The fifth child
A self-satisfied couple intent on raising a happy family is shocked by the birth of an abnormal and brutal fifth child.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2009–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It’s hard to know what anyone considers the “usual greats”. Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature, but she doesn’t seem to make it into the “average” person’s greats list, possibly because her use of language is very much not grade 5. Try The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark, The Grass Is Singing, The Good Terrorist, The Fifth Child, or the series that starts with Shikasta.
E.L. Doctorow is another such example. Try The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, Loon Lake.
In the scifi genre (aside from the Shikasta series already mentioned), M. John Harrison is worth a look. He’s got a long bibliography but Light might be a good starting point.
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum.
Some of Ursula Le Guin’s more serious books might fit the bill, like The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness.
Someone already mentioned Mervyn Peake, he definitely fits this category.
- I just read the fifth child by Doris Lessing, a novel about a family destroyed by a child who is a 'throwback', a kind of neanderthal, or troll. On amazon, there is a comment from a woman who claims to have lived through that, which made me really wonder. Real life trolls?
And now in this article an autist is described as a warty monster from a Grimm fairy tale, and I suddenly understand what this novel is about. I am a little shocked to see an autist portrayed as a troll in a horror story.
