Justin Walls is a bookseller based in the Pacific Northwest and can be found on TwitterĚý.

by Ma Jian, translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew (Counterpoint Press)

A stodgy government functionary nods off at his desk midday, momentarily receding into dreams of the past, before awaking to find that some pesky memories refuse to be shaken. In fact, they are right there in the room, staring back at him. Ma Daode, duly appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, has what you might call a personal stake in the invasive initiative he’s been charged with overseeing. In short, the China Dream project is a neural implant. Once installed, this microchip effectively replaces the nocturnal nuisance of dreaming with a shared vision of national rejuvenation. While President Xi Jinping’s staunch opposition to Western individualism serves as the inspiration for this technological nightmare, the prospect of propagandizing the inside of every eyelid holds an undeniable appeal for one bureaucrat, in particular.

“And I, Ma Daode, volunteer to wash my brain first,” declares our notably ranine protagonist while announcing the device’s development at a stuffy staff meeting. The director has been experiencing eidetic intrusions, impromptu manifestations of Mao’s Cultural Revolution that appear grafted onto his present reality. Slogans reading “SURRENDER OR DIE” materialize anachronistically on the outer wall of a newly constructed industrial park. A pier at the river’s edge invites the image of a watery mass grave. It reasons, or so Director Ma assumes, that if this miracle doohickey (any laborious back-bending undertaken in service of a nuts-and-bolts explanation on how the device actually works is, mercifully, absent) can unite a nation, it could also cleanse his mind. Tormented by his complicity and participation in this era of bloody factionalism, Ma Daode wants nothing more than to put the past away, even as it’s come to define him.

Ma Jian’sĚýChina Dream, here presented in a crisp translation by Flora Drew, is often classified as satire. Carved into episodic chunks, the novel interpolates dry humor among the reminiscences of petrol bombs and scissor fights, undercutting the broad historical scope with petty chicanery and a prodigious amount of poetry-laden sexting. When Director Ma, in one section, is deployed to talk some sense into the dug-in residents of a village scheduled for demolition, he does so by amending the aforementioned “or die” mantra, instead pleading with the gathered crowd, “surrender now, and trust that the government has your best interest at heart.” In a later set piece, the director unwinds with a trip to a brothel, electing for an evening of debauchery in a room made to resemble Mao Zedong’s private train car, complete with attendants kitted out in the garb of the revolution.

Each instance takes pains to illustrate Director Ma’s status as a man out of time. Even as he trusses up Red Guard agitprop for modern sensibilities, a young rabble-rouser dismisses his outmoded rhetoric as the language of “the ‘culture rebellion,’ or whatever you call it.” More embarrassing still, the director incorrectly assumes that the armband-adorned sex worker he visits is herself a student of the revolution. (“Not really—what was it exactly,” she deadpans.) The patent absurdity of an ineffectual bureaucrat endeavoring to expunge an entire decade from the collective consciousness, oblivious to the fact that younger generations have long since dispensed with any meaningful awareness of the period, is evident.

“The book is filled with absurdities, both real and invented,” writes the author in his introduction to the novel. Ma goes on to say that his work serves “to drag memories out from the fog of state-imposed amnesia, to deride and mock China’s despots and sympathize with their victims, while remaining conscious that in evil dictatorships, most people are both oppressor and oppressed.” It should perhaps come as little surprise that, in exchange for a career spent thumbing his nose at unscrupulous regimes, Ma Jian has been exiled from China. The books he’s written, and continues to write, are banned there. A debt of gratitude is owed to Flora Drew, whose crystal clear translation lays bare the enormous strength that mockery and derision can possess when wielded by a seasoned troublemaker.

How American readers, immersed in what has been described as a post-satire state of affairs, might contend with such a novel is ripe for speculation. As of late, attempts to re-dressĚýold positions for currents tastes have, without a doubt, proven a viable tactic in stateside political discourse. If you had a hand in engineering the Iraq war, for example, you can now claim to have stood against it with a straight face. Total retcon. Far more powerful than our ability to allow history—even recent history—to be erased, however, is the American willingness to simply not give a shit. Recollection is a burden. Providing context and spotting contradiction is too fussy, even somehow a bit underhanded. A memory-wiping gadget might seem rather superfluous to a populace already saddled with an obsessively equivocating media sphere and disenfranchised working class. The dream, for all intents and purposes, may have come true.

