How does weird fiction differ from horror and fantasy? Although dark like horror, it is generally about encounters with the inexplicable where there may never be a full explanation for strangeness.  For this reason it rarely involves vampires, werewolves, zombies, or ghosts because these are known quantities to fiction readers that have hardened, to some extent, into archetypes. In the same way, naturalistic horror about serial killers would not be considered “weird” fiction. Sometimes, as in the work of Kafka, the weird can involve strange rituals, and have the atmosphere of being in the middle of a nightmare from the very first word on the page.

Any list of fourteen women writers is going to be too limiting, and can only be seen as signpost or marker on a life-long journey of discovery. In offering this list we hope it will be considered just a jumping-off point for further exploration. The list also doesn’t include notable writers who work or worked primarily in fantasy, horror, or the literary mainstream but occasionally engage in the weird, like Jamaica Kincaid, Leonora Carrington, Luisa Valenzuela, Merce Rodoreda, Rikki Ducornet, Kelly Link, Catherynne M. Valente, Margo Lanagan, Karen Joy Fowler, Lisa Tuttle, Nalo Hopkinson, Poppy Z. Brite, Tananarive Due, and Deborah Biancotti. Interesting writers just beginning to make their mark include Chesya Burke, Lisa H. Hannett, Livia Llewellyn, and Allyson Bird. And even this list is, of course, terribly incomplete!

***

K.J. Bishop (1972 — ) is an Australian writer who with her first novel The Etched City quickly became a favorite of those seeking weird dark fiction. First identified as a member of the New Weird movement, Bishop is influenced by the Decadents of the late 1800s, and has parlayed that influence into a unique approach to her fiction. She has won the William L. Crawford Award and the Ditmar Award. Her work has appeared in Leviathan 4, Subterranean, Album Zutique, and Fantasy Magazine, among others. Although Bishop rarely seems interested in a supernatural element, per se, her fiction is at its core haunted by the inexplicable. Subsequent short stories like “Saving the Gleeful Horse” are unclassifiable but essentially weird.

Gemma Files (1968 — ) is a Canadian writer of visceral horror and weird fiction in both the short and long forms. She has won the International Horror Guild Award, been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, and appeared in several year’s best anthologies. Files often takes traditional tropes and transforms them, but some of her short stories also start in places unique to her and then become even stranger. A uniquely lush yet muscular style informs her fiction and in her dark visions and her ability to convey the alien she most closely seems to be aligned with writers like Caitlin R. Kiernan.

Daphne du Maurier (1907 – 1989) was an extremely popular English author and play­wright, even though much of her work was very dark. Many of her works have been adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca (1938), which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1941, Jamaica Inn (1936), and the story ‘The Birds’ (1963), all three movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Du Maurier’s ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1971) was adapted into a cult classic film directed by Nicolas. The novella is a masterpiece of the occult, its hints of a world beyond embodying the best of uncanny fiction. Du Maurier’s work had much in common with Gothic fiction, but in modernizing it she easily entered the pantheon of weird writers.

Shirley Jackson (1916 — 1965) was U.S. writer best-known for her story “The Lottery” (1948), although much of her other short fiction is as good or better. Her novel The Haunting of Hill House is considered one of the most important horror novels of the 20^th century.  Her influence can be seen in the work of many fantasists, including Joanna Russ, Kelly Link, and Neil Gaiman. The founding of the Shirley Jackson Awards and publication in 2010 of a collected stories volume by the Library of America has helped to cement her popularity. One of our favorite stories, “The Summer People,” selected for Best American Short Stories in 1951, is a chilling yet subtle tour de force of the weird.

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964 —  ) is a U.S. author who has steadily moved beyond a reputation as an heir to the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft and Southern Gothic literature to become one of the most original and audacious weird writers of her generation.  In addition to her many award-winning novels and stories, Kiernan has written scientific papers that reflect her love of herpetology and paleontology, also reflected in her fiction. Perhaps more than any other writer of the past thirty years, Kiernan places the reader somewhere alien and inhabits points of view that seem both luminous and edgy. She has an extraordinary ability to portray the uncanny in original and terrifying ways.

Kathe Koja (1960 — ) is a U.S. writer who first emerged as a novelist during the 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. Koja’s version of the weird is both claustrophobic and luminous, continually questioning the nature of reality. Many of her stories concern characters marginalized by society who either transcend their environment or disintegrate into it.

Leena Krohn (1947 — ) is one of the most respected Finnish writers of her generation. In her large body of work for adults and children, Krohn deals with issues related to the boundary between reality and illusion, and issues of morality and conscience. She comes to the weird in the same ways as Franz Kafka. Her short novel Tainaron: Mail From Another City, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award in 2005. Tainaron shares some affinities with Kafka, while being utterly original. Each section of the novel illuminates the next, with the weird element serving both as strange adventure and parallel to the real world. For this accomplishment alone, Krohn deserves a place on this list. Her books have been translated in many languages, but most of it does not yet exist in English.

Tanith Lee (1947 — ) is an iconic English writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, with over seventy novels and hundreds of short stories to her credit. It is impossible to think of weird fiction without thinking of Lee. She has been a regular contributor over many years to Weird Tales magazine. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Nebula Award multiple times. Along with Daphne Du Maurier, Lee has established herself as one of the preeminent writers coming to the weird from gothic fiction.

Joyce Carol Oates (1938 — ) is U.S. author who has published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novel them (1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to portraying compelling, complex characters, Oates excels at writing stories with a New Gothic or weird sensibility, many of them terrifying or disturbing. She has also anthologized weird fiction and written extensively about it.

Micaela Morrissette (1979 — ) is a U.S. writer who thus far has specialized in short fiction, fueled by Decadent, fantastical, and weird sensibilities. She is a senior editor for the U.S. literary magazine Conjunctions as well as a fiction reviewer for Jacket and Rain Taxi. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Morrissette’s fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Weird Tales, Best American Fantasy, and Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, among others. On the basis of just a handful of tales, she is one of the best of the next generation of weird writers.

