise. One of the chapters is entitled "Sandbox minus John Dillinger equals what?" Oddly, it all kind of makes sense when taken together.
    • The same applies to almost anything written by Brautigan.
  • Songs of Innocence and of Experience contains the story of Lyca, as told in "The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found", a long and symbolism heavy story of how Lyca falls asleep in the wilderness, is discovered by a lion, and is taken to a cave. Her parents find her, seemingly in the afterlife. It makes a little more sense if you look at it as a metaphor for growing up or sexual awakening, but it's still a very strange and dreamlike narrative.
  • Darwinia. The world suddenly gets altered mysteriously when huge chunks of the world are converted into pieces of what seem like a prehistoric world. Then there's an expedition to search for a city. Turns out all the characters are entries in an archive compiled at the end of the universe by beings consisting of the ghosts of everyone who ever died and being infected by semi-alive viruses taking the form of giant insects. Oh, and the protagonists are people who were supposed to die in one of the World Wars, being helped by the ghosts of the actual person. And that's not even close to capturing how weird this all was...
  • "The Glass Bead Game," "Journey to the East," and others by Herman Hesse.
  • "Mount Analogue" by Rene Daumal.
  • "The Magus" by John Fowles.
  • Tom Holt's novels often tend to fall into this, mainly because they run on Rule of Funny but still have a semi-serious storyline. Egregious culprits include Snow White and the Seven Samurai and Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard.
    • Then there was the aptly named Falling Sideways, in which every time you're given a sensible explanation for what's going on, it turns out to be a lie.
  • Most of Diana Wynne Jones' novels are pretty straightforward. "Fire and Hemlock", on the other hand, is freakin' weird. And then there's Hexwood..
  • Most of J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick's novels. Want specifics? Go read A Scanner Darkly, Empire of the Sun, Concrete Island, Cocaine Nights, The Simulacra, Ubik, or High Rise. Then come back and explain exactly what happened during the course of those stories.
    • And then you get Philip K. Dick when he writes his "exegesis". And then you read VALIS. I'm sure there is a really simple explanation for how someone's split personality takes a trip to Europe and sends his other self and his friends photos and postcards. Say goodbye to your sanity.
  • Pretty much anything by Peter Carey. Especially his short stories. Especially especially 'Last days of a Famous Mime' (a guy drowns himself for no discernible reason), 'Life and Death on the South Side Pavilion' (a guy drowns horses for no discernible reason), and 'War Crimes' (a guy kills the unemployed with FLAMETHROWERS. For no particular reason).
  • Jason X: Death Moon; the book is half coherent and half... not, having random meta and ranty parts, scenes involving poorly explained concepts like Teknopriests, Akasha.net, reality hackers, etc. and what's pretty much the definition of a Gainax Ending where Jason starts fighting his past self for no immediately discernible reason.
  • "The Book of All Hours" series by Hal Duncan applies itself a little to this trope. Particularly with a multi-layered universe functioning on dimensional variables with recurring archetypes across millennia acting as the main characters, one of the main characters killing his younger self (at the point when said younger self was supposed to kill the older self) because he was crying (Stable Time Loop seems to apply), and the absolute deconstruction of all levels of reality to a point where even the guy who walked across eternity can't piece it back together (no joke, he decides to steal a copy from one moderately un-corrupted dimensional version of reality in the 1920s ... well, that was the plan anyway). Awesomeness and pan-cultural symbolism aside, you kinda have to read it twice. Or more than twice... Have fun.
  • Dante attempts to describe God as three spheres, of different colors, occupying the same space.
  • The novel Going Bovine by Libba Bray. Mon Dieu, Going Bovine. This is the entire plot. Is Cameron dying in the hospital of mad cow disease, or taking a crazy road trip? Is Dulcie just a figment of his imagination guiding him on a possible hallucinatory road trip? What happened to Gonzo at the end of the book? Where the hell is Cameron at the end? Was Cameron hallucinating that chase scene? Why is microwave popcorn so good, what does Tobias Plummer and all that stuff that ends up getting read on tabloids and billboards have to do with the plot?!