In honesty, any effort to paintĚýChina Dream as a work of period-specific “relevance” would be selling it short. Ma Jian’s everything-happens-so-much approach stealthily elides easy one-to-one comparisons. Instead, we take a ride on a chronological carousel, a simultaneously disintegrating and regenerating multi-linear loop, barreling forward even as it feels stuck in reverse. By the novel’s third act, Ma Daode has a serious case of the spins, wandering the streets with his name and title scrawled on a piece of cardboard hanging around his neck, reduced to foraging for a natural remedy to his ailments. At last, the philandering apparatchik is both oppressor and oppressed.

Time makes fools of us all. Though, as evidenced in Ma Jian’s excoriatingĚýChina Dream, it makes bigger fools of some more than others.

Psychological horror/thriller/chiller/etc.—you know the sort, taut with spring-loaded tension and positively oozing dread—is tricky to pull off in a work of literature, let alone to sustain over the course of an entire novel. Anything containing too much gory mayhem runs the risk of being slapped with the genre label (Quelle horreur, indeed!), while taking too cerebral a tack could attract the charge that nothing “happens.” An effective workaround in the current milieu of literary scares is to aim for the unsettling, Ă  la expert spine-tingler Samanta Schweblin, whose forthcomingĚýĚý(trans. Megan McDowell, Riverhead Books) will arrive with just such claims already embedded in its jacket copy. (See also: Guadalupe Nettel’sĚý, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, due out from Seven Stories Press later this year.) Think of the infamous diner scene from David Lynch’sĚýMulholland Dr.Ěý(2001), a startling encounter with the inexplicable that upends all previous notions of what might happen from one moment to the next. It’s no wonder that, like “unsettling,” the term “Lynch-ian” has pretty much had the tread worn off its tires as far as bookish buzzwords are concerned. This method, essentially, takes reality and makes it unreal.

However, recent entries into the canon of cinematic terror, like Ari Aster’sĚýHereditaryĚý(2018) or Jordan Peele’sĚýUsĚý(2019), suggest a shift in what we as a culture deem hair-raising. A hyper-reality borne of not just fright but ambient stress and buried trauma, centered around the family, has acquitted itself as a convincing boogeyman for contemporary America. Even in Robert Eggers’ deliciously demonicĚýThe WitchĚý(2015), the devil himself opts to sow seeds of suspicion in the hearth of an ousted Puritanical clan, pitting mother against daughter and infant against goat (or something like that). Sure, there’s no shortage of bloodletting in these films, but the true innards-twisting aspect of each lies not with any amount of over-the-top slasher theatrics. Instead, it’s the permeating sensation that something—specifically something close to home—isn’t right.

For fiction that addresses a similar strain of homestead horror and genealogical angst, we must turn to two 2019 Nordic novels in translation: Linda Boström KnausgĂĄrd’sĚýĚý(World Editions), translated by Martin Aitken, and Vigdis Hjorth’sĚýĚý(Verso Fiction), translated by Charlotte Barslund. Both are attuned to the complex contaminants that can burble to the surface among relatives and loves ones, especially where grief is involved. From Nicolas Roeg’sĚýDon’t Look NowĚý(1974)—which Lynch ripped off for the aforementionedĚýMulholland Dr.Ěýscene, if we’re being honest—to Lars von Trier’sĚýAntichristĚý(2009) to Aster’sĚýMidsommarĚý(2019), a death in the family remains fertile ground for exploring our inherent fears.

InĚýBoström KnausgĂĄrd’sĚýWelcome to America, we’re introduced to Ellen, a newly non-verbal tween convinced that she’s colluded with God in a plot to murder her mentally unstable and frequently menacing father. Rather than address these worrisome notions via whatever passes for conventional methods, Ellen’s actress mother becomes ebullient and distant, her brother adopts a posture of physical intimidation, and our eleven-year-old patricide collaborator recedes into a chrysalis of torment. There is an atmospheric disquietude reminiscent of Roman Polanski’sĚýRepulsionĚý(1965) or Ingmar Bergman’sĚýPersonaĚý(1966) to the novel, a hallucinatory netherworld crafted from isolation. Echoing Catherine Deneuve’s confinement in the former and Liv Ullmann’s silence in the latter,ĚýWelcome to America’s troubled narrator possesses all the makings of a budding woman on the brink. A spiritual successor to the vanishing girls of Peter Weir’sĚýPicnic at Hanging RockĚý(1975), Ellen slips through a geological recess of the mind, simultaneously trekking further out while burrowing deeper in. The bog of doubt, delusion, and scattered dreams she discovers there is as haunting as anything in modern fiction.