Margaret St. Clair (1911 — 1995) was a U.S. writer whose most creative period was during the 1950s, when she wrote such acclaimed stories as “Brightness Falls from the Air” (1951), “An Egg a Month from All Over” (1952), and “Horrer Howce” (1956). In 1951 she also published the classic “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles.” The story is satirical, weird, and gives a nod to a Lord Dunsany story.  Her 1963 novel Sign of the Labrys was known for its early use of Wicca elements in fiction, while interests included witchcraft, nudism, and feminism.

Francis Stevens (1883 — 1948), was the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Stevens wrote a number of uncanny fantasies between 1917 and 1923 and has been called “the woman who invented dark fantasy.” Among her most famous books are Claimed (1920), which H. P. Lovecraft called “One of the strangest and most compelling science fantasy novels you will ever read.” She also wrote an early dystopian novel titled The Heads of Cerberus (1919). Although not all of Stevens’ work has dated well, she was the first American woman to have her weird fiction widely published and acclaimed.

Karin Tidbeck (1977 —  ) is a Swedish writer of remarkable range and talent whose understated and darkly imaginative stories have just begun to appear in publications like Weird Tales, Unstuck Annual, and Shimmer. All of her fiction is influenced by a weird sensibility, and sometimes partakes of the landscapes and tales of her native Sweden. She has one collection out in Swedish, and recently won a prestigious grant from the Swedish Author’s Fund. Her first English-language collection will appear later this year from Cheeky Frawg.

Kurahashi Yumiko (1935 — 2005) was a Japanese writer perhaps best-known in the English language for her collection The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories. Yumiko’s first story was published in 1960, and she continued to publish fiction through the 1980s, with health problems leading to her giving up creative writing after a certain point. She tended to be both transgressive and traditional in her work, poking at boundaries of sex and power while also being influenced by Poe. As a result, there is a surreal and unsettling quality to her fiction that admirably does not allow readers to get comfortable.

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If you’ve already sent us your book, remind us with an email to vanderworld@hotmail.com. If there’s some reason you can’t send a physical copy, contact us. But we’re pretty big on physical copies.

We’ll post in time for the last of the holiday gift buying season, and we’ll be awarding Weirdie prizes to the best of the best—in addition to making sure everyone and sundry links to our best-of lists.

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We’re delighted this week to feature a story from Hieroglyphic Press’s recent release, Requiems & Nightmares by  1800s Italian writer Guido Gozzano. The book has been translated by the team of Brendan and Anna Connell. In addition to the story “The Real Face,” we have an extensive interview with the translators—about translations generally and about Gozzano in particular, for those unfamiliar with him.

Hieroglyph Press publishes beautiful little books, designed and printed with great care. The press on their website has a general statement of intent worth quoting:

We are a small imprint primarily dedicated to publishing works of an eclectic and rarefied nature: to use a quote from elsewhere we wish for spiritual art — Decadence, Esoterica and Symbolism. Our use of the term Symbolism in this context is very catholic: we use it not because all of the authors we are passionate about fall into that category — in fact half the writers named in the ‘Authors We Like’ section of the Sacrum Regnum page wouldn’t be considered so, but because many of the features of Symbolism i.e. the aestheticism, the contempt with decayed modernity, the mystical aspects, the love of ‘ancient traditions and hermetic histories’ and the devotion to style and skill in language itself, tally with what we wish to champion.

This emphasis on Symbolism in a catholic way is important, especially because of the interplay between the Symbolists and the Decadents. Even Flaubert at one point was teetering on the edge of being thought of as a Decadent before being claimed as a Symbolist. And both traditions have connections to The Weird. Indeed, if not for the rise of modern commercial Weird and for the huge influence of both Kafka and Lovecraft, the Decadents and Symbolists might have had more direct influence on both horror and weird fiction. Instead, such influence tends to manifest indirectly except in a small group of writers.

So, please enjoy our offerings this week, which also include Edward Gauvin’s post reprinting Thomas Owen’s thoughts on Lovecraft. We’ve published Owen’s fiction before. And also if you haven’t seen our interview with Stefan Grabinski’s translator (Hieroglyphic Press also published a book his fiction recently), check it out—it’s great. Along with fiction from Grabinski.

The post Hieroglyphic Press and Guido Gozzano appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Edited in the context of:

• Avoid the Great Certainty (certainty and making assumptions based on certainty kills thought: look at the evidence)
• Meticulous test previous attempts (Black Water/Dark Descent)
• Rigorously test of existing canon and individual stories in that canon
• Identify of pastiche previously presented as canon
• Leave out that which has become too archetypal and therefore too known
• Ignore most self-referential and metafictional stories as sophisticated fan fiction
• Balance “historical relevance” with “modern readability”

(Incomplete) Initial Conclusions Drawn:

• Kafka is interior weird and Lovecraft exterior weird, with both representing important main threads that carry forward to the present-day.
• Weird ritual and strange science fiction also partake of “the weird”.
• Beauty and fascination are as wedded in these stories as are horror and fear of the unknown.
• Although “the weird” may at times be identified by “feel” that a certain type of “feel” can be quantified, even as it remains elusive. This “slippery” quality may frustrate academics but it also helps explain why weird fiction remains difficult to commercialize or commodify—the slippery quality allows it to shift.

Approaches:

• Overthrowing the Tyranny of Subject Matter: Exploring writers typically not associated with The Weird who wrote weird stories, in addition to many other kinds of fiction. (James Tiptree, Jr., for example)
• Repairing the Pointless Rift: Paying no attention to the vagaries of the “literary” versus “genre” divide. (Okri and Lovecraft, Tanith Lee and Murakami)
• Repatriating the Fringe with the Core: Acknowledging the role of cult authors and more experimental texts, which sometimes represent a form of the “road less trodden” and not excluding those works from the dialogue that is the anthology.
• Crafting More Complete Genealogies:  Acknowledging the debt on the weird from Decadent and Surrealist sources, even if these influences are subsumed in others.
• Articulating the Full Expanse: Exploring permutations of the weird from countries beyond the North American/UK/Australian axis, and then further exploring beyond continental European influence.
• Reinterpreting through Translation: Commissioning new translations to provide a more complete understanding of important stories. Given that the weird relies on “feel” to some extent, style in translation has a huge affect on the effect of certain stories .

