I'll just paste a recent comment of mine below, that was written about House of Leaves not being really what I was expecting – perhaps somewhat knows a novel that matches my criteria 🙂
Ideally it should be multi-POV narrative and have slight differences ("inconsistencies") between each narrative, that is the readers job of explaining. Think of mismatching newspaper headlines, people's memories not matching up, events occurring slightly different depending on the POV we're currently in, etc.
I started out House of a Leaves since I was hoping for something similar to the Infinity Series.
This is a series of visual novels that ultimately worked by adding more and more "inconsistencies" to the plot up until you could barely understand wtf was actually going on, but still had an always simple explanation that would solve everything. They're somewhat similar in concept to the movie TENET – the premise is simple (people moving forwards / backwards through time), but matching all persons and events up between the timelines in your head can easily consume several days of analysis. It's just the "reveal" about the turnstiles would happen at the very end and not in the middle of the plot in Infinity.
I quickly understood House of Leaves isn't quite that… but I hoped there would still be some amount of other mindfucky content in there, as I always heard about it.
Now it seems to me that mindfucky content is apparently hidden in symbolic content and subtexts for 90% of the books length. So yeah, that's not really the "challenge to a game of logic" I hoped it would become, I guess.
by Objective-Process-84
1 Comment
Idk if you’d be willing to give a visual novel a chance, but Umineko no Naku Koro ni is a huge mindfuck of a mystery containing a literal game of logic.
It takes what usually would be subtext and personifies it in a larger metanarrative that turns the mystery on its head over and over again.
I read this many years ago and have yet to find anything that scratches the same itch other than cerebral films like Tenet. I’ve heard The Locked Tomb series takes some cues from Umineko, but I can’t confirm the rumor.
Edit for fatfinger autocorrect
Edit again because I just realized the infinity series is a VN lol—give Umineko a shot!!