Weird Thoughts Archive

Weirdfictionreview.com Thanks Angela Slatter, Welcomes Adam Mills as Managing Editor

Many thanks to Angela Slatter, who was kind enough to agree to be our managing editor at Weirdfictionreview.com for the first three months of our strange existence. As was always the plan, she’s now stepping down to work on a novel, among other literary endeavors. We’re exceedingly grateful to her for helping us get off to a wonderful start, and hope to feature her fiction and nonfiction here in future. (You can also read her thoughts on The Weird here.)

Taking over for Slatter will be Adam Mills, who has already been working for Weirdfictionreview.com coordinating, compiling, and editing the 101 Weird Writers feature. Adam has committed to working in this new capacity through the summer. We will also be opening up to unsolicited nonfiction pitches through our contact form in a couple of weeks – Adam will have more information about that soon.

In addition to his duties as Managing Editor, Mills also works as an editorial assistant for us and our e‑book company, Cheeky Frawg – currently, he is editing an Amos Tutuola collection for us. Mills previously received an MA in English from Missouri State University and just graduated from the Stonecoast MFA Program, based at the University of Southern Maine, with a concentration in Popular Fiction. His work can be found in publications such as The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (eds. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer) and The Land Bridge (ed. Zachary Jernigan). He has taught a variety of English classes, including creative writing and composition, at universities and community colleges alike. He also maintains a blog devoted to personal and professional interests.

Please join us in thanking Angela, and welcoming Adam!

Interpretations of Bruno Schulz

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This week at Weirdfictionreview.com is largely devoted to Bruno Schulz, the great Polish writer and artist whose life was tragically cut short when he was shot dead by the Nazis. Schulz’s work, collected in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, has a dreamlike quality that shares affinities with the work of Kafka, but seems distinctly more subtle, drifty, and complex, at least in English translation. In a sense, he is the Proust of the Weird. As translator John Davis notes in our interview with him, Schulz found the fantastical in the mundane details of the world: the numinous surrounds us. so that there is no difference, and no barrier, between the fantastical and the real. This gives his stories a faintly haunted quality, in that the weird exists not just in the sometimes strange happenings, but in the very fabric of the prose itself, in each sentence. It is a subtle form of the weird, and means that even in a literature like the weird that focuses on a sense of “unease,” Schulz exists in the interstices.

As might be expected, interpretations of Schulz’s fiction in film have had mixed results. If your meaning exists in the precision of description of image or person, and in the sentence, how can a dramatized version on the screen really capture that essence? The film version of “Sanatorium” above, from 1973, features some striking cinematography – and we’ve used two screenshots on our main page – but must substitute its own meaning for Schulz’s in a way that erases Schulz’s meaning – more so than is often the case in the translation from prose to film. It’s entirely possible that Schulz is unfilmable.

The Brothers Quay have also attempted to capture Schulz on the screen, although it might be more accurate to say that they have used Schulz to explore their own obsessions. While their Street of Crocodiles is compelling and a genuine work of art, it does not, for me, capture the essence of Schulz’s fiction. It emphasizes instead a heightened dread and twitchy anxiety that is at odds with the nostalgia in Schulz’s work. It is actually more Kafka-esque than Schulz-ifarian, so to speak. Schulz’s fiction is much more delicate, its strength, its muscularity manifesting in subtle ways, much as a very slender sword may prove less breakable than a blade that, to the eye, would seem to be superior.

In terms of translations, readers of our The Weird compendium will have the opportunity to compare that version, taken from the book publication, and the newer translation by Davis posted this week on WFR.com. Are the differences as severe as the difference between the two films mentioned above? Probably not, but we still believe the exercise should prove enlightening.

Finding The Weird Down the Yellow Brick Road…: "Make the music stop, make it stop!"

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We’re back for our first week of 2012 here at Weirdfictionreview.com. What have we been up to? Read on…

If you’re a weirdie, then it might be expected that right before you leave to visit friends in the wilds of New Hampshire, you watch a movie with a description like this:

One Morning in New England, 1940, the entire population of Friar New Hampshire – 572 people – walked together up a winding mountain trail and into the wilderness. They left behind their clothes, their money, all of their essentials. Even their dogs were abandoned, tied to posts and left to starve. No One knows why. A search party dispatched by the U.S. Army eventually discovered the remains of nearly 300 of Friar’s evacuees. Many had frozen to death. Others were cruelly and mysteriously slaughtered. The bodies of the remaining citizens are still unaccounted for.” Now, a documentary filmmaker has unearthed the coordinates of the trail…

Well, that’s what we did, anyway. Yellow Brick Road is highly recommended – much scarier than the overrated Blair Witch Project, with some synergies with a story like Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” The movie manages to accomplish a lot on a limited budget, and it is often absolutely terrifying while retaining its sense of mystery. The acting is also excellent for the most part, and the ending does a better job than most of not giving the viewer an easy answer.