Related ideas:

• Regret over taxonomy (exclusion is inevitable but not a cause for relief or happiness)
• Confront invisibility (carry forward beyond the anthology efforts to render visible to English-language readers writers not yet translated into English, or not to any great extent; render visible English-language literature that has been marginalized)
• Acknowledge the inherent imperfection of the attempt
• Never resignoneself to the inherent imperfection of the attempt

The post The Weird: Approaches and Foci appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

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, both popular in the 1800s. As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale “has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane—a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread” or “malign and particular suspension or defeat of…fixed laws of Nature”—through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.

With unease and the temporary abolition of science can also come the strangely beautiful intertwined with terror. Reverie or epiphany, yes, but dark reverie or epiphany—not the lightness of “I wandered lonely as a cloud” but the weight of, for example, seminal early twentieth-century weird writer and artist Alfred Kubin’s sensation of being “overcome…by a dark power that conjured up before my mind strange creatures, houses, landscapes, grotesque and frightful situations.” Like what we loosely group into the genre of “horror,” The Weird can be transformative—sometimes literally—and it entertains monsters while not always see them as monstrous. It strives for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledges that failure as sign and symbol of our limitations.

Usually, the characters in weird fiction have either entered into a place unfamiliar to most of us, or have received such hints of the unusual that they become obsessed with the weird. Whether It exists or not, they have fallen into dialogue with It; they may pull back from the abyss, they may decide to unsee what they saw, but still they saw it. Such stories can be terrifying, but do not always rely upon the scare central to horror fiction, nor the twist ending common to, for example, classic Twilight Zone episodes. They remain universal because they entertain while also expressing our own dissatisfaction with and uncertainty about reality—and in a context wherein the monster, the strangeness, stands first for itself, has a visceral physicality that convinces us, at least while reading, of the existence of The Weird.

As a twentieth and twenty-first century art form the story of The Weird is the story of the refinement (and destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework but also of the welcome contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions, some only peripherally connected to the fantastic. The Weird in a modern vernacular has also come to mean fiction in which some other element, like weird ritual or the science fictional, replaces the supernatural while providing the same dark frisson of the unknown and the visionary. The best and most unique supernatural writers from prior eras, like Arthur Machen (his best short fiction written before 1910), would leave their mark on this newer weird, but not a boot print.

Because The Weird often exists in the interstices, because it can occupy different territories simultaneously, an impulse exists among the more rigid taxonomists to find The Weird suspect, to argue it should not, cannot be, separated out from other traditions. Because The Weird is as much a sensation as it is a mode of writing, the most keenly attuned amongst us will say “I know it when I see it,” by which they mean “I know it when I feel it”—and this, too, the more rigorous of categorizing taxidermists will take to mean The Weird does not exist when, in fact, this is one of the more compelling arguments for its existence.

In its purest forms, The Weird has eschewed fixed tropes of the supernatural like zombies, vampires, and werewolves, and the instant archetypal associations these tropes bring with them. The most unique examples of The Weird instead largely chose paths less trodden and went to places less visited, bringing back reports that still seem fresh and innovative today. The Weird is also darkly democratic: you can be a weird writer like Thomas Ligotti, in all that you do, or, like James Tiptree, Jr., or Karen Joy Fowler, you can feel the pull of The Weird in only some of your fiction; it doesn’t matter, authenticity exists in the words on the page, on the shared frisson that rises from them. Authenticity in The Weird, increasingly throughout the twentieth century, also meant stories that, even if just subtextually, engaged the problems of modern life, and more so than past supernatural fiction at times engaged with the extremes of that life, including the horrors of war.

Similarly, influences on The Weird in the twentieth century, streams of fiction that fed into its watershed, included many traditions, including Surrealism, Symbolism, Decadent Literature, the New Wave, and the more esoteric strains of the Gothic. None of these influencers truly defined The Weird, but, assimilated into the aquifer along with Lovecraftian and Kafkaesque approaches, changed the composition of this form of fiction forever.

The Early Years

The story of The Weird is often seen as the story of the rise of the tentacle, a symbol of modern weird. The tentacle and all it represented metastasized in Weird Tales and The Lovecraft Circle—the group of writers surrounding Lovecraft that included Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, Howard Wandrei, and August Derleth. Although female contributors to Weird Tales were rarer, the Southern writer Mary Elizabeth Councilman had a significant impact, as did Francis Stevens (the pen name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, included herein with “Unseen—Unfeared”). It is important to remember that although many of these writers would spawn imitators and thus render some of their visionary qualities more ordinary to a modern reader, in their day they, and Weird Tales, represented a revolution of sorts against old ideas about supernatural fiction. (In Europe, the Weird Tales equivalent was Der Orchideengarten, which translates as The Orchid Garden, est. 1919.)

The Lovecraft Circle is represented in the early pages of this volume, but not to the exclusion of all else. Why? Because in other places a similar impulse was arising. At roughly the same time Lovecraft penned tales like “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Call of Cthulhu,” Jean Ray, in a Belgian prison, wrote stunning and sophisticated stories like “The Shadowy Street” and “The Mainz Psalter,” Japanese poet Hagiwara Sakutoro composed the hallucinogenic strangeness that is “The Town of Cats,” and Polish writer Bruno Schulz mythologized his childhood in weird stories like “Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass.”

These non-Anglo versions of The Weird were not aberrations. In the 1910s, Ryunosuke Akutagawa published the Japanese contes cruel “The Hell Screen” and Franz Kafka, still to remain relatively unknown for decades, wrote the classic of weird ritual “In the Penal Colony,” while in India Rabindrath Tagore wrote his most supernatural tale, “The Hungry Stones” and in Italy Luigi Ugolini penned “The Vegetable Man,” a tale of weird transformation.

Also near the start of the twentieth century, the writers Alfred Kubin, Algernon Blackwood, and F. Marion Crawford, in very different ways, helped usher in the modern era of The Weird: Kubin as a representative of Symbolist/Decadent writers, Blackwood as a forerunner of Lovecraft, and Crawford as the early manifestation of an impulse toward the more commercial weird tale as later exemplified by, among others, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Bloch. Kubin, in particular, chose a path that would be echoed and amplified by Kafka, Schulz, and others, and taken up in the modern era by writers like M. John Harrison, Leena Krohn, and Michael Cisco. (William Hope Hodgson’s novel The House on the Borderland from 1908 had a profound influence on weird SF and the classic weird tale but was too long to include in this volume.)

