— The Editors

***

I come to this Introduction from a somewhat strange perspective. I was one of the people who woke up on November 9, 2016—as a Canadian living in England, whose eyes were still fixed south of the border, across the pond—in what seemed to be an alternate reality.

The morning of the General Election, I remember logging on and experiencing almost a doubling of vision, as if the universe had split into two tracks that were radically diverging from one another. There was a hallucinatory space of about a week where I still felt as if I could see another world layered underneath mine. There was shock and disorientation, not a little fear—but also bewilderment at how fragile the norms and traditions which formed the bedrocks of reality—my reality, as it turned out—had proven to be.

I don’t mean to rehash politics. The tumultuous events of the last twelve months have been a shock to the system as one by one our certainties about the way things are have been cast aside. New futures have been dreamed up and rapidly discarded. Tiny bubbles of consensual realities have surfaced and burst, or gained power, grown, come to englobe more and more people. The speed of change has been rapid, disorienting. But in the wake of all this I’ve begun to think about my own experiences critically as a way of examining what literature is and what it ought to do.

I grew up in a little town in Ontario, on the border with Port Michigan, and so I’m used to border crossings. I have two passports, and this means I can pass easily, more easily than most, choosing whichever identity is most likely to be granted access. I know that liminal spaces are dangerous, and multiple identities can be useful—but they are also cause for suspicion. If you are two things—or three things, or many things—then you are not easily one thing; you can pass but you still present a risk. And increasingly, as I’ve crossed borders over the last year I’ve registered a radical sense of difference, as the cultures of three countries I’ve felt as familiar as breathing, have shifted and re-aligned.

Weird fiction is a strange beast, an eclectic genre (or subgenre). It originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the works of authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James, and has since developed over the course of the last hundred years to encompass new writers such as China Miéville, M. John Harrison and others. Weird fiction is notable for its generic uncertainty; it exists at the boundary between science fiction and horror—perhaps—or between literary fiction and horror—perhaps—or between Lovecraft and whatever happens to be floating close to hand at any given moment—perhaps!

In 1933, in the lull between two world wars, a year which included the death of President Calvin Coolidge, an assassination attempt on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, the beginning of the Great Depression and the premiere of the original film version of King Kong at Radio City Music Hall, a middle-aged pulp writer by the name of H. P. Lovecraft began work on an article addressing weird fiction which would later be published in the June 1937 issue of the Amateur Correspondent. “I choose weird stories,” he wrote, “because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.” In this article Lovecraft sketched out the parameters of a kind of story interested in using the language of dreams and fragments, vague impressions, snatches of scientific discourse, in order to interrogate the nature of reality. This work, whatever we may think of the man himself and his influence on the field now, both of which have deservedly (in my opinion) required re-evaluation, is still ongoing—and still necessary.

In fact, it would seem that in our moment this work is more necessary than ever.

***

Recently, another short story writer interested in the nature of reality had something to say about a moment of catastrophic change. In 2011, Dominican author Junot Díaz interrogated the response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti in an article entitled “Apocalypses: What They Reveal” in The Boston Review. He wrote of the etymology of the word “apocalypse”, which means “to uncover and unveil.” There are three kinds of apocalypses, he argues: there are those that follow the actual imagined end of the world; there are those that comprise catastrophes which resemble the imagined end; and there are those disruptive events that provoke revelation. The apocalypse, he says, quoting James Berger, “is the End, or resembles the end, or explains the end.”

We are, by all accounts, no matter where you might fit yourself in the political spectrum, in an apocalyptic moment. We are witnessing the end of something, or an event that resembles it; we are searching for an account that can explain that end.

On the day following the announcement of the results of the American election I was teaching a group of writers at Anglia Ruskin University. It was an evening class. The students had always been a lively bunch, eager, full of questions and comments and jokes and affection for one another. But that day I didn’t know how to address them. One colleague had told me not to talk about Trump, to just leave it out of the room, but that seemed impossible. Politics, whatever we believe, is at the heart of writing; it is a vital part of living and participating in society.

I did the best thing I could think of in the situation. I cribbed something I’d heard from Ben Markovits, a lecturer at Royal Holloway: that the purpose of teaching creative writing is, on the one hand, to help students to become published (in the best cases)—but in all cases, regardless of the quality of the writing, it is to help students to become better witnesses to the world. I have thought hard on that maxim since I first heard it. We are all witnesses of the world. The tools of storytelling can help us, in this respect: they help us to understand our world, to observe it, to process it. This is a fundamentally imaginative act and it is an act with great power—the power to witness.

We are living in an apocalyptic moment and we have a duty to be witnesses. We have a duty to observe, to imagine, to speculate, and to create.

***

Weird fiction is a genre that knows about the apocalypse.

It is a genre used to dismantling the status quo and exploring what lies beyond the margins of what is known in the world. It is genre obsessed with bringing to light what wishes to remain hidden and dealing with the consequences of that revelation.

The rules of reality have changed. This is an age in which it seems impossible to count on shared assumptions. Gary Dunion on Twitter cleverly captured the zeitgeist by pulling together a number of headlines he had read recently:

• Suspect in North Korea killing “thought she was taking part in TV prank”
• Robert Mugabe could contest election as corpse, wife says
• German parents told to destroy doll that can spy on children

His caption? Season 4 of Black Mirror is coming along nicely…

Indeed.

The Twitter account for Black Mirror states: “Our job is to explain what’s happening to you as best we can.” As we have seen, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. I can only imagine the problem is going to get worse.