Another film viewed over the holidays, The Kill List, fares slightly worse despite its stylish noir inventiveness, although we also recommend it highly; if you’re not fond of brutally realistic violence, skip it, however. A hired killer and his partner sign up for a series of killings that come to have more and more of a supernatural sense to them. There’s more than a bit of The Wicker Man in The Kill List, and in the latter stages an amazing tunnel sequence, as our anti-heroes get in way over their heads, is somewhat undercut by tricksy editing at the very end to disguise a Very Unnecessary Twist. That said, this filmmaker has our attention – the movie is stunningly shot, with an underlying throb of unease throughout that has the viewer on the proverbial edge of the seat.

Of course, “weird” is often in the eye of the beholder – proof being that the trailers for Paranormal Activity 3 made us laugh – and today we have two film posts for you, including an appreciation of a Dr. Seuss movie that isn’t truly “The Weird” but is just too surreal in its weirdliness for us to pass up, especially in such an energetic essay.

Did you see any creepy movies over the holidays that you’d recommend? Please let us know.

And come back Wednesday for a great long story by Tanith Lee…

Thanks For Your Support: WFR.com’s First Two Months: Your Donations Appreciated...

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(Thank you mad genius Zerfoss for our holiday card…)

You may have noticed that here at Weirdfictionreview.com, we have set a hellacious pace during our debut. Over less than two months, we have published 80-plus interviews, features, essays, short stories, novel excerpts, art, and editorials. A huge, heartfelt thank you to all of the contributors who have allowed us to bring you great writing and images. We love you all, and appreciate both your passion and your talents. Many thanks, too, to our managing editor, Angela Slatter.

Whether you’re a regular reader of WFR.com or new to the site, if you’re excited and energized by what we do, please consider a donation. You can use the paypal option on the main page, lower left, which sends a donation to vanderworld at hotmail.com. If you have the means and truly love what we do, any donation of over $200 will entitle you to a special gift (please query). Any donations go toward allowing us to explore ever weirder horizons and also reward our wonderful contributors, who provide us with content out of a love for the weird.

As you might expect from our start over these two months, we’re not done, not by half. When we return on January 9, you can expect fiction by Tanith Lee, Marc Laidlaw, Stefan Grabinski, Amos Tutuola, Jeffrey Ford, and many more, along with interviews with Stephen Graham Jones, Kathe Koja, Steve Duffy, and Lucius Shepard, a special “10 Days of John Clute” feature, a new story by Michael Cisco, a week focused on the weird gothic work of Eric Basso, serialized novels, more international weird, a definitive list of 1,001 weird books, and the 101 Weird Writers ongoing feature – not to mention regular columns by Edward Gauvin (translations), Nancy Hightower (art), Matthew Pridham (movies), and Brian Slattery (music)…along with contributions from Gio Clairval, Larry Nolen, and Paul Charles Smith. Maureen Kincaid Speller also joins us as our regular book reviewer. Is that all? Not even close. We will have some ghastly and ghostly surprises for you that may just take over your mind in delightfully weird ways. So stay tuned.

For now, though, please enjoy our last week of content for 2011. Under the cut, you’ll also find direct links to all of the material we’ve posted since November 1st, just in case you’ve missed any of it. Enjoy!   And  thanks for your support.

We wish you and yours all the best this holiday season and hope you have a very Happy New Year.  Continue reading →

The Weird Winter Week: Bleak, Uncompromising, Pushing Right Through…

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Dear Weirdie:

You may have noticed by now that our “A Christmas Story” really isn’t and that our “Twist” might not be what you would expect, and that a “Gallows-Horse” has materialized right outside of “The Red Tower”, which is no doubt currently ruled by Maldoror in one of his fevre dreams.

For this span of snow drifts and slow thoughts, we bring you a British diplomat stationed in the Middle East who wrote under the name “Sarban”. His work isn’t always comfortable, is sometimes fetishistic, and in the piece we’ve selected he turns an at times Nabokovian eye toward his fellow human beings, all while documenting a desolate Event.

We also offer up to you an Iranian philosophical novelist, Reza Negarestani, who now lives in Southeast Asia. His “The Gallows-Horse” is to our mind the finest piece of short meta-supernatural fiction written in 2011, even if it’s the nature of such a story to be neglected because of its uniqueness. It’s a piece to be savored and re-read.