These writers came from vastly different backgrounds, but were bound together by some common impulse in their imaginations, some need to make sense of “the fearful and fascinating mystery” that is life, in a particular way. For their efforts, a disproportionate number of them died in poverty and were marginalized as outsider artists or hacks—with the strangest (read: the most imaginative) ignored or misunderstood even within the already cast-out genres of SF/Fantasy/Horror. Some were shot or sent to death camps during times of war. Too many committed suicide, sometimes driven there by an impulse closely tied to the unique nature of their creativity. A lucky few gained popularity and a wide readership for their efforts.

What all of these writers, and the writers who would come after them shared was some element of the visionary in their writing, some impulse or worldview that catapulted them beyond the every-day. In some, it is expressed in their writing as just a glimmer or glint from a deep well. In others it is a great, raging fire at the center of their work. In either instance, subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous. Did these writers believe in the supernatural elements they described? In some cases, the evidence would suggest, yes. In the majority, the impulse to entertain combined with the impulse to remind readers of the strangeness of the world and the limits of our understanding of it. A few simply saw the world so differently that what to them seemed normal strikes readers as deeply weird. In some strands, The Weird represents a clear quest not just to understand the inexplicable; it represents a fascination that at times embraces the Weird, eschewing the terror of such a search. Many of these stories hold up to repeated readings for this reason.

Modern Weird

Three events created a kind of cut-off point between the early manifestations of twentieth-century weird and modern weird: Lovecraft’s passing in 1937, World War II, and the wide-spread translation of Kafka into English in the 1940s (which created webs of influence still existing to this day).

The 1940s and 1950s were in a sense a period of expansion of The Weird in the U.S. and U.K. The rising popularity of horror and fantasy in major magazines like Playboy provided high-profile markets for the Bradburys, Leibers, Beaumonts, and Blochs—who, as Michael Moorcock documents in his foreword, attracted a wider audience by consciously wedding the visionary aspects of surreal weird fiction to more traditional storylines, modern subject matter, and a less ornate style. Women writers entering The Weird in the U.S. found more opportunities for their work, too, including (on the genre magazine side) Margaret St. Clair and (on the “literary” side) Shirley Jackson.

In the 1960s, the British New Wave created an opposite and equally useful renovation to that exemplified by Bloch and Bradbury by mixing the best of SF and fantasy with mainstream and experimental influences, some of which also referenced the Decadents and Surrealists. Out of this period came such giants as Michael Moorcock (whose work only peripherally touched on weird fiction), M. John Harrison (the most significant twentieth-century critic of the weird tale through his fiction), and J.G. Ballard (whose surreal SF often reads like weird fiction). Harlan Ellison provided a visceral, passionate American counterpart to the London-based Brits with early tales like “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and the later story “The Function of Dream Sleep” included in this volume.

Outside of the U.S. and U.K. several new manifestations began to put forth fungal tendrils of influence during this time period. The phantasmagorical in The Weird was kept alive, although with a thready pulse, through the works of surreal painter Leonora Carrington, the “London Kafka” William Sansom, Merce Rodoreda, Amos Tutuola, and Olympe Bhely-Quenum, whose “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts” received the blessing of no less than André Breton. The Latin American Boom, presaged by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, provided The Weird with fine works by Augusto Monterroso, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Julio Cortazar that stretched the weird tale by bringing to it magic realism and an appreciation for the surreal and political. In France, Claude Seignolle repurposed French folktales to create elegant and sophisticated supernatural stories.  

Another tradition feeding into The Weird, Gothic literature, began to be substantially overhauled and repurposed, first through the phantasmagorical work of Mervyn Peake in the 1940s and 1950s followed by the thoroughly modern stories of Daphne Du Maurier in the  1960s and 70s. In the United Kingdom, Du Maurier did for the weird tale through her Gothic influences what Bradbury, Bloch, and Leiber had done in the U.S. through the influence of Lovecraft: popularized it without losing the elements that made predecessors so compelling and strange. A frequent contributor to Weird Tales, Tanith Lee also made a splash within genre circles around this time, penning a number of classics with Gothic antecedents.

During the 1960s and 1970s, two important and eccentric works of weird fiction bloomed like strange orchids feeding on rich, rare soil. Frenchman Michel Bernanos came out of seemingly nowhere to write the short novel “The Other Side of the Mountain,” perhaps the finest weird tale of the 1960s. Bernanos managed in just this one cult classic to combine the traditions exemplified by Jean Ray and Algernon Blackwood with his own brand of surreal existentialism. In the 1970s, the utterly original U.S. writer Eric Basso, entering The Weird through a kind of avant garde approach to the Gothic, combined with surrealist and modernist influences, produced one of the most unique of all modern weird tales, the short novel “The Beak Doctor.” Like a three-dimensional version of Kubin’s stylized The Other Side, “The Beak Doctor” used Joycean technique combined with clinical detail to create a dreamlike phantasmagoria about a strange sleeping sickness.

The rise of female writers outside of genres like Gothic fiction (including the traditional ghost story) starting in the 1970s also influenced The Weird, as it did many other forms of fantastical fiction. Several of these writers wrote weird fiction, even if they did not self-identify as writers of The Weird. James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Angela Carter, Jamaica Kincaid, Joanna Russ, Leena Krohn, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Hand, and Joyce Carol Oates all published significant weird tales during this period. Their diversity of approaches, taking in every possible influence, would enrich non-realistic literature for decade to come.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Stephen King’s success created a new market for supernatural novels and new, naturalistic approach to American horror. T.E.D. Klein and Karl Edward Wagner also contributed to American horror, riffing off of their wide knowledge of weird fiction. In England, the publication of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in the 1980s provided a new and different model: transgressive stories that went beyond the scare to examine views of the body, alienation, and the nature of monsters. Barker’s influences seem so various as to be useless to list, and in his monumental masterpiece “In the Hills, the Cities” the visions of Bosch and the Surrealists are perfectly integrated with the character detail more common to stories from the New Wave era. As importantly, American Thomas Ligotti would begin to publish dozens of stories that could be considered classics of weird fiction, taking his place alongside Kafka and Lovecraft as one of the most gifted weird short story writers of the twentieth century.

