Hello! Relatively new follower but our taste in books seems to align pretty well! As a fellow lover of POV fuckery, I’m wondering if you have any recommendations? Examples of books I’ve enjoyed are Leech, Harrow the Ninth, The Spear Cuts Through Water, Metal from Heaven, and pretty much everything by Ann Leckie. I’ve read The Archive Undying but unfortunately it didn’t quite work for me — there was a little *too* much going on and I didn’t really connect with any of the characters :/ (forgive me lol). Hoping to explore this niche more though!
omg hello!! this ask made my whole morning, thank you!! Lovers of POV Fuckery, unite!
un/fortunately: you and i have SUCH overlapping taste that you've already read literally all of my go-to recs (i have not yet read SPEAR, but seeing it in this lineup makes me bump it up my TBR haha). so on the one hand: yay!! book buddies! if you find additional POV fuckeries, please drop them in my inbox.
on the other hand: this does mean i have slim pickings for you, and a bunch of them are Kind Of A Stretch™. these are presented in descending order of relevance. a great deal of these are dark and fucked up, too, but since you put LEECH and HARROW on your list i figure that's not a deal breaker lol. if i had wrap-up thoughts, i linked them! all internal to tumblr.
THE FIFTH SEASON by NK Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy): this is the first POV Fuckery book i ever read, and it's phenomenal. apocalyptic fantasy. second/third person.
THE WORKS OF VERMIN by Hiron Ennes (their second book!): you have got to check this one out since you liked LEECH and METAL. the POV fuckery is much more subtle here but there's a payoff toward the end (unless i'm just dense and missed it?? reskimming the first couple pages indicates that it's seeded well, but the worldbuilding is very immersive and i missed it first pass). third all the way through but those THIRDS man.
MIDDLEGAME by Seanan McGuire (technically book one of a series, but i think it stands alone perfectly and i didn't like the second book nearly as much): also much more subtle, to the point where i'm not sure this one quite counts as POV fuckery but there's definitely other fuckery going on, and explicitly naming that other fuckery is spoilers lol. masterful book, hugely recommend. if you DO wind up reading this one and you're grumpy with me about it not being POV fuckery, please come back and i'll give you my spoilers rationale XD
SHRIEK by Jeff VanderMeer (book 2 of a trilogy so i feel weird about this one, but book 1 is a 700+ page behemoth): anything VanderMeer writes is weird and fuckery, honestly. if you can get through CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN (the 700+page book 1, which is a collection of shorter fictions and non-fictions set in this weird city PLUS an appendix with MORE loadbearing story; it's a structurally fascinating volume in its own right but dense as hell), then SHRIEK is much more approachable. memoir by an ex-socialite woman about her historian brother (the same brother who wrote parts of book 1), with the historian brother annotating/cutting in through in-line annotations. so mostly first person, with some second person asides, epistolary-ish-style.
HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Z. Danielewski (i can't mention Ambergris and not HOL now, apparently): an absolute puzzle box of a book; three stories and three main narrators/contributors, but no those narrators don't perfectly overlap with the stories. it's about a film that doesn't exist and a dead man's analysis thereof; everyone's a liar and unreliable and this is such an obsessive book. excellent enrichment, loses points for being deeply het and casually misogynistic, but WOW what a journey.
WALKING PRACTICE by Dolki Min (translated novella!): okay this one's straight first person, but it does some very neat stuff within those confines! alien shapeshifter stranded on earth who has to eat people to survive. lots of sex and...eating people......but very queer about it. typographically fascinating.
NOTHING BUT THE RAIN by Naomi Salman (tiny novella!): also primarily first person, narrated through journal entries, but it's set in a town where rainwater washes away memory, so our POV character keeps forgetting swathes of information. (this one does have child and animal harm/death content warnings though, which i feel like is a different classification from most of what you read above, just FYI)
and then bonus round, for Weird Epistolary Novels I Have Enjoyed (letters are like fuckery lite, right?):
THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
ELLA MINNOW PEA by Mark Dunn (as letters fall off a statue in a town, they're banned from use! since it's epistolary, you see the linguistic tightening in real time)
