These days it is timely to be in mourning. So many people feel adrift and confused as if they have lost something intangible but precious. And perhaps they have. Jobs, relationships, even hope for the future — today, all of these shimmer and flash with the dangerous light of precarity. As so many of the characters in […]
This review is for Monster Portraits written by Sofia Samatar and illustrated by Del Samatar, which is out this week from Rose Metal Press. We’re also featuring an excerpt from Monster Portraits that readers can check out. — The Editors Monster Portraits, by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar, explores the monster as a symbol of otherness. Through haunting, evocative […]
Why haven’t you heard of Anna Kavan? Born in Cannes in 1901 as Helen Woods, she published a number of books under the names Helen Ferguson, taken from her then-divorced first husband, and Anna Kavan, adopted from a character in her own 1930 novel, Let Me Alone. In 1968, she died of heart failure. Sometimes referred to […]
Fans of Leonora Carrington’s weird and fantastic fiction had their wishes met last April. In celebration of the Surrealist’s centennial (she would have been 100 on April 6th), the literary world has come together to bring most of her catalog back in print, alongside a new evaluation of her life. In the U.S., Dorothy, A Publishing Project […]
There is no shortage of good horror and weird fiction about ventriloquism, but it’s always focused on the dummies, isn’t it? Arguably the best part of Dead of Night (1945) is the segment about the ventriloquist’s dummy, Hugo, who makes his owner descend into insanity (or serves as the projection of the ventriloquist’s psychosis, an […]
Fictional cities are a long running theme throughout China Miéville’s work, from New Crobuzon to Besźel. It’s rarer that he deals in real places, although the influence of his early novella The Tain carries themes to his most recent work The Last Days of New Paris. Both deal with post-apocalyptic real cities: London and Paris; and […]
A demon is exorcised from a toe, a recovering addict takes on an ancient magus, an author is exposed to the strange totemic power of words, and a ruthless industrialist reaps what he sows during his foray into an unusual form of engineering. These are some of the ludicrous and unsettling delights to be found in Jeffrey Ford’s […]
My first encounter with Charles Beaumont came in the form of worn-out 90s VHS tapes. I was ten and about to enter another dimension, one narrated by Rod Serling. As with Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, both Twilight Zone writers, Beaumont became a childhood influence without a name – after all, what girl stops to read the credits […]
“Within a writer’s life, words, just as things, acquire powers,” writes Rikki Ducornet in the opening pages of The Deep Zoo, and the book itself unfolds as an exquisite exploration of such words, such things, such powers. It contains fifteen lucid and erudite essays on a kaleidoscopic array of subjects: natural history, fairy tales, the madness of […]
Catling’s The Vorrh, previously published in England and released in the U.S. from Vintage this month, is not shy about announcing its ambitions. Before we reach the first chapter, we have been greeted by epigraphs from Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Rudyard Kipling’s “Gertrude’s Prayer,” as well as two […]