In his artist statement, Chris Mars rallies a battle cry: “There are the voiceless, who cannot speak for themselves. These are the easiest ones to shrink down. There are words for the non-conformers, simple words that can be quickly acknowledged by those that buy in. Crazy. Faggot. Gang. Rich. One is sinful, one is lazy, one is violent by nature and one is […]
This game of echoes is common enough. An image, phrase, or paragraph strikes your fancy, sinks into the brain’s loam and lodges in the bedrock of your memory. Then another, years later, makes it gleam or ring out in the dark recesses, so you rush to dig through your books, looking for what it reminds […]
In our search for optimal ways to use natural resources, human beings have discovered subtle connections between the ecosphere, the raw materials comprising our world, and the fate of our own species. The fragility of this planet’s living environment was a concept all but undreamt a mere century ago, when the Earth promised to supply an endless […]
This post is part of an ongoing series on 101 weird writers featured in The Weird compendium, the anthology that serves as the inspiration for this site. There is no ranking system; the order is determined by the schedule of posts. Margaret Irwin (1889 — 1969) was an English writer of a long series of critically acclaimed historical novels as […]
There is a story of a woman who gave birth to a shard of porcelain that grew into the image of the Virgin Mary and her son. This image was guarded carefully by the woman’s family and handed down from mother to daughter, from aunt to niece. The image became a source of strength for the family, and the […]
Jeffrey Ford is an American writer whose fiction combines elements of traditional fantasy or magic realism with surrealism and horror. As a student at Binghamton University, he studied with the novelist John Gardner and until recently taught at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. His work has been nominated for and received many awards, including the […]
Stacey Steers’s Night Hunter film left me speechless the first time I watched it at the Denver Art Museum in 2011. At that exhibition, it was accompanied by the most delightful and creepy of dollhouses, which you peered into and could see looping clips of film. But it was the full-featured animation (16 minutes and 16 seconds) that […]
Simon Strantzas is the author of the critically-acclaimed Cold to the Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), a collection of thirteen tales of the strange and supernatural. His first collection, Beneath the Surface (Humdrumming, 2008), has been called “one of the most important debut short story collections in the genre”. Strantzas’s stories have appeared in The Mammoth Book […]
The yearning for a tenderness perhaps available only in another world, which informs many of Schneider’s other works, is not entirely absent from Histoires à mourir debout. More elliptical and less sanguinary, cloaked in an aura of wondrous mystery, the two novellas that begin the book involve young women whose desires find no mortal satisfaction. Anne-Dauphine, in […]
Brian Evenson (1966 – ) is an influential American writer of hard to classify dark fiction that often seems surreal or Kafkaesque. He is also a translator of French literature and the Chair of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University, as well as a senior editor of the Conjunctions literary journal published by Bard College. Evenson’s critically acclaimed […]