“Remember: Ignore the warnings your parents gave you as children. Be nosy and talk to strangers. Wander. If you sit in one place all night you will miss everything. If you have any questions or need assistance come and find me. I will whisper secrets in your ear. Cheers, Cynthia von Buhler Send from the future.” I […]
This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts. Georg Heym (1887– 1912) was a German poet and playwright who also wrote one novel. Heym believed […]
Amos Tutuola (1920 – 1997) was a largely self-taught Nigerian writer who became internationally praised for books based in part on Yoruba folktales, especially the phantasmagorical classic The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952). Welsh poet Dylan Thomas called the novel “thronged, grisly and bewitching,” bringing it even more attention. From the perspective of weird fiction aficionados the book is as amazing an […]
All editors have key concepts or ideas about the approach to creating an anthology. Here are a few of the ideas and foci that occurred to us during the preliminary steps of creating The Weird anthology and during the process of research and selection. – Ann & Jeff Edited in the context of: Avoid the Great Certainty (certainty and making […]
(Image by Jeremy Zerfoss) Buy The Weird compendium here… A “weird tale,” as defined by H.P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est. 1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, […]
Kathe Koja is an American writer who first emerged as a novelist during the U.S. horror boom of the early 1990s. Kafkaesque, transgressive novels such as The Cipher (1991), Bad Brains (1992), Skin (1993), and Strange Angels (1994) established her as one of weird fiction’s most innovative practitioners. Story collaborations with science fiction writer Barry Malzberg […]
On his departmental homepage at Vanderbilt University, Mark Hosford, Associate Professor of Art, describes his work as using “narrative imagery to reveal societal wonders and blunders.” I’m not sure reveal is the right word to use, given how much transgressive laughter and horror fill Hosford’s strange dreamscapes. His work makes us see a world where Freddy Krueger from […]
This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts. Brian Evenson (1966 – ) is an influential American writer of hard to classify dark fiction that often […]
Seventy years ago, the entire population of a New Hampshire town left their homes and vanished into the woods. The bodies of nearly 300 of these missing people were later discovered, mutilated corpses which bore the signs of murder and exposure to the elements. The rest of the townsfolk were never recovered, lost to the eerie […]
As part of our Favorite Monsters feature that we ran for our “12 Days of Monsters” last month, we polled various writers to see who their favorite monsters were and why. One of those writers was Hal Duncan. His debut Vellum was published in 2005, garnering nominations for the Crawford, Locus, BFS and World Fantasy […]