Let me be straight: Billy Fog is a dark book for kids. Scant pages in, the title character, a boy no more than ten, writes in a letter to Santa: Who is death? What is it? Where is it? Do we have to go there? Sometimes in bed, before I go to sleep, I look into the darkness all around me and […]
The reviewer, James Crossley, works for Island Books in Seattle and contributes to Message in a Bottle. I intended to read Joan Aiken’s retrospective collection methodically, one story at a sitting, but that’s not what happened. I first picked it up in the middle of the night, hours after being stung by a bee, unable to sleep because my […]
The story that is the focus of this essay appears in The Weird compendium and can also be found in the out-of-print collection The Seventh Horse. This essay contains some spoilers. — The Editors Usually, I don’t advocate transposing the writer’s biography onto the writer’s work, especially since I am not going to dwell on it here, but in the case of Carrington […]
Note: This short essay contains spoilers. You can read “The Bloat Toad” here. “Bloat Toad or Escuerzo?” This question predicates the translation choices made in translating anew Leopoldo Lugones’ 1906 short story about a legendary vindictive amphibian that stalked those who had done injury to it. An earlier translation used the descriptive “bloat toad” throughout the […]
Many thanks to the author for kind permission to reprint this essay. It originally appeared in Collapse IV — please visit their website and consider a donation to their efforts if you enjoy this piece. — The editors The author, with skull and octopus, yesterday. 0. Prologue: the Tentacular Novum Taking for granted, as we do, its ubiquitous cultural debris, […]
The following essay focused on “The Other Side of the Mountain” contains some mild spoilers. Visit Gio Clairval’s blog for more on The Weird and a variety of other topics. The story In a story written in first person, the narrator always survives, but the beginning of this novella doesn’t bode well. Our young narrator, after an […]
WFR Editors’ Note: A version of this essay was first given as a talk by António Monteiro at a meeting in Rochester, England, October 30⁄31, 1999, and subsequently published as the introduction to The Horrifying Presence and Other Tales, published by Ex Occidente Press. We are pleased to present a version modified from both the speech and the published […]
When I was thirteen I was handed a book by a friend. The cover art was off-putting — a red ocean, a mountain in the background with a human heart at its center, the head of a statue in the foreground. I hesitated to accept it, but this friend, who wasn’t much of a reader, stared at me for a moment and said, “You’ve got to.” Now, […]
Michel Bernanos was the fourth of six children born to Georges Bernanos, the famous French Catholic writer of rural damnation. He was the only one to become a writer, though in the vein of the fantastic and often under pen names, so as not to partake unfairly of his father’s fame. At the age of 41, […]
WFR Editors’ Note: As readers may have noticed, this week at WFR we are very much emphasizing the more Kafkaesque strands of the weird, whether with direct descendents of Kafka like Michal Ajvaz and Leena Krohn or through direct antecedents/ contemporaries like the brilliant Alfred Kubin, who was for a time connected to Kafka’s circle of […]