The urban horror or urban weird that took root during the 1970s and 1980s was also exemplified perfectly by the claustrophobic stories of Ramsey Campbell, a clear descendent of Lovecraft who diverged from his influences in part by focusing on gritty working class English settings. Yet one byproduct of this new emphasis on naturalistic horror was an estrangement from the weird tale. By the early 1990s U.S. horror boom, non-supernatural tales of serial killers and the extremes of sex and violence portrayed by the Splatterpunks had little in common with The Weird. (Influential writers like Peter Straub tended to reserve The Weird for novel-length works.) However, even as the U.S. horror community increasingly turned away from the idea of surreal or visionary horror, a handful of writers like Jeffrey Osier, Jeffrey Thomas, Kathe Koja, Poppy Z. Brite, and Caitlin R. Kiernan continued to write recognizably weird fiction. Kiernan in particular would become perhaps the best weird writer of her generation.

The final significant development for The Weird came in the early twenty-first century with the emergence of the New Weird movement discussed first by M. John Harrison, Steph Swainston, and China Mieville but also including writers like K.J. Bishop, Michael Cisco, and one of the editors of this volume, Jeff VanderMeer. In a sense, the New Weird was a re-enquiry into approaches and issues raised by the New Wave of the 1960s—bringing along all of that movement’s associated influences—but in this case primarily from the perspective of The Weird rather than science fiction or fantasy. Mieville in particular managed to reinterpret, rewire, and overhaul The Weird in novel form, synthesizing the tentacle horrors of Lovecraft with the intellectual rigor of the New Wave. A ghostly counterpart who has never truly received his due, American Michael Cisco also has created an amazing oeuvre of novels, perhaps more influenced by Kafka and Eastern European literature. K.J. Bishop’s contributions came primarily with a Decadent slant to them, while Swainston re-imagined heroic fantasy for The Weird.

Since then, The Weird has again fragmented, perhaps in preparation for a future coalescing of a Next Weird or perhaps not. Late period examples by Stephen Graham Jones, Reza Negarestani, Micaela Morrissette, Brian Evenson, and K.J. Bishop demonstrate an intimate knowledge of both the Kafka and Lovecraft strands of weird fiction, but recombined in strange and exciting new ways. Others, like the work of Laird Barron, seem more traditional but through their unique style and vision still manage to surprise.

What The Weird holds next for readers is unclear, but given the past manifestations, we can be sure it will adaptable, idiosyncratic, and involve some of our best stylists. It will also continue to be at times discredited, misunderstood, and denigrated for being unapologetically transgressive, imaginative, and strange. Nonetheless, The Weird will endure.

Organizing Principles & Enhancements

A compendium like this one is neither as complete as an encyclopedia nor as loosely organized as a treasury. Our purpose is to showcase the wealth, depth, and breadth of The Weird over the past one hundred years while also mapping certain tendencies and preoccupations. We have arranged the book chronologically from earliest story to latest story as the best way to show the evolution of and diversity of The Weird. Translated fiction is ordered in the anthology by when it first appeared in print, not by date of first translation into English. This preserves the “chain of evidence” while pointing out the possibilities of initial influence across non-Anglo writings.

Among the interwoven threads in The Weird you will find a dedication to showcasing what one might call traditional weird, mainstream (or commercial weird), weird SF, weird ritual, surreal weird, feminist weird, and avant garde weird. “International weird” is a meaningless term given the long-standing and complex literary traditions of the countries represented in this volume. However, we have tried to chronicle a clear tradition of Japanese surrealism and horror that feeds into The Weird, strong examples of Eastern European weird, evidence of weird fiction from India, African-nation weird, and those samples from Latin America that fall somewhere beyond magic realism. A few stories were unavailable to us because of rights issues, but we see them as an extension of this anthology as well: Philip K. Dick’s “The Preserving Machine” (weird SF), J.G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” (New Wave weird), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (Latin American weird), Otsuichi’s “The White House in the Cold Forest” (Japanese weird). Because this anthology is so vast (over 750,000 words), we were able to include novellas and even short novels, including these important works: Michel Bernanos’ “The Other Side of the Mountain,” Eric Basso’s “The Beak Doctor,” Leena Krohn’s “Tainaron,” and Brian Evenson’s “The Brotherhood of Mutilation.”

In pursuit of certain stories, we were also able to commission original translations. These translations include such major stories as Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “The Hell Screen,” Michel Bernanos’ “The Other Side of the Mountain,” Dino Buzzati’s “The Colomber,” Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotl,” and Georg Heym’s “The Dissection.”

The post The Weird: An Introduction appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

We’re proud to announce the publication this week of The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories in North America, via Tor Books. We have collected over one hundred years of weird fiction in a single volume of over 750,000 words, starting from around 1908 and ending in 2010. More than 20 nationalities are represented and seven new translations were commissioned for the book, most notably definitive translations, by Gio Clairval, of Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotl” and Michel Bernanos’ short novel “The Other Side of the Mountain” (the first translations of these classics in over fifty years). The publishers believe this is the largest volume of weird fiction ever housed between the covers of one book.

 Here’s the full table of contents for The Weird for those who haven’t seen it. We’ll be celebrating it at Weirdfictionreview.com, with exclusive content starting tomorrow. – Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

Table of Contents

Foreweird by Michael Moorcock
Introduction by the Editors
Afterweird: China Mieville

Story order is chronological except for a couple of exceptions transposed for thematic reasons. Stories translated into English are largely positioned by date of first publication in their original language. Authors are North American or from the United Kingdom unless otherwise indicated.

