Last year, Weird Fiction Review took a close look at a nearly forgotten treasure of cosmic horror, The Rim of Morning by William Sloane. Following on our enjoyment of that two-novel collection, we decided to delve into a slate of other releases from New York Review Books Classics, one of seven imprints published by The New York Review […]
Rhys Hughes is a prolific Welsh writer of over thirty books, which include novels, stories, poetry, and essays. His work, tied to a planned cycle of 1,000 stories called Pandora’s Bluff, focuses on metafiction, horror, and the fantastical, often with a dose of absurdism and humor. Rhys’s stories have been praised by Weird luminaries that include Michael Cisco, […]
If there was any doubt about the resurgence of interest in weird fiction, they should be assuaged by the October publication of Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 2 from Undertow Books. Looking back to last year’s debut of the series, it might have seemed perilous to risk launching such an endeavor with so many other […]
I was like a man walking down an unfamiliar street in a strange city, late at night, with a vague substratum of uneasiness in his mind. He does not say to himself, “Maybe I am going to get held up and beaten in this place.” He simply feels uneasy. But if he sees the shadow of a man shouldered back […]
The third entry in the Apex Voices series, Sing Me My Scars by Damien Angelica Walters is a sharp treatise on the subject of human pain, in all its forms, and what comes after. Underlying the physical torments endured by Walters’ protagonists are believable emotional horrors with which most readers will relate. Realistic tragedies – loss of love, proxy […]
Today marks the beginning of a week of weird voyages and strange seas here at WFR. The trope in which a plot pulls its characters to exotic locales has a long and rich history, both within Weird fiction and more mainstream traditions. It seems most often to be used for the purpose of displacing the characters and reader […]
New Wave Fabulism, New Weird, Magical Realism… Kelly Link’s fiction has been described under a number of labels, and they all inevitably feel insufficient. Her new collection, Get in Trouble, brings with it characteristics that undoubtedly belong to the above categories. Nonetheless, to describe these stories as strictly belonging to any particular genre, regardless of how […]
The art of J.K. Potter has graced the covers and interiors of many weird fiction authors, including Tim Powers, Lucius Shepard, Ramsey Campbell, and Clive Barker. His vibrant colors, thoughtful juxtapositions, and sense of the surreal and bizarre are unique in the way they interact with a story’s subject matter. By thoughtfully layering multiple elements into […]
This article is part of our series about the four stories not included in The Weird. See the Four Stories introduction for more information. – The Editors The work of J.G. Ballard occupies a unique space that exists at the intersection of science fiction, horror, satire, and post-modern literature. All of these tendencies can be witnessed even […]
Though the lines connecting Decadent and Weird fiction are many, resembling something of a tangled web whose only certain common ancestor is the Gothic novel, one of the primary concerns of both these traditions within fiction is a preoccupation with limits — the limits of bodily experience, the limits of the world’s possibilities, the limits of the physically possible. […]