In “The Red Tower” by Thomas Ligotti, we bring you one of the master’s best tales, newly redecorated by an original piece of art by Aeron Alfrey specially commissioned for this reprinting of the story. And if you don’t get lost in that tower, you may find yourself tumbling through the phantasmagorical adventures of the infamous decadent in “Maldoror Abroad” by K.J. Bishop. For dark respite afterwards, check out the Billy Fog brought to us at Edward Gauvin…

(“Maldoror Abroad” and “A Christmas Story” are both ghosts, their corporealness temporary, and they will disappear into the ether within mere weeks…so read them while you can.)

In this, the season of our malcontents and strange vast things seen through the snows, we believe you will appreciate what we’ve brought you from the winter wastelands…because we trust you, Weirdie, we really do. We trust you with the difficult and the remote, the rigorous and the bizarre. This is our gift to you, and if it is not quite the traditional creepy joy you might have expected, we hope you will understand the reasons why. There is always time to curl up comfortable in a corner with a book of ghost stories and some marshmellows and cocoa and a thick blanket. But, if you are out here in the snow drifts, with us, we know that’s not what you want…because you are one of the Hardcore Weird.

Avaunt! There’s more yet to show you, but for now…the twist, the red tower, the gallows-horse, and a stranger abroad all beckon, along with Leah Thomas’s web comic, a review of Joan Aiken, and Ann VanderMeer’s recap of the year to date on WFR.com.

The Weird Questionnaire: Sixty questions, sixty minutes

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(Image used by permission of J.K. Potter)

Readers will have heard of the Proust Questionnaire, a Belle Époque social entertainment not penned by the great literary rememberer, but made famous by his replies, which are prized for their content, his phrasing, and what they reveal about the era. Something of the budding artist’s character emerges as well, notably in the differences between the answers Proust gave at ages 13 and 20. Ever since French book show host Bernard Pivot first employed it on his program Apostrophes, it has been taken up by James Lipton and the back pages of L’Express and Vanity Fair.

Writer, critic, editor, and folklorist Éric Poindron has produced what might be construed as a Weird reply, the Étrange Questionnaire. Poindron hosts several regional radio programs in Champagne, runs a writing workshop at the University of Reims, and perhaps most pertinently, curates his own personal cabinet of curiosities, which can be visited by appointment. Fittingly, then, his questionnaire was conceived neither as a parlor game nor a personality quiz, but a series of writing prompts — in his words, “open-ended questions to feed the fictional and fantastical… a kind of exquisite corpse.” Does the alimentary imagery intimate zombies?

Poindron’s rules are few and simple: there are sixty questions (twice as many as most versions of the Proust Questionnaire). Spend no more than a minute on each, and an hour in total. However, don’t keep checking your watch: “let writing define time.”

Poindron’s archive of answers amuses and beguiles, though the images alone — for those who don’t read French — are worth checking out. Among those questioned are Belgian surrealist collagist André Stas; Anne-Sylvie Homassel, whose fiction has appeared in various volumes of Tartarus Press’ Strange Tales, and whose translations range from Machen and Dunsany to Sax Rohmer and Kris Saknussemm; and Claro, with whom Brian Evenson shares a symbiotic translation relationship, each having translated the other’s work (Claro runs Lot 49, an imprint of American fiction at Éditions Le Cherche Midi).

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WFR’s Book Recommendations: Gifts for the Weirdie in Your Life: What recent weird books would you recommend?

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Above you’ll find our own books that we would shamelessly recommend as gifts for the weirdie in your life: The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities and massive 1,200-page The Weird from this year and The New Weird from 2008. Why? Well, they’re not just full of weird, uncanny, strange fictions, they’re also all three beautifully designed books. (Also check out our amazing new Cheeky Frawg website for ODD?–the “Bloat Toad” story running this week is from ODD?–and other weirdnesses.)

Those two criteria – weirdo-saturated and good-lookin’ – guided our selections below, which are mostly from the last couple of years. This is by no means a definitive list of the best books – a lot of our international fiction reading, for example, was research that fed directly into our own projects – but instead new and recent releases or reprints that strike us as sumptuous and/or unusual gifts to give this holiday season. In offering these recommendations, we have to note that two publishers of weird fiction in particular offer consistent high-quality, high-value, beautiful books time and time again: Centipede Press and Tartarus Press. Ex Occidente also produces great books, although we don’t get to see most of them, so it’s sometimes hard to judge. Subterranean Press, even though they don’t specialize in weird fiction to the exclusion of all else, continues to impress. PS Publishing remains stalwart and awesome, but as with Subterranean, their focus is broader than weird fiction. As for who is taking the most chances, that’s also clear: Chômu Press. They don’t always get it right, but they’re not afraid to promote the bleeding edge.

