If the rule that you must go under during the jaunt—and the boy’s choice to stay awake—hooked you, you’ll love how Blindsight pushes that idea to the brink. Siri Keeton’s crew boards the alien vessel Rorschach and confronts entities that may be hyperintelligent yet not truly conscious, forcing brutal debates about the Chinese Room, the binding problem, and whether awareness is an evolutionary dead end. Like that final scream of “longer than you think,” this novel leaves you staring into a cold, limitless cognitive abyss.

That last-page gut punch in “the jaunt” story’s frame—the family lounge, the history lesson, the rule you only understand too late—finds a kindred spirit in Ted Chiang’s precision-engineered twists. In “Story of Your Life,” linguist Dr. Louise Banks learns the Heptapods’ language and discovers a non-linear experience of time that flips her choices and the entire narrative in retrospect. Other tales like “Understand” and “Seventy-Two Letters” deliver the same clean, idea-first shock that lingers after you close the book.

If the image of a conscious traveler experiencing an eternity between departure and arrival chilled you, Permutation City goes even deeper. Egan’s digital “Copies” grapple with simulated time, speed disparities, and the terrifying freedom of running forever under the Dust Theory. As characters spin up universes and face the implications of minds that can’t conveniently ‘black out’ through the long parts, the book captures that same clinical, clinical-turned-cosmic dread that the jaunt’s backstory revealed.

The way the father’s cozy, informative tale about teleportation history becomes a trap primed for horror mirrors how House of Leaves layers its narratives. You read Zampanò’s manuscript about the Navidson house while Johnny Truant’s footnotes unravel in parallel, and the safe ‘explainer’ framework turns menacing. That same feeling—the frame itself betraying you—drives the dread here, as corridors stretch impossibly and the commentary becomes as dangerous as the story it describes.

If the quiet family moment before the jaunt—just a few people, a sterile room, and a rule with life-or-death stakes—made the horror hit harder, Annihilation delivers that same tight, suffocating focus. The biologist’s solitary journal, the tower-that’s-a-tunnel, and the Crawler’s terrible script build dread from intimate observation rather than spectacle. Like the lounge-side lecture that spirals into nightmare, each careful detail here tightens the psychological vise.