Where to Start with the Weird, Wild Worlds of Matt Ruff

Matt Ruff may not be the most prolific author, or the most prominent, but for almost 30 years, he’s delivered consistently weird, always interesting books that skate the line between the literary and speculative genres, loaded with social satire, humanism, lyrical imagery, and set in truly original, off-kilter worlds. His novels play fast and loose with reality, and don’t fit comfortably into any particular classification.
With Ruff’s cosmic horror social satire Lovecraft Country out this week, I thought it would be a good time to introduce his previous novels to those who are only just discovering him. Consider it a guidebook to the bizarre worlds of Matt Ruff.

If you’re in the mood for a fast-paced modern satire:
Bad Monkeys
Possibly Ruff’s most accessible work, this surrealist conspiracy thriller goes underground with a secret vigilante organization. When a woman named Jane Charlotte is arrested for murder, she claims she did it on behalf of the Bureau for the Disposition of Irredeemable Persons. The novel flashes between Jane Charlotte’s recruitment and career with the Bureau, and the psychiatric evaluations in the present after she turns herself in. She could be lying. She could be crazy. Or she could be telling the truth. Bad Monkeys is the tightest and tautest of Ruff’s books, making it a good starting point. It also puts a personal spin on the “unreliable narrator” trope, involves some truly bizarre and terrifying touches (the Scary Clowns division; rogue agent John Wayne Gacy), and works as a deranged conspiracy novel even as it skewers and subverts the form.

If you want more straightforward science fiction:
The Mirage
From the outset, this one’s kind of a head-scratcher, but I’ll do my best: on November 9th, 2001, a group of Christian fundamentalist terrorists from a third-world North America crash airplanes into the Tigris and Euphrates World Trade Towers. (If you’ve already checked out, I don’t blame you.) The concept of a mirror-universe version of one of America’s greatest tragedies is hard to swallow, but in Ruff’s hands, what would be a trite concept involves deep world-building, an exploration of governmental overreach, and religious zealotry, with a few Philip K. Dickian twists that elevate it well beyond the on-the-nose satire that might emerged from a less byzantine imagination. It also helps the story is intriguing just on a plot level, full of government coverups, tense action, tight dialogue, and moral ambiguity.

If you want something a little more literary:
Set This House In Order
Andy Gage was created two years ago as the face for the alters, or “souls,” of Andrew Gage, a man with dissociative identity disorder. He lives alongside hundreds of his family members inside Andrew’s head, in a massive house designed by his father, Adam. In the outside world, Andy is a programmer on an ambitious but incredibly impractical virtual-reality world project, where his boss asks him to work with a woman named Penny Driver. While Penny is mostly unaware, she’s part of her own collective of souls, and some of them need Andy’s help. But what the two uncover in Andy’s attempts to help Penny and her fellow souls reveals dark secrets and threatens to destroy the stability of Andy’s own house. Ruff’s dreamlike prose illuminates the internal landscape and mythology of Andy’s world, and the story plays to his strengths, with a massive cast that never seems overstuffed.

If you’re in the mood for something dark and funny:
Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy
In a far future New York City, an oblivious billionaire industrialist with arrested development decides to build a skyscraper so tall that it reaches into the ionosphere. His former wife hunts mutant alligators for the New York Zoological Society’s Sanitation Division as penance for being his PR director. A mutant shark named Meisterbrau preys on unsuspecting New Yorkers, growing stronger with each attempt to kill it. A massive digital display in Times Square might be keeping score for an elaborate serial murderer targeting corporate raiders and industrialists. And all of this is just the prologue for something even nastier, as the city (and maybe even the country) descends into chaos. Sewer, Gas, and Electric is a ruthless black comedy, a satire, an epic sprawl of dystopian madness that cranks our current societal problems to absurd extremes and adorns them with B-movie and pulp sci-fi garlands. If you’ve ever imagined Abbie Hoffman trying to teach Ayn Rand knock-knock jokes, Ruff has you covered.

If you want an unconventional heroic fantasy:
Fool on the Hill
A colorful cast of characters descends on the city of Ithaca, New York to play their parts in a story written by a Greek god named Mr. Sunshine and a thousand monkeys on typewriters. As Sunshine manipulates the various people, monsters, and forces at play at an unnamed college on the hill above Ithaca, an epic conflict begins to emerge. At the center is another writer, a man named Stephen George, who finds that he, too, has control of the story through a magical discipline known as “writing without paper.” As Mr. Sunshine builds to his grand finale, George must find it in himself to become a true hero, and ensure the tale has a happy ending. Ruff plays with the idea of narrative itself, framing conventions and cliches alike as the machinations of a god who’s a fan of the conventional, but the real stars are the ridiculous characters and the lyrical prose.
Do you have a favorite Matt Ruff novel?