Many years ago now — in that once upon a time which is the memory of the imagination rather than of the workaday mind, I went walking with a friend. Of what passed before we set out I have nothing but the vaguest recollection. All I remember is that it was early morning, that we were happy to be in one another’s […]
In life there are two kinds of places. The places of everyday life. The apartment. The workplace. The hospital. The marketplace. These are the locations of normal reality. Where our everyday dramas and tragedies take place in the light. Careers and relationships. Social standings and money making. But then there is another place. A dark place […]
As you probably know already, this year, 2014, has been an amazing year for weird fiction — or as Scott Nicolay puts it succinctly in his article about the Weird, “we are in the middle of a Weird Renaissance.” This year, we saw weird fiction pervade everything from television to the New York Times. We saw some excellent titles from […]
Ghouljaw & Other Stories is one of the finest debut collections I’ve had the pleasure to read this year, every bit as impressive as Jason A. Wyckoff’s Black Horse (2012) and Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters (2013), sharing with these works a breadth of originality that makes it required reading for both readers and writers of Weird Fiction. There is a deep literary and genre […]
In the mid-’90s, a rare-film librarian at a state university in Pennsylvania mysteriously burns his entire stockpile of film canisters and disappears. So begins the novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes. In his novel, Rombes explores the intertwining of life and cinema through a interview with a highly acclaimed but eccentric film librarian, Roberto Acestes Laing. We had a chance […]
The following is an excerpt from the novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes. It is reprinted with the author’s permission. Be sure to check out our interview with Rombes as well. — The Editors Laing is not so good at transitions. As soon as he finishes describing Destroyer he starts in on another film, Black […]
Leonora Carrington (1912 — 2011) was a British-born Mexican surrealist painter. She also wrote several novels and short stories. Her work was influenced by Max Ernst, who she met in 1937 and began living with him in Paris. Ernst was arrested soon after the Nazi occupation of France as his art was deemed “degenerate”. Carrington fled to Spain […]
It is impossible, in my eyes, to read Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy without thinking of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. It is not so much because of the similar tropes – the exploration team, the perception problems, the deep hole, etc. – but because of a deeper, darker link, which only becomes obvious once […]
“Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another — writers who could not have read each other — still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the […]
Michael Kelly, editor and author, started Undertow Publications in 2009 with an anthology called Apparitions, but it was Shadows & Tall Trees, the publication that came out later that same year, for which Kelly is perhaps best known. Named after a chapter from Lord of the Flies, Shadows & Tall Trees is an annual series dedicated to publishing original weird, macabre, strange, and ghostly […]