1. Occasionally, if you read voraciously enough, you will encounter a story with the power to change your life. For me, M. John Harrison’s “Black Houses” is just such a story. “Black Houses” is a perfectly crafted missive, a weapon aimed straight at the heart – so darkly comic and fiercely erotic that you might not notice its destructive […]
[SPOILER ALERT: The two works in question, while hardly plot-driven, are discussed in their entirety.] The Littlest Pirate King (Fantagraphics, 2010), David B.’s graphic novel adaptation of Pierre Mac Orlan’s short story “Roi Rose”, opens with a faithful rendering of its first paragraphs: “The first lantern ran along the ship’s deck as if on invisible little […]
Ben Marcus is a critically acclaimed writer whose previous books include Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String. His new novel, The Flame Alphabet, has received much praise, from Michael Chabon and others, and been excerpted in national magazines like Esquire. As I wrote for the B&N Review, The Flame Alphabet is “chilly yet […]
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. Dino Buzzati (1906 — 1972) was an Italian novelist and short story writer who served as a journalist with […]
1. More and more, I find myself attracted to innovative writing that isn’t afraid to leave great gaps within itself, that doesn’t try to stick the world onto a postage stamp, but rather puts a postage stamp in the middle of the world’s unfathomable complexities. There was Leena Krohn’s short “sort-of novel” Tainaron, a book that I preferred to various […]
The following interview occurred in Michael Cisco’s New York apartment, which consists of the basement of a house dating back to the 1700s, and the sub-basement he has dug below that level. Greeting me at the door in a red fez, a multi-colored pancho, cargo shorts, and sandals with white socks, Cisco brought me through the study, library, […]
O.L. Samuels is an artist who makes his strange and beautiful creatures “with the help of the spirit.” Each piece is carved very precisely based on how the spirit moves him and then he spends hours painstakingly decorating them. He has used tree trunks, branches and roots, layers of paint, glitter, sawdust and beads. Surprisingly he is […]
I was first introduced to Ray Caesar’s work when writing the catalogue essay for Carrie Ann Baade’s Cute and Creepy show, which was exhibited at Florida State University’s Fine Art Museum this past October. I haven’t been able to shake the images of his haunting, and haunted, beauties ever since. Trapped forever between woman and girl, […]
I arrived to China Miéville mania pretty late in the game. I remember how it happened clearly though. It was spring of 2008; the only reason I recall the approximate date was because it marked either the beginning or the middle of my final undergraduate travails. Ah yes, that brief, tumultuous pocket of time when you feel, […]
The struggle for survival is one theme a good number of horror movies depend on to create a sense of tension. Will the protagonist survive a hideous situation, bloodied and battered but still in one piece? It takes imagination, character and, yes, even heart to construct a scenario which pushes through these obvious concerns and into the more nebulous […]