The Next Best Book Club discussion

Wanted: madness in fiction.
For example, I found an indie novel Scar with a schizophrenic main. And I recently read In a Dark Wood Wandering: A Novel of the Middle Ages that has an insane king of France a major character.

I've read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, but I guess I am more after fiction - with or without own-life insights.

Hmm... some ideas:
Pale Fire by Nabokov consists of a 999-line poem by a (fictive) poet and an analysis by the scholar Kinbote who is a narcissist and delusional to the point of believing that a) everything in the poem is about him and b) he is actually the exiled king of a fantasy kingdom.

Then there's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. Not all of the institutionalised characters are actually insane, but some definitively are and anyway, it's an interesting look at mental institutions.

Infinite Jest by D.F. Wallace has a fair share of characters that are insane or are driven insane, I think.

Some German texts:

Woyzeck by Büchner is a play about a man going insane due to trauma and jealousy; The Sand-Man and Other Stories by ETA Hoffmann (I am talking about the Sand Man, don't know about other stories) also has a (probably) insane protagonist, it's also extremely scary and creepy.

The Book About Blanche and Marie: A Novel could also be interesting: It's the fictional journal of a (real) famous hysteria patient (Blanche). While Blanche isn't really insane, it is an interesting look at hysteria, Charcot and the Salpetriere.

Other ideas: American Psycho, The Stranger, Girl, Interrupted and Norwegian Wood.

Take a look at:

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
Asylum by Patrick McGrath
The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
Poppy Shakespeare by Clare Allan

I've got a few:


Psycho killers
The Seven Days of Peter Crumb: A Novel
Duncan's Diary: Birth of a Serial Killer

Losing their minds
Threats
My Only Wife
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

OCD Adjustment/People issues
The Pleasure of My Company
This Book Will Save Your Life

Thanks so much for this wealth!

I have Woyzeck - the play and the opera, though I haven't read the play yet. I remember One Flew Over from school.

I'll avoid the psycho-killer type on the whole - thriller style, anyhow.

HEAPS here for me to explore, I'm glad I asked you guys.

On lunatic asylums, I have The Inmates by John Cowper Powys, set in one. I also remember from school that play Marat-Sade, which I was much struck by.

Pigletto, thanks in particular for The Quickening Maze about the poet John Clare, with Alfred Tennyson in too. I read a great bio of Tennyson, Tennyson, the Unquiet Heart, that tells of mental illness in the family and Tennyson's own fears of madness.

Glad to have been of help.

How could I forget.... Denis Lehane's SHUTTER ISLAND!

There's a mad character in Gone Girl, although the character is too smart to be committed.

How about Hannibal Lector?

The new Jeffrey Eugenides novel The Marriage Plot has a character that has manic depression.

Dr B in the Royal Game by Stefan Zweig... some kind of post traumatic stress disorder caused by being detai ed by the Nazis resulting in obsessive compulsive behavior.