I coundnt' agree more – “Cruddy” is fantastic, and like “Geek Love” is one of those books that walks right in and sets up its own special room in many readers’ mental mansions. It is hard to think of books with quite that much strange power, but here are a few you might enjoy trying:

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
Kirkus: “…If "the world is full of terrible people"- the three and me are Mary Katherine (Merricat). Blackwood and her sister, Constance, who have lived alone with their Uncle Julian, frall in body and mind, since the time when Constance as a child is said to have put assents in the sugar which killed their parents, their brother, and Julian's wife. … There's a childlike charm here, an occasional chill, and just a touch of gentle madness which gives this a very special kind of sorcery and seduction.”

Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter
Fevvers, aka The Cockney Venus, an Amazonian trapeze artist whose gravity-defying feats are performed with the aid vestigial wings, inspires the love of a man who endures the trials of clown-hood and the weird visionary rites of Siberian tribal elders to win his lady love at the dawn of the twentieth century. The influence of Carter's subversive feminist fables can be seen in the works of Aimee Bender and Elizabeth Hand, among others.

Niagara Falls All Over Again, by Elizabeth McKracken
During thirty years together as a famous comedy team, conniving comedian Rocky Carter and his straight man, Mose Sharp, a small-town boy from Iowa, have enjoyed a warm relationship, but when Rocky commits a desperate act of betrayal, their friendship is endangered.

An Invisible Sign of My Own, by Aimee Bender
Are Mona Gray's willful behaviors and her odd affinities with numbers and patterns some sort of psychological compulsion, or is she in tune with something the rest of us aren't? Whichever the case, this curiously deliberate woman provides a fresh and spellbinding window on the trials of life, as she withdraws from the pain of her father's illness and into the crystalline certitudes of mathematics. Bender's evocative, fairy-tale style sneaks up on the reader with a mighty emotional wallop in her first novel, as it does in her highly original short story collections, Willful Creatures and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.

Nice Big American Baby, by Judy Budnitz
Desperate to give her unborn child every advantage, Precious carries him for years until he emerges fully grown into a land of promise where traveling salesmen refuse to leave their open cages and courageous surgeons save limbs, but not lives. These bleak, unsettling fairy tales shine their harsh light into the deepest recesses of our collective unconscious.

David Wright
Seattle Public Library Fiction Department