    • Not to mention the quantum physicists, the happiness cult, Disney world, freeing the snow globes...
  • If the narrator being Tyler all along in Fight Club is not an example of that, then I'm being a Martian.
  • The battle of wits in The Princess Bride is this to the point where, by the time you figure out what Vizzini is saying, your brain will be coming out of your ears.
  • At the heart of the main conflict driving the plot of In the Keep of Time—who is Ollie? Did going through the mists of time merge her with a girl from the 1400's? Was there never a Mae, and time shifted around her to account for her? Did something happen to the real Mae? Or if it is Mae the children take back to the present, where did Ollie go? Did taking her along leave Muckle-mooth Meg without a daughter? Which memories are real? How did they come back, or did they? Some of this is never actually resolved.

Andrew: That doesn't make any sense.
Elinor: Does any of it?

  • "In the Night Kitchen" by Maurice Sendak [1].
  • I Live in Your Basement from the Goosebumps series is far too mindfucky and complicated to summarize here, but check out this Blogger Beware post.
  • The Maximum Ride books have several mind-screwy moments, especially ones involving the Voice.
  • Thomas Ligotti is a man who likes to play with readers' expectations. Nowhere is this more obvious than "The Nightmare Network", the third and final story from My Work Is Not Yet Done. "Think again."
    • On a subtler note, "The Red Tower", which up until the very end manages to have no actual characters whatsoever, and even then only really has the narrator... and, by tacit implication, anyone that reads it. Trying to explain how this works would take a very long time, but simply put, the basic idea is that everyone alive is, unconsciously, aware of the Red Tower's existence, speaking of it constantly without knowing that they are speaking of it. The narrator has become aware of this, and is revealing the secret to the reader, hoping that they will believe him and begin to recognise the truth. Whether or not he is insane, of course, is immaterial to the massive Mind Screw.
  • I Am the Cheese by Robert Corimer seems pretty straightforward at first, but slowly begins to screw with you as you snowball closer and closer to the end, to the point where the last two pages are one of the best examples of all time.
  • Though the first two books in are quite straightforward, the last book of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, is very Mind Screwy, to the point that it culminates in resurrected Merlin channelling the spirits of all the other planets out to Saturn, who are clearly the Roman gods that each planet is named for, but also established as Angels of the Lord, in order to take down a scientific organization bent on achieving immortality by destroying their own physical bodies to acquire unending astral ones
  • The Time Trilogy, or Quartet, or Quintet, depending on who you talk to, is absolutely a mind screw. Taking only the first trilogy, one of the main themes of the first book, A Wrinkle in Time, is that distance is an illusion. A Wind in the Door then argues that size is an illusion, and it is capped off by A Swiftly Tilting Planet, where time is an illusion. And these are by no means the only, or even the prominent, themes of each of the books. Keep in mind, this is a kid's series.
  • The point of From a Buick 8 is that you'll never have all the answers. So the story hands you about three definite answers over the course of the entire novel.
  • A Series of Unfortunate Events is another series with a similar point, so it is a pretty big Mind Screw, especially considering it's a children's literature. As the story progresses, more and more questions are raised and few are answered, cultimating in the last book, The End, which is anything but. And then there's the supplementary books...
  • The Raw Shark Texts is a complete Mind Screw. The serially amnesiac protagonist is being chased by a conceptual shark and enlists the help of people who may or may not exist to escape and find out who the hell he is. At one point the text devolves into about thirty pages of an ASCII shark moving towards the reader.
  • The little-known Hungarian sci-fi novel Napszél[2] is chock-full of Evangelion-levels of incomprehensibility, navel-contemplating and the like. Every time Eridanus' red sun comes up, Mind Screw ensues until it sets; in fact, said planet's mere existence is a Mind Screw since it just came out of a nebula with two suns orbiting it (you read that right, the suns orbit the planet and not the other way around) and lifeless but an atmosphere perfect for human life, launching itself across space at superluminal speeds on a collision course with Earth then out of the blue settling on a stable orbit around Sol (which is somehow never mentioned as visible from the surface, even though Earth is clearly visible with the naked eye). Lots of stuff the exploration team finds planetside doesn't make a goddamn sense like known chemical elements having bizarre properties. When they test the soil for viability, the saplings mutate into huge tentacle...things that turn the planet into a Death World. The rest of the novel is spent with navel-contemplating and even more Mind Screw (at one point the protagonist witnesses one of her teammates killing another... then the dead woman turns to the protagonist and whispers "sometimes the rivers flow backwards... the river of time too" then time reverses and undoes the murder with no one except the protagonist remembering it) until the team decide to euthanize themselves. Thing is, the poison somehow fails to work and their ship is allowed to leave. Reading all these, you get the distinct impression the author was high when she wrote them. Hell, just look at the fucking cover!