• Alfred Kubin, “The Other Side” (excerpt), 1908 (translation, Austria)
• F. Marion Crawford, “The Screaming Skull,” 1908
• Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” 1907
• Saki, “Sredni Vashtar,” 1910
• M.R. James, “Casting the Runes,” 1911
• Lord Dunsany, “How Nuth Would Have Practiced his Art,” 1912
• Gustav Meyrink, “The Man in the Bottle,” 1912 (translation, Austria)
• Georg Heym, “The Dissection,” 1913 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Germany)
• Hanns Heinz Ewers, “The Spider,” 1915 (translation, Germany)
• Rabindranath Tagore, “The Hungry Stones,” 1916 (India)
• Luigi Ugolini, “The Vegetable Man,” 1917 (new translation by Anna and Brendan Connell, Italy; first-ever translation into English)
• A. Merritt, “The People of the Pit,” 1918
• Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Hell Screen,” 1918 (new translation, Japan)
• Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett), “Unseen—Unfeared,” 1919
• Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919 (translation, German/Czech)
• Stefan Grabinski, “The White Weyrak,” 1921 (translation, Poland)
• H.F. Arnold, “The Night Wire,” 1926
• H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” 1929
• Margaret Irwin, “The Book,” 1930
• Jean Ray, “The Mainz Psalter,” 1930 (translation, Belgium)
• Jean Ray, “The Shadowy Street,” 1931 (translation, Belgium)
• Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” 1933
• Hagiwara Sakutaro, “The Town of Cats,” 1935 (translation, Japan)
• Hugh Walpole, “The Tarn,” 1936
• Bruno Schulz, “Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass,” 1937 (translation, Poland)
• Robert Barbour Johnson, “Far Below,” 1939
• Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost,” 1941
• Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1941
• Donald Wollheim, “Mimic,” 1942
• Ray Bradbury, “The Crowd,” 1943
• William Sansom, “The Long Sheet,” 1944
• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” 1945 (translation, Argentina)
• Olympe Bhely-Quenum, “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts,” 1949 (Benin)
• Shirley Jackson, “The Summer People,” 1950
• Margaret St. Clair, “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles,” 1951
• Robert Bloch, “The Hungry House,” 1951
• Augusto Monterroso, “Mister Taylor,” 1952 (new translation by Larry Nolen, Guatemala)
• Amos Tutuola, “The Complete Gentleman,” 1952 (Nigeria)
• Jerome Bixby, “It’s a Good Life,” 1953
• Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl,” 1956 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Argentina)
• William Sansom, “A Woman Seldom Found,” 1956
• Charles Beaumont, “The Howling Man,” 1959
• Mervyn Peake, “Same Time, Same Place,” 1963
• Dino Buzzati, “The Colomber,” 1966 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Italy)
• Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” 1967 (new translation by Gio Clairval, France)
• Merce Rodoreda, “The Salamander,” 1967 (translation, Catalan)
• Claude Seignolle, “The Ghoulbird,” 1967 (new translation by Gio Clairval, France)
• Gahan Wilson, “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be,” 1967
• Daphne Du Maurier, “Don’t Look Now,” 1971
• Robert Aickman, “The Hospice,” 1975
• Dennis Etchison, “It Only Comes Out at Night,” 1976
• James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats,” 1976
• Eric Basso, “The Beak Doctor,” 1977
• Jamaica Kincaid, “Mother,” 1978 (Antigua and Barbuda/US)
• George R.R. Martin, “Sandkings,” 1979
• Bob Leman, “Window,” 1980
• Ramsey Campbell, “The Brood,” 1980
• Michael Shea, “The Autopsy,” 1980
• William Gibson/John Shirley, “The Belonging Kind,” 1981
• M. John Harrison, “Egnaro,” 1981
• Joanna Russ, “The Little Dirty Girl,” 1982
• M. John Harrison, “The New Rays,” 1982
• Premendra Mitra, “The Discovery of Telenapota,” 1984 (translation, India)
• F. Paul Wilson, “Soft,” 1984
• Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild,” 1984
• Clive Barker, “In the Hills, the Cities,” 1984
• Leena Krohn, “Tainaron,” 1985 (translation, Finland)
• Garry Kilworth, “Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands,” 1987
• Lucius Shepard, “Shades,” 1987
• Harlan Ellison, “The Function of Dream Sleep,” 1988
• Ben Okri, “Worlds That Flourish,” 1988 (Nigeria)
• Elizabeth Hand, “The Boy in the Tree,” 1989
• Joyce Carol Oates, “Family,” 1989
• Poppy Z Brite, “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” 1990
• Michal Ajvaz, “The End of the Garden,” 1991 (translation, Czech)
• Karen Joy Fowler, “The Dark,” 1991
• Kathe Koja, “Angels in Love,” 1991
• Haruki Murakami, “The Ice Man,” 1991 (translation, Japan)
• Lisa Tuttle, “Replacements,” 1992
• Marc Laidlaw, “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio,” 1993
• Steven Utley, “The Country Doctor,” 1993
• William Browning Spenser, “The Ocean and All Its Devices,” 1994
• Jeffrey Ford, “The Delicate,” 1994
• Martin Simpson, “Last Rites and Resurrections,” 1994
• Stephen King, “The Man in the Black Suit,” 1994
• Angela Carter, “The Snow Pavilion,” 1995
• Craig Padawer, “The Meat Garden,” 1996
• Stepan Chapman, “The Stiff and the Stile,” 1997
• Tanith Lee, “Yellow and Red,” 1998
• Kelly Link, “The Specialist’s Hat,” 1998
• Caitlin R. Kiernan, “A Redress for Andromeda,” 2000
• Michael Chabon, “The God of Dark Laughter,” 2001
• China Mieville, “Details,” 2002
• Michael Cisco, “The Genius of Assassins,” 2002
• Neil Gaiman, “Feeders and Eaters,” 2002
• Jeff VanderMeer, “The Cage,” 2002
• Jeffrey Ford, “The Beautiful Gelreesh,” 2003
• Thomas Ligotti, “The Town Manager,” 2003
• Brian Evenson, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” 2003
• Mark Samuels, “The White Hands,” 2003
• Daniel Abraham, “Flat Diana,” 2004
• Margo Lanagan, “Singing My Sister Down,” 2005 (Australia)
• T.M. Wright, “The People on the Island,” 2005
• Laird Barron, “The Forest,” 2007
• Liz Williams, “The Hide,” 2007
• Reza Negarestani, “The Dust Enforcer,” 2008 (Iran)
• Micaela Morrissette, “The Familiars,” 2009
• Steve Duffy, “In the Lion’s Den,” 2009
• Stephen Graham Jones, “Little Lambs,” 2009
• K.J. Bishop, “Saving the Gleeful Horse,” 2010 (Australia)

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We’re pleased this week to note that our The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories compendium, which is already being taught in some US universities, has begun to garner some rave reviews in advance of its May 8th North American publication date.  (You can find the full TOC of 116 stories here.) Both Publishers Weekly and Booklist love the anthology, which much more press to come.