Meanwhile, Hjorth’s comparatively cogentĚýWill and TestamentĚýresembles Henri-Georges Clouzot’sĚýThe Wages of FearĚý(1953) with the nitroglycerin swapped out for the phrase “cabin valuations.” This diabolical bit of legalese dredges forth all manner of curdled resentment after being invoked one too many times — yes, like how Beetlejuice functions inĚýBeetlejuiceĚý(1988) or Candyman inĚýCandymanĚý(1992), exactly — and thrusts black sheep Bergljot back into the familial fray. There’s another felled patriarch, another trail of abuse, but whereas adolescent Ellen is left to merely cope following her father’s passing, grown-ass Bergljot confronts her trauma with the advantage of resolute indignation and abundant hindsight. When the matter of the inheritance goes sour, the surviving family members split into competing factions: those who believe that the trespass occurred and those who, for various reasons, feel compelled to deny, deny, deny. What follows is a free-for-all rhetorical chess match marked by passive aggression, suppression, grievance, subterfuge, and bad faith diplomacy. Like Audrey Hepburn’s sightless protagonist in Terence Young’sĚýWait Until DarkĚý(1967), Bergljot must fend off attempts to undermine what she knows to be the truth. (A certain Mia Farrow character can also totally relate.) The slow burn of steadily accumulated anxiety, increasing with every perceived slight and cutting remark, is enough to leave you tied up in sympathetic knots. That is, if you can bear to watch.

The conceptual artist Anicka Yi’s olfactory-based installationĚýWashing Away of WrongsĚý(2014, created in conjunction with French perfumerĚýChristophe Laudamiel) consists of two stainless steel dryer doors embedded into a gallery wall, each containing a motion-activated diffuser which, once the darkened portholes are unhinged, emits a lab-engineered puff meant to evoke a relationship’s nadir in terms both “abstract” and “representational,” respectively. When I initially encountered the work, however, it wasn’t by scent—or even sight—but by sound: a coterie of similarly-attired school children, on a field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art, were taking turns daring one another to get a whiff of the exhibit, scattering amid peals of tinny laughter and performative revulsion before being wrangled by their chaperones. The details of my own experience are unimportant (and too voluminous to unpack here). Instead, I’ll simply postulate that the act of opening a small doorway, shoving your oily visage into the recess, and inhaling an assortment of unsettling—possibly mind-altering—aromas is an ideal sensory analogue for reading a book. That is, the sort of book that alters your chemical composition in some imperceptible manner. The sort that infiltrates your physiological make-up, surreptitiously slipping a flounder into a ventilation duct so that weeks or months later you’re still puzzling over the source of that haunting smell. Here are five such books, ranked by the intensity of their odor profiles, from palatable to putrid.

by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd (New Directions)

The surface-level environs of the corporate city-state that sprawl across Oyamada’s English-language debut are inoffensive at a glance, redolent of clinical efficiency with accent notes emanating from the industrial laundries (starchy sweetness) and casual dining options (savory tang) dotting the terrain. Beneath the sterile exteriors lie dingy, intestinal workspaces where menial tasks, notably perpetual paper-shredding, are undertaken, creating a musty mĂ©lange of recycled oxygen, bored tedium, and wood pulp. It’s when the essence of reptilian rot begins to emanate from the crevices, while hulking rodentia patrolĚýThe Factory’s brackish outer edge, that things truly begin to smell funny.

by Bjørn Rasmussen, translated by Martin Aitken (Two Lines Press)

Rasmussen’s little obliteration wastes no time in expounding on the pungent pleasures of an illicit tryst, reminiscing over “breathing that special kind of air” from the very first page. Specifically, the intoxicating inhalant being referred to in this case is a lover’s asshole, butĚýThe SkinĚýgoes much deeper than that to assemble its heady stench. The manure and urine of the stables are ever-present, alongside the musky leather of saddles and riding crops, each element blurring seamlessly with an overall genital funk (ammonia and brine) radiating from the increasingly sadistic carnal excursions. Where the stink really sets in, though, is among the more cerebral concoctions—fear, arousal, and desperation are a potent mix.