  • The Brazilian writer Machado de Assis was a good practioner of this trope. In Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas[3], the narrator says he doesn't know if he's a "dead author" or an "author dead" and then there's him mounting hippos in the afterlife.
  • While almost all Jasper Fforde books have a heavy dose of surrealism, none more so than One of Our Thursdays is Missing, which takes place from the point of view of a fictional character
  • The book Celia and The Fairies by Karen Mc Question. It is hard to determine whether the fairies are actually speaking to Celia when she is awake, whether the fairies are speaking to Celia through her dreams, or if all the fairies in the dreams are simply products of Celia's imagination.
  • "Barefoot in the Head" by Brian Aldiss. The whole book is a massive, psychedelic mindscrew.
  • The riddle how to access the secret room in the library becomes this in-story in The Name of the Rose. "The hand over the idol?/image?/mirror! should move (how exactly?) the first and the seventh of the four(???)".
  • Koji Suzuki's Ring Cycle novels (that The Ring films are based on):
    • Ring: Wait, saving Sadako's corpse from the well doesn't end the curse... it only ends when you copy and show the tape?
    • Rasen: Nope! The curse doesn't end - ever! She just keeps you alive until you're no longer useful! On top of that, her ultimate plan is to become reborn as a perfect double-gendered being so she can ejaculate inside herself and propagate an army of clones of Sadakos to overrun the world.
    • Loop: Okay now... so the first two books took place in a sophisticated computer simulation? And the curse/virus is leaking out into the real world? And the protagonist of Loop is actually a clone of a character that died in the first book... which we've already established took place in a computer simulation and Oh dear I've gone cross-eyed
  • While the Strugatsky Brothers usually focused on rather hard social science fiction, they also wrote The Doomed City - a heavily psychological surrealist mystery full of symbolism, loose threads and very weird occurrences. Let's see: people are chosen and taken (it's never explained how exactly) to participate in an Experiment (always spelled with a capital E in the novel) by the enigmatic Mentors (it's never explained who they are). The Experiment either takes place in an alternate dimension or on another planet or in a fully isolated, vast compound on Earth (it's never explained... you get the idea). The purpose of the Experiment is never even hinted at. The titular city, the sole settlement in the Experiment's area (whatever that may be), is really strange - even before supernatural things (which may or may not be planned by the Mentors - there is a lot of in-universe speculation about that) start to happen. After lots of dramatic events, psychological crises and character development, there's a revolution and the humans proclaim the end of the Experiment and demand non-interference from the Mentors. They apparently get it, although quite a few of the main characters (now all in positions of power) suspect it's still all part of the Experiment, despite their "free choice". Supernatural happenings cease and all seems fine, until the leader gets the bright idea to dispatch an expedition to the North of the City (abandoned for decades, if not centuries, before the novel begins) in order to map the area and gather info on a possible threat. The last two acts of the novel, which consists of five, deal with this expedition - at which point reality vacates the premises entirely. A textbook example of a Gainax Ending (the protagonist gets shot and is back in Leningrad, with his Mentor telling him that he has passed the "first circle" but that "there are many of them ahead") concludes the whole thing.
  • In a case of Older Than They Think, one of many fictional characters Dante and Virgil meet within the Circle of Lust in The Divine Comedy is Ditto, a character in one of Virgil's own plays. Neither of them find this the least bit odd.
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  1. ↑ who also wrote Where the Wild Things Are
  2. ↑ "solar wind"
  3. ↑ Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas, also known as Epitaph for a Small Winner
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