As a lapsed Episcopalian-turned-agnostic who grew up on science fiction and superhero comics, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the divine. Spend enough time in the uncanny corners of fiction, though, and the definition of what constitutes the divine starts to look a little different. Some writers I’ve spent decades reading have spent the bulk of their career exploring nontraditional concepts of divinity and omnipotence—I feel reasonably sure that I could put together a list like this featuring only works by Neil Gaiman, to cite one example.

There’s also a way in which the fantastical can wrestle with big questions about divinity, immortality, and omnipotence in ways both unexpected and irreverent. Sometimes that comes as an outgrowth of exploring the rituals and dogma of an existing religion—consider the ways someone like James Morrow or James P. Blaylock takes aspects of Christianity and turns it into thought-provoking speculative fiction that’s unlikely to be taught in a Sunday School class. Sometimes it involves imagining a forgotten deity, or a long-dead one, or one capable of bringing eldritch horrors to bear upon the world.

So here’s a look at five books with strange gods and strange concepts of gods. Whatever your own personal cosmology might be, hopefully you’ll find something to spark inspiration in these words.

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