Warning: This essay contains many spoilers. A dozen men are holed up in a research station in the unforgiving wastes of Antarctica, caught up in a relatively peaceful life of scientific inquiry, casual camaraderie and boredom. The bleak landscape outside dominates John Carpenter’s The Thing, through both the isolation it imposes as well as the ambient hostility […]
1. Monsters are, of course, ridiculous. The exception is the monster that scares you. That’s terrifying. That’s a nightmare. 2. “One of these days,” I said, “I’d love to do an anthology of monster stories. I even have the title: Creature! With an exclamation point. It would cover the last three decades of monster fiction; from where King […]
As part of our Favorite Monsters feature that we ran for our “12 Days of Monsters,” we polled various writers to see who their favorite monsters were and why. One of those writers is Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, a Filipino writer of Science Fiction and Fantasy. A graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, Rochita was the recipient of […]
As part of our Favorite Monsters feature that we ran for our “12 Days of Monsters,” we polled various writers to see who their favorite monsters were and why. One of those writers is Livia Llewellyn. She has had her stories published in Subterranean, Sybil’s Garage, Apex Magazine, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, Postscripts, and […]
Earlier in the month, just before the 12 Days of Monsters started proper here at Weirdfictionreview.com, we contacted various writers to ask them something: who, or what, was their favorite monster, and why? The writers we contacted are themselves well acquainted with all sorts of things that go bump in the night, prominently featuring monsters […]
Gemma Files is a Canadian citizen, and has lived in Toronto, Ontario for her entire life (thus far). She is the daughter of two actors, Gary Files and Elva Mai Hoover. Files graduated from Ryerson University with a B.A.A. in Magazine Journalism, then spent roughly eight years as a film critic, primarily writing for local alt-culture journal eye […]
I grew up amidst the fields and forests of central Pennsylvania. I grew up obsessed with werewolves. It may not come as a shock, then, that I took an interest in a werewolf novel set in the acne-riddled T‑zone of the state’s face known as Pennsyltucky. That I just described Tristan Egolf’s Kornwolf as a “werewolf novel” is telling as […]
While creating the comic Reading The Weird for Weirdfictionreview.com, Leah Thomas came up with these sketches of some of the monsters, human and otherwise, from fourteen of the stories collected in The Weird compendium — perfect for 12 Days of Monsters! Well, actually 15, as the gnole appears in stories by both Lord Dunsany and Margaret St. Clair. […]
Monsters are tricky things. We love them, fear them, need them, despise them when they invade our dreams a little too often. Their ubiquitous and yet marginalized presence in our lives rests on the contradictory emotions elicited by such creatures. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes “The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety and fantasy (ataractic […]
China Miéville (1972 — ) is an influential English writer known for revitalizing weird fiction. He has won the World Fantasy Award and multiple Arthur C. Clarke awards, among others. Miéville’s early novels — including Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002) — fused the weird with body transformation, Marxist politics, secondary world settings, and a bold style. Later novels like […]