People react in a variety of ways when faced with hardship. Some people eat an entire box of ice cream by themselves or blow off steam at the rec center, and these are perfectly reasonable choices. These people, however, do not get books written about them.

Two recently-released titles — “Goatman” and “Welcome to Marwencol” — present two incredible stories about the boundaries of creativity and escapism. Each book offers a look into a world where the desire to get away from it all is extrapolated with macro-sized reactions.

The bluntly-titled “Goatman” by Thomas Thwaites straddles the line between performance art and science experiment as it chronicles the author’s quest to transform himself into a goat. Such a premise may seem like a joke, but what follows is actually a very rigorous foray into transhumanism. Thwaites spares no expense in engineering an exoskeleton capable of man-to-goat conversion and a prosthetic goat stomach that allows him to digest grass. Beyond the mechanical aspects of goats, he explores the psychological world experience of the animals by meeting with neurologists, animal behaviorists, and goat herders.

He finds that current technology can not bring his consciousness to that of a goat, but he nonetheless does his best to think and feel like one. There’s something very zen in this approach. Perhaps Goat-life is the next mindfulness?

The reasons for such a project might seem lacking, but Thwaites offer his justification on the inside jacket: “Wouldn’t it be nice to live totally in the moment, with no worries about what you’ve done, what you’re doing, or what you should do? Wouldn’t it be nice to be an animal for just a bit?”

Thwaites’ story contrasts with the harrowing life of Mark Hogancamp, for whom escape is vital and tragic. Instead of transforming himself, he transforms the entire world around him, creating an entirely new space in which he has total control to manifest his dreams and piece apart his traumatic memories. “Welcome to Marwencol” tells of the unprovoked attack that robbed Hogancamp of his memories at the age of 38, but it focuses on the titular Marwencol– a 1:6 scale model of a fictional (and somewhat magical) town in WWII-era Belgium.

Hogancamp uses an array of meticulously detailed models and set pieces to create stories of all kinds. Most of the characters that inhabit Marwencol have counterparts in real life; naturally, Hogie, an American pilot shot down near Marwencol, is the the alter-ego of Hogancamp. The SS troops in the town that are constantly trying to assassinate Hogie and ruin Marwencol stand in for his real-life attackers. These are not mere revenge fantasies, though. Hogancamp unravels nuanced, painful stories that recreate and reshape his trauma as a form of therapy.

His philosophy differs from Thwaites in that for him, escape is a tool that allows us to confront our pain and re-engage with our realities in a different context. A key take away from “Goatman,” on the other hand, is that escape can be a door to something new and wonderful; at some point, it becomes more than just the remedy for our original predicaments.

It’s easy to lose sight of our own positions while learning about the unusual and extreme lives presented in either book. Pulling back the lens, we realize that the act of reading itself is escapism– it’s looking through the eyes of the author, into a world constructed and contained within the pages of the book itself.

By reading these two books, there’s a second layer of removal from our own lives and our own actualities. It’s not on the same level as creating an entire 1:6 scale world with hand-weathered plastic Jeeps or eating grass on all fours on the alpine slopes of Switzerland, naturally, but this is only a matter of degree. In the end, it’s hard to say how reasonable and valuable escapism really is; just as we see with Hogancamp and Thwaites, people can have radically divergent reasons to escape– and the manner in which they escape could not be more different, each approach with its own cascading repercussions.

What I can say for sure, though, is that “Welcome to Marwencol” and “Goatman” both offer incredible stories of human imagination. Either one is worth a read alone, but their real value surfaces when placed in conversation. You will, at absolute least, learn more than you could ever want to know about goat psychology.

-Eli Hoelscher is a reader’s services assistant at the Lawrence Public Library.