Please do suggest additional books in the comments thread – and may the eccentric and incomplete nature of our selections enrage you enough to be passionate in your selections!!


The Weird Book of the Year 

“My coffin is suddenly ablaze with light. A luminous vapor appears with a pop like a cloud in a cloud chamber directly above me and my coffin glows like a flourescent tube. I can see myself, all withered.”

Although this is not a year’s best list per se, we still must single out The Great Lover by Michael Cisco as the best weird novel of 2011 – by far. At this point, it appears Cisco is simply operating in a sphere that most weird fiction writers never reach, or attain only rarely, and is doing it effortlessly. That he remains so unknown is an absolute travesty. The best work of the weird in 2010, The Narrator, Cisco’s prior novel, may be more accessible than The Great Lover, but once you become accustomed to the rhythms of this book, it is an unforgettable experience. The Great Lover of the title is a sewerman and undead hero and the novel, to some measure, follows his adventures. It’s a hard novel to describe – just buy it and experience it. In some alternate universe, Cisco is the most award-winning weird writer of the twenty-first century. As Publishers Weekly said about this novel, “Fans of stylish and thematically sophisticated weird fiction should seek out this mad testament to Cisco’s visionary genius.”

The Blissfully Eccentric

Revagations:A Book of Dreams by Eric Basso — This crisply designed volume chronicles the author’s dreams from the 1970s and could be described as a series of avant-Gothic flash fictions. Engrossing, disturbing, and straddling the divide between Basso’s short story narratives and his poetry: “This island-city of rain, where a shower of drops constantly falls; not from the sky but up from the surrounding sky…” Because of the bite-sized portions that make up this thick book, it may be the best entry point to Basso for new readers. It also features a brilliant essay on dreams referencing various poems and other narratives.

There Is No Year by Blake Butler — Some may not consider Butler a weird writer, even though parts of his prior cult classic Scorch Atlas have the feel and sense of unease you expect from weird fiction. Although this new novel also falls into the cracks between genres, it has an even more intense feel of nightmare or dark dreaming, with inexplicable events and terrors that evoke the best of writers like Mark Danielewski. It begins with an eerie prologue about the saturation of the world with a damaging light. If you’re fond of Machen you may not like Butler, but if you like your trad weird cut with some William Burroughs, Butler is the writer for you.

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What Are the Greatest Weird/Horror Anthos of All Time?

 ‘The definitive collection of weird fiction… its success lies in its ability to lend coherence to a great number of stories that are so remarkably different and yet share the same theme’ — Times Literary Supplement

‘Studded with literary gems, it’s a hefty, diligently assembled survey of a genre that manages to be at once unsettling, disorientating and bracing in its variety.’ — James Lovegrove, Financial Times 

‘It’s a tremendous experience to go through its 1,126 pages… there are so many delights in this that any reader will find something truly memorable’ — Scotland on Sunday
 
‘Readers eager to explore a world beyond the ordinary need look no further’ - Time Out
 
‘An anthology of writing so powerful it will leave your reality utterly shredded…Give yourself to the weird!  Open the pages of the new gospel of The Weird.’ — Guardian.co.uk

We’re extremely pleased that our The Weird compendium continues to get such high praise, with more reviews coming. We’re also happy because we’re getting a lot of traffic to this site as a result of the anthology.  Not to mention, we can announce that the North American edition of The Weird will be published by Tor Books, with the ebook out in February and the trade paperback in May (with a short-run hardcover as well). Meanwhile, the UK edition is available in Kindle format now as well.

But the main point of this post is to ask you, our loyal weirdie readers, your recommendations for your Top 3 greatest compilations of dark/weird/horror fiction of all time, both original and reprint anthologies. Please note which is which and state your case. The best and most convincing explanation will be rewarded with a copy of the paperback edition of Thomas Ligotti’s collection Teatro Grottesco (Virgin Books), a subscription to our ODD? antho,  a copy of Jeff’s short-run weird collection Secret Lives and our own hardcover anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, personalized by us however you like. Deadline is next Friday night at midnight, Eastern Standard Time.