In May, we will run tons of special content here at WFR to celebrate the release of the anthology, spotlighting contributors. This will include fiction by Georg Heym, an exclusive long interview with the son of Amos Tutuola along with Tutuola fiction, another interview with Kathe Koja, fiction by Stefan Grabinski and an interview with his translator, and much, much more.

We also just did an interview for Shelf Awareness, and Ann and I will be at the Book Expo of America (BEA) in New York City in June to promote the book, courtesy of our wonderful publisher, Tor. We will be participating on a BEA panel and doing a signing:

12:00pm, Tuesday June 5 
Science Fiction/Fantasy & Mainstream—Crossing Over
Uptown Stage (W/ John Scalzi and Walter Mosley; Moderated by Ryan Britt)

11:30am—12:30pm, Wednesday June 6
Signing THE WEIRD
Table: 21; Main Autographing Area

Here’s a sampling from the two advance reviews:

Publishers Weekly, Starred, Boxed Review: “Ambitious in the extreme, the Vandermeers’ latest genre-blurring endeavor…is one of the most far-reaching and inclusive speculative anthologies to ever see print. Alongside familiar names—from Lovecraft and Kafka to Link and Kiernan—the Vandermeers unveil a menagerie of obscure authors and impressive stories from around the world….This standard-setting compilation is a deeply affectionate and respectful history of speculative fiction’s blurry edges [with] stunning diversity, excellent quality.”

Booklist, Starred Review: “[Icons Kafka and Lovecraft appear] herein alongside other stellar performances by writers who have faded from top best-sellerdom into obscurity (F. Marion Crawford, Hugh Walpole); are literary stars of the highest magnitude (Rabindranath Tagore, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Jorge Luis Borges); live through only one unforgettable story; and who busily augment the worldwide catalog of weird stories as this is written (most of the contributors). No popular-fiction library should not have this treasure trove.”

The post The Weird Compendium Reaches North America: BEA Plus PW and Booklist Raves appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Our 12 Days of Monsters celebration ends today, and we’re thrilled with the content we’ve been able to provide to our readers. We want to thank everyone who contributed to this effort. Special thanks to IAFA and their International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Without their theme  of the Monstrous, we would not have done 12 Days of Monsters—an effort to not just promote the cooler aspects of the monstrous but the conference as well.

Thanks to our readers for their tremendous interest in our 12 days–we had a great audience for all of our posts, and lots of facebook and blog link-backs. As for comments, we appreciated the enthusiasm, and also this particularly detail-rich gem from Caleb Wilson, pointing out one of his favorite monsters that is also a well-loved favorite here:

The Todal from James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks:  Here’s what people say about it: It looks like a blob of gulp. It makes a sound like rabbits screaming. It smells of old, unopened rooms. It’s made of lip. It feels as if it has been dead a dozen days, but moves about like monkeys and like shadows. It gleeps. And, it’s an agent of the Devil, sent to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should.

We also want to extend special thanks to ICFA guests of honor Kelly Link and China Mieville for going out of their way to participate, and to Genevieve Valentine, this year’s winner of the Crawford Award for best first fantasy novel (presented at the conference). Additional thanks to our managing editor Adam Mills for editing and posting most of the content, as well as Luis Rodrigues and Gregory Bossert for technical assistance.  

The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) is an annual scholarly conference held annually in Orlando, Florida, and devoted to all aspects of the fantastic (broadly defined) as it appears in literature, film, and the other arts.  It is sponsored by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. This year, as noted, the ICFA had a theme of “The Monstrous Fantastic.” We just returned from the conference, and had a wonderful time, which we’ve written about here.

For those of you who want an easy way to access our 12 Days of Monsters, you can use this link. But we’ve also set out the entire schedule with the links, below. We again apologize for the delay in posting an excerpt from Johanna Sinisalo’s novel Troll. In addition, material from Amos Tutuola will run at a later date. We did decide to leave the Kosher Guide free download up through Monday. If you like it, or liked this content, please use the donation button on our main page. We run off of donations. – Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

12 Days of Monsters

March 15, Thursday
“Replacements” by Lisa Tuttle (fiction)
“A Brief History of Monsters” by Theodora Goss (essay)

March 16, Friday
“Weiroot” by Jeffrey Ford (fiction)
“The Happiness of the Katakuris” by Matthew Pridham (movie review)
“The Mere Touch: Weird Reviews” by Maureen Kincaid Speller

March 17–18, Sat-Sun
“Creature” by Ramsey Shehadeh (fiction)
“The Monstrous in Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Ammonite Violin” by Jeff Vandermeer (essay)
“Fascinating Monsters” by Aeron Alfrey (art gallery)

March 19, Monday
“Pretty Monsters” by Kelly Link (fiction–available one week only)
“The Third Bear” by Jeff VanderMeer (essay)
“Vampires: Mademoiselle B by Maurice Pons” by Edward Gauvin (essay)
»Free download of Jeff VanderMeer’s essay collection Monstrous Creatures

March 20, Tuesday
“Monsters and The Weird with China Mieville” (interview)
“The Weird’s Bestiary” by Leah Thomas (art gallery)
“The Grotesque Manageries of Greg Simkins” by Nancy Hightower (art essay)

March 21, Wednesday
“The Dire Wolf” by Genevieve Valentine (fiction)
“Werewolves” by Ekaterina Sedia (editorial)
“Long Live Underwolf: Discovering Tristan Egolf’s Kornwolf” by Jesse Bullington (review)