by Pola Oloixarac, translated by Roy Kesey (Soho Press)

While much of Oloixarac’s latest trawls the global tech sector for content, no Soylent-saturated incubator could hope to stand up to Dark Constellations’ hallucinatory interstitial sections concerning a motley crew of 19th-century explorers. These assorted scientists find themselves ensnared in the odoriferous bouquet of a vast cavern, surrounded by fist-sized insects and translucent crustaceans, while gaseous pockets of volcanic runoff erupt in a “night perfumed with sulfur.” The exploration culminates in a prerequisite “torrent of blood and semen” as a marathon sex ritual, followed by the guzzling of albino butterfly innards, ensues. A primordial hothouse of herbaceous depravity—and I didn’t even mention the eventual depiction of VR-assisted lizard porn which, though presumably fragrance-free, should cause all your senses to recoil in unison.

by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne (Grove Press)

A nearly unparalleled entrant into the pantheon of putrescence, Del Amo’s AnimaliaĚýstinks to high heaven as a matter of course. There’s no way around it, a provincial pig farm proves to be fertile ground for a grim symphony of filth and viscera, expertly exuding the kind of pore-clogging reek that permeates down to the marrow. When it isn’t offal and entrails, the novel is locked in a constant battle with its main antagonist: shit. A veritable deluge of hog shit, glutting orifices and spreading disease, threatens ruin at every turn. In its scorched-earth crescendo, the sky is choked by a miasma of charred flesh and blanketed by toxic plumes of blackened smoke. A book this revolting is unlikely to be toppled from its position as preeminent nasal offender.

byĚýRodrigo Márquez Tizano, translated by Thomas Bunstead (Coffee House Press)

Although,ĚýRodrigo Márquez Tizano may have a thing or two to say about it. IfĚýAnimaliaĚýis Hell on Earth, thenĚýJakartaĚýis a pissed-off Tartarus covered in napalm. Rampant pestilence in the form of “poxes, choleras, fevers, and plagues” have ravaged the population, littering the landscape with decaying corpses, as an economy ruled by vice has taken hold of what’s left. Vermin ferry the sickness from one host to the next as mangy carrion canines scavenge the remains. Waste piles up in “mountains of garbage and meat.” Societal hygiene falls victim to government regulation.ĚýJakartaĚýis a bile-and-brimstone grotesquerie that should absolutely be sold with a warning label attached.

Justin Walls is a bookseller with Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon and can be found on Twitter .

Ěýby Ahmed Bouanani, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud (Morocco, New Directions)

In a 2002 episode of the seminal “squigglevision” successorĚýHome Movies, budding Foucault-ian and irascible boob Coach McGuirk stumbles backwards into a series of quarter-baked revelations regarding the prison-industrial complex. Initially alighting on the self-pitying canard that pampered prisoners—when you think about it—enjoy a higher quality of life than that of your average youth league soccer instructor, the H. Jon Benjamin-voiced everyman then advances his threadbare theorizing to its only logical conclusion: “We all live in our own prisons, Brendon. We’re all trapped in these bodies.” After spiraling into an overlapping bit of fatalistic call-and-response with his eight-year-old interlocutor, even the conversation itself is revealed as a form of incarceration. No book in recent memory (or any book appearing in English in 2018, let’s say) better exemplifies the outer-limits elasticity of this metaphor than Moroccan multi-discipline artist Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital, replete with its own cartoonish cast of miscreants condemned to an eternity of interlocking bureaucracies, shunted away “beneath tons of indifference and oblivion.” A bawdy, oneiric, brilliant novel,Ěýtranslated by Lara Vergnaurd, The HospitalĚýdepicts no less than the grand illusion of autonomy as experienced by a patient manifest that includes names like Rover, Guzzler, and Fartface.