We’re compiling our own Top 10 list for a later post and your recommendations will have influence on our list. — Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

Tartarus Press’s Wormwood #17 Now Out: Joel Lane on Lovecraft

In addition to Centipede Press’s relatively new fiction/nonfiction journal The Weird Fiction Review, which we’ve written about before, there’s another, long-running journal devoted exclusively to nonfiction: Tartarus Press’s wonderful Wormwood. Wormwood #17 is just out, a great gift for supernatural fiction fans. Edited by the writer Mark Valentine, this installment’s table of contents promises not just great reading but some excellent books to add to our library. Tartarus has been kind enough to let us reprint part of Joel Lane’s essay on Lovecraft from #17 below the cut.

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Editorial: As the Weird Turns by Angela Slatter

When I was a kid (yes,Virginia, dinosaurs walked the earth then), I read Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar” and have regarded garden sheds with an acute suspicion ever since. M R James was responsible for many restless nights, many dreadful dreams (“Casting the Runes”, “A Warning to the Curious”, “Oh, Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad”, “A Warning to the Curious”, “The Treasure of Abbott Thomas”, “The Wailing Well” were but a few causes of night terrors). If James was the main course, then Stoker’s “The Judge’s House”, Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw”, and Laski’s “The Tower” were the disturbing dessert. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” still haunts my dreams — I sometimes wake convinced I have been climbing that long, dread staircase only to surface in a place I don’t belong.

A normal child might have stopped reading such things and turned to stories of flowers and bunnies. You will note that I did not; I kept reading these strange tales, sought out more and more and more of them. It’s a habit I’ve never lost — even as I write this, I am listening to the BBC’s enactments of a series of M R James’ ghost stories. I never learn, do I?

In my teens I added to my list of nightmare fodder, pieces such as Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities”, Etchison’s “It Only Comes Out at Night”, and Ramsey Campbell’s “The Brood”. Stories that might have been horror but seemed to be something else as well. Stories that were … weird.

It never ends.  Now I go back and forth between the classics, like Sarban’s The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny, or his Ringstones and Other Curious Tales (two beautiful Tartarus Press editions sit upon my desk), then to more modern pieces like Miéville’s “Details”, or Margo Lanagan’s ever-gloriously-grim “Singing My Sister Down”. Then there’s the newly released Women Writing the Weird, edited by Deb Hoag — a wonderfully promising anthology of unsettling/bizarre/weird tales.

Of course, when I began reading it wasn’t called ‘The Weird’. These tales were defined as gothic; chillers; ghostly; strange; uncanny. Basically, stories under the broad church of, well, creepy shit.

I find myself wondering what they had in common. They weren’t all about the supernatural. It wasn’t horror, although some had definite elements of the horrific in their content and effect. The Weird definitely is not about domesticated vampires, pet werewolves or friendly ghosts.

The Weird isn’t about the tame.

It’s about things that are unexpected, things that fracture the mundane, things that are not explained, that are different and simply are.

It’s beautiful women who lure us away from the path; it’s Saki’s Gabriel-Ernest helping himself to the Toop child; it’s Angela Carter’s “The Snow Pavilion” narrator finding himself among dolls and decay and choosing not to fight it; it’s all the awful wishes the Monkey’s Paw might grant; it’s even the old tale we used to tell each other as kids, “The Hairy Toe”.

It’s the unexplainable, the unanswerable. There is no spoon feeding in the Weird — the reader must interpret as s/he will. There are no pat solutions, no easily digestible climaxes. The Weird is designed to disturb — and one of the great disturbances to the psyche is not being given all the answers. To feel that there is something you’re missing. Reading the Weird leaves one with the uneasy sense that beyond the last full stop something is still happening. Something is still coming towards you – or moving away from you and you desperately want to go with it. The Weird gives you the feeling that nothing is properly finished. The Weird breaks you down and hints ever-so-softly that your conviction of comfort is false.

Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People” is a wonderful example — rich with a creeping dread, a sense of threat that is never articulated or fully realised by the end of the story, but which grows and looms and never goes away.

The Weird is a changeable thing. Grandmaster Moorcock has said “I know the Weird when I feel it”. It shows all the characteristics of a creature that knows evolution is necessary for survival — so even though time of death may have been pronounced on the New Weird, its corpse has been absorbed by the parent Weird and it will go on in another form. You’ll know it when you feel it.

On my brief watch as managing editor, you will find reviews, essays, considerations of the Weird in its manifold forms. The territory is wide and deep; it has infinite length and breadth. Ultimately, the Weird tells us ‘You cannot understand everything’. So sit back and be dazzled, be confounded and uplifted by your fear, by your uncertainty, by the ground that feels quite crumbly beneath your feet.