March 22, Thursday
“Blood Makes Noise” by Gemma Files (fiction)
“Complicit in Their Own Derangement: An Interview with Gemma Files”

March 23, Friday

“My Favorite Monster” (responses from 50 writers, including Mike Mignola, Christopher Fowler, Karen Lord, Stephen Graham Jones, Rikki Ducornet, Rachel Pollack, Karen Lord.)
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s Favorite Monster
Livia Llewellyen’s Favorite Monster
» free offer: download the Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals e‑book

March 24–25, Sat-Sun
“The Dust Enforcer” by Reza Negarestani (fiction-philosophy)
“Scandalous Monsters” by John Langan (essay)

March 26th
“Reading the Weird” by Leah Thomas (comic, with special epilogue)
“The Thing in the Jar” by Michael Cisco (fiction)
“The Thing in the Hall” by E.F. Benson (fiction)
“The Thing in the Cellar” by David H. Keller (fiction)
“The Thing in the Weeds” by William Hope Hodgson (fiction)
“Underneath the Skin: John Carpenter’s The Thing, and You ” by Matthew Pridham (essay)

The post Other Things: The End of Our 12 Days of Monsters Celebration appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Note: Due to a technical issue, the excerpt from Johanna Sinisalo’s novel Troll scheduled to post today will run in April instead, along with an article by the author and an interview. Our apologies to the author and to our readers for this delay.

As part of our 12 Days of Monsters celebration, we’re offering something special today. For a very limited time–the download links will be gone by Sunday–you can download for free the ebook version of our The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals in either epub or mobi formats. We ask only that if you enjoy the download that you consider buying the gorgeous little hardcover edition and/or making a donation to Weirdfictionreview.com (via the Donate button on the main page).

Kosher–offer has expired, sorry!
Kosher–offer has expired, sorry!

Here’s a description of the book.

A perfect gift book, this sumptuously illustrated and whimsically bite-sized bestiary is the definitive – in fact only — guide to the kosherness (kashrut) of imaginary animals. It is an undomesticated romp from A to Z, including E. T., hobbits, Mongolian Death Worms, and the elusive chupacabra. Including contributions from noted author Joseph Nigg and Food Network cooking star Duff Goldman.

Copiously illustrated, this hilarious kashrut will rank with the most famous of theological contests. In this corner is Evil Monkey, the one-time presidential candidate and alter-ego of acclaimed fantasist Jeff VanderMeer. His more-than-worthy adversary is Ann VanderMeer, Jeff’s co-anthologist (Steampunk, Last Drink Bird Head) and editor of Weird Tales.

As featured on Boing Boing and Jewcy.com and brought to you by the same creative team that gave you The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, this irreverent abecedary is the must-have present for anyone seeking to broaden their imaginary culinary experiences guilt-free.

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The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) is an annual scholarly conference held annually in Orlando, Florida, and devoted to all aspects of the fantastic (broadly defined) as it appears in literature, film, and the other arts.  It is sponsored by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. This year, the ICFA (March 21–25) has a theme of “The Monstrous Fantastic,” with guests of honor China Mieville and Kelly Link. Ann VanderMeer and I will be there representing WFR, our The Weird compendium, and various other projects. She is participating on a panel or two, and I have a reading and panel.

In celebration of this year’s ICFA, we’re presenting readers with “12 Days of Monsters,” and to whet your appetite, here is the entire schedule for the 12 Days, including a few surprises. Please note that Weirdfictionreview.com is not officially affiliated with ICFA and neither is our “12 Days” celebration.

Highlights of our exclusive content  include a new interview with ICFA guest China Mieville and the first web publication of ICFA guest Kelly Link’s “Pretty Monsters” along with this year’s Crawford Award winner Genevieve Valentine’s “Dire Wolf,” as well as monstrous art, comics, and favorite monsters…

12 Days of Monsters

March 15, Thursday
“Replacements” by Lisa Tuttle (fiction)
“A Brief History of Monsters” by Theodora Goss (essay)

March 16, Friday
“Weiroot” by Jeffrey Ford (fiction)
“The Happiness of the Katakuris” by Matthew Pridham (movie review)

March 17–18, Sat-Sun
“Creature” by Ramsey Shehadeh (fiction)
“Making Her Own Light: Caitlin R. Kiernan” by Jeff VanderMeer (essay)
“Fascinating Monsters” by Aeron Alfrey (art gallery)

March 19, Monday
“Pretty Monsters” by Kelly Link (fiction–available one week only)
“The Third Bear” by Jeff VanderMeer (essay)
“Vampires” by Edward Gauvin (essay)
»Free download of Jeff VanderMeer’s essay collection Monstrous Creatures

March 20, Tuesday
“Monsters and The Weird with China Mieville” (interview)
“A Weird Bestiary” by Leah Thomas (art gallery)
“Monsters in the Grotesque” by Nancy Hightower (essay)

March 21, Wednesday
“Dire Wolf” by Genevieve Valentine (fiction)
“Werewolves” by Ekaterina Sedia (editorial)
“Kornwolf: A Review” by Jesse Bullington (essay)

March 22, Thursday
“Blood Makes Noise” by Gemma Files (fiction)
“Complicit in Their Own Derangement: An Interview with Gemma Files”

March 23, Friday
“Troll” by Johanna Sinisalo (novel excerpt)
“My Favorite Monster” (responses from over 60 writers, including Mike Mignola, Christopher Fowler, Karen Lord, Stephen Graham Jones, Rikki Ducornet, Rachel Pollack, Livia Llyewellyn, and Karen Lord.)
»One day free offer: download the Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals e‑book

March 24–25, Sat-Sun
“Dust Enforcer” by Reza Negarestani (fiction-philosophy)
“Creatures” by John Langan (essay)

March 26th
“Reading the Weird: The Thing About It…” by Leah Thomas (comic, with special epilogue)
“Thing in Jar” by Michael Cisco (fiction)
“The Thing in the Hall” by E.F. Benson (fiction)
“The Thing in the Cellar” by David H. Keller (fiction)
“The Thing in the Weeds” by William Hope Hodgson (fiction)
“The Thing” by Matthew Pridham (essay)
“Other Things” by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (editorial)

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