I “Masha and the Bear” The first bear may be uncouth, but not necessarily unkind, despite appearances. He isn’t good at human languages and he lives alone in a cottage in the forest, but no one can say he doesn’t try. If he didn’t try, if the idea of trying, and thus of restraint, were alien to […]
Tying in with my translation of Maurice Pons’ short story “Honeymoon” in the latest issue of The Coffin Factory (a terrific new magazine! Check it out!), I humbly offer this consideration of his 1973 novel Mademoiselle B. No real spoilers, especially for a book so light on plot, but passages are quoted at length. Maurice Pons’ Mademoiselle […]
Some writers cannot help themselves. Some writers, by the sheer complexity and reach of their imaginations will always be somewhat unclassifiable. For this reason, it’s their view of the world we value, not the category in which a publisher places them. These are the writers who create what they find to be perfectly normal, only to […]
Aeron Alfrey creates unique imagery inspired by strange fantasy worlds filled with monsters, magic and death. His art has been published in numerous books and shown in galleries around the world. His monsters, perfect for our “12 Days” feature, are often frightening, but all are so intricately designed that every time you look closely something else […]
Please welcome our regular book reviewer, Maureen Kincaid Speller, with her first column at WFR. You can also read her work at Paper Knife and in magazines such as Interzone. — The Editors “The mere touch of cold philosophy.” – Keats Reviewed in this column: Glorious Nemesis by Ladislav Klíma (Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2011) The Orphan Palace by […]
Takashi Miike is easily one of the most fascinating directors working in cinema. His Audition is a deliberately paced and beautifully shot exercise in horror, a precursor of genre “break-outs” such as Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. In Ichi the Killer, a yakuza (gangster) flick with the sensibilities of a splatterpunk Looney Tunes episode, Miike created a masterpiece of hyperkinetic, highly […]
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by Eastern European literary traditions. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as […]
Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964 – ) is one of the most original and audacious weird writers of her generation. In addition to her many award-winning novels and stories, Kiernan has written scientific papers that reflect her love of herpetology and paleontology, also reflected in her fiction. Perhaps more than any other writer of the past thirty […]
If the truly Weird causes a sense of great dread, then the grotesque provides another approach to the inexplicable through aggressive horror and humor. Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that the truly grotesque stands “at the margin of consciousness between the known and unknown…calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organizing the world” (3). Caught […]
(The mad king comes in many forms; portrait of Max Ernst by Aeron Alfrey; detail from the slider image on the main page. Used with kind permission.) Click here for a complete selection of Eric Basso’s books. “Elevated above all other beings, he is also degraded below all; man is sublime and abject, great and wretched, […]