Weird Fiction Review

All this week on Weird Fiction Review, we have something special planned: we are featuring and examining the work of Eric Basso, an innovator and great writer and artist.

Readers of the anthology that inspired this site, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, will recall Basso’s story from that collection, “The Beak Doctor.” It is a masterpiece of a story, but it is not the extent of Basso’s literary output. He has a novel, a drama trilogy, a complete collection of his short plays, another longer play, a book of short fiction, and seven different collections of poetry, as well as a collection of critical writing and a dream journal. His work has appeared in journals and publications such as the Chicago Review, Bakunin, Fiction International, Exquisite Corpse, Collages & Bricolages, and many others.

Basso’s achievements are impressive in all regards. He has produced significant work in every possible genre I can think of (nonfiction, fiction, drama, poetry) and some I don’t see often enough to think of regularly (a book of dreams). As a writer myself, I’m staggered (and a bit intimidated) by what he’s done! It’s even more staggering when I do the math: it is currently 2012; Basso’s published literary work technically dates back to 1966, counting the start date of Revagations, the first volume of his dream journal. For 46 years, Basso has been producing some of the most challenging, innovative writing in the literary world. This is all the more noteworthy considering that Basso is a self-trained writer, as voracious in his reading as he is varied and impressive in his creative output.

And yet, Basso has not reached a level of exposure befitting a writer of his talent, a huge reason why we wanted to have a week devoted to his work in the first place.

Many of you reading this right now may well be Basso neophytes, or soon-to-be neophytes (I certainly hope for the latter). I was a Basso neophyte until recently myself; I discovered him through his story included in ODD? Volume 1, “Logues,” before acquiring a copy of his fiction collection, The Beak Doctor. In the spirit of luring more of you toward his work, I’ll offer a few of my own impressions.

His writing is disorienting; it constantly challenges the solidity of the ground on which I stand while I read it. It limits and calls into question my perception of the world around me, both figuratively and literally. I’m reminded of “The Beak Doctor” here, and how the deep fog that fills the nameless city limits the good doctor of the title to a viewing field of not even a few feet in front of his face, forcing him to rely on a mental map to navigate the city. Sometimes, that map fails him, suggesting a changed landscape he may never get to fully verify. This is a potent reminder that we constantly negotiate the essence of the world around us through our perceptions, and when those perceptions are thrown askew, as Basso ably demonstrates, the world becomes very Weird indeed.

His writing is marked by a quality I would label as simultaneity. Oftentimes within even the same paragraph, there are details and cues suggesting actions taking places at different levels of action, possibly even in different locations. It is left up to the reader to try and maintain the order of events while they read his writing. More often than not, typical conceptions of time and causality cannot be taken as givens. His stories sometimes feature fragmented or multiple perspectives, not so much competing with each other as overlapping each other with jigsawed edges. These perspectives are often presented on equal grounds, with no inherent supremacy given to any of them, so they must be taken in full, alongside each other.

It is easy to detect within Basso’s writing touches of the surreal, the gothic, the Weird (of course), and the visionary. I see within little moments like “The Rhomb,” a vignette within “Logues,” a probing of reality: a man holds a rhombus in his hand; he is told that if he turns it over, it will disappear; he fears this, but he has to know if it is true anyway. That possibly self-annihilating curiosity with reality lurks at the heart of much that Basso writes, as those who read his essay “Annihilation” (to be posted later this week) will find out.

Last but not least, Eric Basso made me a better reader for having encountered his work, spurring me toward an evolution in my reading methodology. I haven’t felt this changed by reading something in a long time. My interactions with other stories will now be influenced by my reading of “The Beak Doctor” and what else I have read of Basso’s work.

I’m excited about what’s to come this week. We have a little bit of everything: some of his fiction, one of his most noted essays, a selection of his poetry, an interview with the man himself, and some excellent essays providing close readings of his material. And, when the week is said and done, hopefully you’ll go out to pursue your own copies of some of his works and conduct some readings of your own.

