Good Madness

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art - write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself." ~Neil Gaiman

I've been thinking about good madness as I build the next project.  It's crazy and fun and kind of scary at the same time.  Words like grotesque, freak, and deviant keep showing up.  I even bought the Deviant Moon tarot cards because something just screamed at me when I saw them.

This is the kind of project that I could become obsessed with.

Is that a good thing?

As a reader, I think it is.  Some of my favorite books are ones that are almost startling and creepy the way they seem to suck me into their world.  I remember the first time I picked up Laurell K. Hamilton's Guilty Pleasures. 

Willie McCoy had been a jerk before he died.  His being dead didn't change that.

From the very first line, it was different.  I knew I was going to be in for one wild ride and I gobbled those books up as fast as I could (at least up to Incubus Dreams; thereafter's another story).  They were filled with magic and dreams and good madness, a sort of twisted up world that was so strange and violent and bloody...yet compulsively good too.

I read those books like I was in a frenzy.  Trapped in a sort of madness that was good.  Very good indeed.

What about you - can you recommend a "Good Madness" sort of series that became a crazy good obsession?  Something you just couldn't help reading, whether it was shocking or exciting, strange and twisted, or just wickedly lovely in some way?

Assuming I can drag myself away from my own madness, I'd love to add more obsessively good books to my towering TBR pile!