It’s fitting that much of the past year’s finest fiction was preoccupied with the notion of being confined in one way or another. Denis Johnson’s “The Starlight on Idaho” and “Strangler Bob” (rehabilitation-as-prison and prison-as-prison, respectively) from his towering swan songĚýThe Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Willem Frederik Hermans’ corkscrewingĚýAn Untouched HouseĚý(war-as-prison, oasis-as-paradise, paradise-as-prison), and the face-melting speedfreak-ery of Jose Revueltas’ĚýThe HoleĚý(prison-as-prison again) each qualify as exemplary entrants into the literature of detainment. These works collectively trend toward the brief and ghastly end of the spectrum, spewing invective or violence with appropriately cauterizing results, and doing so from a staunchly paleolithic (read: male) viewpoint.

However, there’s a gee-golly brand of braggadocio that permeatesĚýThe Hospital‘s ersatz penitentiary, baldly farcical boasts deployed as incantations against the monotony of the grind. (One could easily conflate this internment with modern-day office culture, but I’ll avoid that.) In short: defense mechanisms masquerading as macho chest-thumping. Such ever-evolving bull sessions, true to form, favor the grisly (axe murder) or the scatological (ill-timed diarrhea), each fabricator-in-question hastily appending a buttress or turret to their invisible architectures mid-telling. The cumulative effect becomes akin to gazing at Bruegel the Elder’sĚýThe Triumph of Death as re-imagined by Carl Barks—a madhouse rendered in terms both blood-curdling and comedic. It’s a woefully unfair fight between sprawling atrocity and the minuscule objections of ineffectual outcasts who, defying all reason, continue to puff themselves up in opposition of the inevitable onslaught of decay. As the adage goes, you have to laugh to keep from crying.

Where Bouanani’s flickering labyrinth truly excels is in its utter obliteration of temporal cognizance, a non-linear un-being born of isolation. Few meaningful markers from the outside breach the titular institution, “a frozen body, walled in from every angle.” The occasional visitor soon forgotten, the smell of the ocean on the night breeze, and little else. Even more scant are the instances of inmates slipping through the gates on the rare day-pass, returning to former haunts only to find themselves becoming wraiths in the light of a world that has banished them from its embrace. Instead,ĚýThe HospitalĚýis equal parts foxhole and group chat, awhirl with the sort of anecdote and bluster and meandering introspection endemic to a shared sentence that rapidly diminishes in terms of beginning or end, morphing into a Möbius expanse of middle. It would be impossible to miss the purgatorial implications at hand, but what squeezes through the cracks amidst the gloom is an inherent sense of camaraderie, of a common plight between disparate fools fated to wile away the hours roaming the halls of one another’s mind palaces. When, in one exchange, a lush botanical array is conjured on the spot (“A caprice of a mad gardener, untroubled by aesthetics or harmony, who, on a whim of his imagination assembled a collection of plants that have absolutely nothing in common!”) it feels like a merciful palliative administered to a fellow sufferer, another in a line of lost boys left to their own devices, as well as an apt description for the mutable structure itself.

The HospitalĚý(as well as the hospital) operates on a borrowed-time concept that situates all things in the liminal realm of contradiction. Alive or dead, healthy or infirm, inside or out—these distinctionsĚýblur beyond recognition within Bouanani’s mirage-like convalescent bunker, giving way to a rhetorical mode familiar to anyone presently feeling likewise immured by the specters of income inequality, rapacious insurers, political corruption, impending ecological collapse, and so on. Damned if you do or don’t; it hardly matters. Perhaps only Wolfgang Hilbig’s recently translatedĚýThe FemalesĚýperforms a commensurate speaking-across-eras trick, it being a seemingly beamed-in manifesto for a terminally horny and reflexively aggrieved strain of leering masculinity rampant among the current discourse. Though, while Hilbig’s decomposing narrator is something like an irradiated Ignatius J. Reilly, Bouanani’s—assigned the nom de plume Smart Ass—never exhibits less than utmost humanity, regardless of how bleak his reality has become. That balancing act alone makes this bookĚýworthy of the prize.

Beyond anything else, it’s the unsentimental adherence to hope that confirmsĚýThe HospitalĚýas an essential work of precariousness, deprivation, and resilience. During an uncommon bout of revelry to celebrate a momentary respite from persistent rainfall, the detainees of the hospitalĚýerupt in a chant of “May God bless the hell where we spend all our day—here!” Without fail, thunderclouds rear their heads and resume the deluge. Just like that, the party’s over. The storm gathers over us all, but for now we remain blissfully trapped in these treacherous, fallible, hell-bent bodies.