When I found out I would become the new Managing Editor for Weird Fiction Review back in January, I felt a mixture of emotions: elation, nervousness, excitement. Above all, though, it felt right. It made sense to me that I should want a position like this, though I didn’t understand exactly why until recently. After reading about the experiences other writers and readers have had with the Weird, especially as it manifests in literature, I’ve realized that I’ve been stalking the Weird for almost my entire life.

I learned to read when I was about three years old. From the start, I had a vast hunger for knowledge and a strong imagination. During class Story Time, I would draft little sagas about traveling back in time and riding dinosaurs to fight aliens in flying saucers, making my own illustrations as I went. I craved weird, unrealistic, fantastical stuff. I devoured it all when I was a kid, without boundaries, whatever allowed me to imagine something else, something clearly not belonging to my native reality. I was not interested in reality one bit. I found it disappointing, dull, and – more often than I would have preferred – heartbreaking.

Fantasy and horror held a special place in my heart, and I think that was where the Weird first whispered its sweet nothings to me. Like Leah Thomas, my Weird compatriot and creator/illustrator of our featured webcomic “Reading the Weird,” I worshipped the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series written and illustrated by Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell. Especially those illustrations. I no longer have those books in my possession, but I still recall one picture in particular: a partially decomposed human head, twisted and gnarled, missing part of its skull and most of the bottom mandible, seemingly growing out of a tree in a leafless, foggy forest. That image jarred me for how it challenged my understanding of the human body and nature, and it made me want to write my own stories to meet that challenge.

Writers like Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft were instrumental in my early encounters with the Weird. Many of their stories unnerved me and instilled in me a deep sense of disquiet. It’s one thing to be presented with scary beings like the Man in the Black Suit and Cthulhu; it’s another matter entirely to look past those beings and realize that what lies beyond them, partially obscured, might actually be scarier.

I liked being freaked out, but why? I think it was linked to my personal quest to try and understand the world. I had this deep, abiding desire to know everything, to solve every mystery laid in front of me. I loved, and still love, a good puzzle. I was obsessed with understanding everything. Detective stories enthralled me; my personal idols were fictional detectives: Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and Encyclopedia Brown. (Quick confession: I actually tried opening a detective agency once when I was ten. It lasted a week. Business in my hometown was rough at the time.)

Leave it to someone like John H. Stevens, then, with his excellent essay on SF Signal, “Eight Weird Thoughts I Gleaned From The Weird,” to help connect the dots for me: “The power in weirdness is that it makes you ask questions, and then question the questions.” The Weird, in many ways, is deeply involved in finding the most unshakable mysteries and ideas of the universe and then presenting you with them, and then making you realize that you may never be able to solve them. If do you luck out and solve the puzzle (ha!), it leads to more puzzles. Understanding the nature of the question makes you both ask more questions and ponder just how shaky your grasp on knowledge itself is. So, for someone like me, the Weird represents the ultimate challenge, one that will always keep me involved in it because it will never end.

The Weird has persisted with me all throughout my life, even as my tastes have changed. I’ve dropped some old favorites (sorry Lovecraft, but I had to move on) and added some new ones, and I’m proud to say that many of them  have an undeniable streak of the Weird running through them: Ray Bradbury, Julio Cortázar, Harlan Ellison, Kelly Link, Haruki Murakami, Angela Carter, Jeff VanderMeer (not to be a suck-up, but…), and many others. Working on Weird Fiction Review and promo materials for The Weird also introduced me to writers I plan to pursue further, like Gustav Meyrink, Eric Basso, Bruno Schulz, Leonora Carrington, and Robert Aickman. Perhaps my personal figureheads of the Weird now are Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick, because they traffic in weird ideas that disrupt knowledge and reality, which still appeals to me to no end. Ideas are pure, potent imagination, and when weird ideas are applied to non-weird materials and essences, they can be contagious.

For this, and many other reasons, I’m proud to be the new Managing Editor. Weird Fiction Review has already collected and published a vast array of material devoted to the Weird and everything it touches. It has become an impressive storehouse for weird ideas and expressions of all kinds. And – being on the editorial staff and getting to see all of the articles and exclusives as we prep them – I can tell you we’ve got a surplus of fantastic content on the way. I think I speak for everyone at Weird Fiction Review, then, when I say we will continue to stalk the Weird for a long time to come.