When Lovecraft talked about his short stories he imagined fear to be at the heart of the process of discovery and revelation. He said:

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.

In this respect, weird fiction seems a perfect vehicle for exploring our present moment. For it does seem to us, I think, to many of us, anyway, that time is out of joint; are we moving back to the happy utopia of the 1950s? Are we moving toward the dystopia of 1984? Are we returning or progressing? We do not know. We cannot decide. And the possibilities are not so much divergent as layered overtop of one another. We are existing in multiple moments at most, in multiple times at once.

And it is scary.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, in their introduction to The Weird compendium recognize the murky taxonomy of weird fiction writing:

Because The Weird often exists in the interstices, because it can occupy different territories simultaneously, an impulse exists among the more rigid taxonomists to find The Weird suspect, to argue it should not, cannot be, separated out from other traditions.

Weird fiction then is used to this strange overlapping, this occupation of simultaneous moments at once. It is a revelatory mode of writing, an apocalyptic mode of writing.

***

This volume was edited with the assistance of a group of students from my university who read through the solicited stories, made recommendations, debated the value of individual pieces and applied—and often questioned–the definition of weird fiction to them. Though the final selections were my own, our conversations shaped my thinking. One particular definition resonated strongly with me. It came from Marian Womack, a spectacular Spanish short story writer and translator whose work has appeared in a previous volume of this series.

She said:

We have a long tradition of [the Weird] in Spain, and this only increased during the dictatorship as new symbolic ways of communicating ideas were rehearsed in narratives (cinematic and literary). This kind of fantasy, in which “something is not quite right”, lends itself very well to Gothic sensibility, with its convoluted use of language and its tormented heroes. And then there is an element of irrationality built into the rational and, coming from a Spanish background, I interpret this as surrealism, for me this is a major element I recognize in weird writing, and one that is present in my own understanding of the weird.

Her response pointed away from, not toward, Lovecraft; it sketched out other directions for inquiry, other crises, other narratives, other points of view than those in which weird fiction has been traditionally grounded. Yet her definition struck me as capturing the essence of the weird tale, the embedding of irrationality within the rational: a way of writing which uses the one to expose the other, to make the reader realize that all supposedly rational systems are inherently irrational.

In thinking about the state of the genre, I’m reminded of an article written by a provocative critic, Jonathan McCalmont, who traced the history of the resurgence of weird fiction in the twentieth century. In particular, he focused on several months in 2003 in Britain when the TTA Press message boards were alive with a great discussion about the nature of the “New Weird”. The discussion was prompted in part by the success of Miéville who published The Scar in 2002 and received critical acclaim in the British Fantasy Award and Locus Awards of 2013.

The topic under debate was the rise of a new type of writing that seemed to have links with the past—a writing to which critics had begun to apply the label “New Weird”—but the forum conversations were riven with arguments from critics and authors alike. M. John Harrison succinctly summed up the problem. A lively figure who emerged as part of the New Wave in the 60s and 70s, he had seen the dangers of labelling a movement. He felt as if the energy of the writing might well be diminished through successive waves of commercialization:

…once the New Wave parameters were codified, there was a general softening-off as second generation writers stripped out the edgier stuff. I mean, I think it’s inevitable that people seeking to understand a movement select the similarities rather than the differences between exponents. That drives you towards the mean–the main stream. New writers imitate that, & before you know it, the energy’s gone, because it lay in the creative tensions between the different exponents.

His response shows a distinct suspicion of the rise of both the conventional and commercial frameworks which have tended to define new “waves” of writing historically and which would go on to attempt to define the so-called “New Weird”. He felt that if he didn’t speak up then he would have left it to others to describe what exactly it was that he was writing. And he believed that in and of itself would enervate the work.

But in describing the discussions that took place on that message board, Jonathan McCalmont said something that struck me as a sort of remedy to this:

Every cultural entity (be it a genre, a sub-genre, a scene, a movement, or a school) is born of a particular place and time… a sudden awareness that the wider culture has changed and that the old tools are no longer up to the job.

McCalmont suggested that the New Weird encapsulated one of those moments.

But where are we now?

Much has happened in the years since those debates and there are signs that weird fiction has been codified in exactly the way Harrison feared it would be. This anthology by definition is one of those forces for codification, attempting to sum up what weird fiction is in order to assess what is “the best.” The best of what? The best of that which is mixed and hybrid, the best of that which defies easy categorization, the best of what ought to remain unnamed. So—no new labels. No New New Weird or Post New Weird. Just weird.

A year ago I would have said there was a danger that weird fiction will—or has already begun to—lose its edge, moving from innocence, to plausibility to decadence, according to the formulation of Joanna Russ, in which originally distinct ideas and voices have become assimilated to the point of stale repetition.

And yet I believe we are in one of those moments of rapid re-imagining when the old tools of writing no longer seem up to the job.

The language of weird fiction speaks to the irrationality of our present, floundering systems. Whereas these stories have typically looked outward to generate their horror, from the undeniable xenophobia of some of Lovecraft’s writing to the misogyny embraced by the slasher flicks of the 70s; but it could just as easily look inward. To be horrified by one’s self, to feel a disconnection from what is labeled “traditional” or “natural” or “essential” is a vital step toward embracing a radical empathy with what might have heretofore been labeled as Other. This is work that weird fiction can do.

The stories within this volume were published in 2016. Many of them were almost certainly written before the upheavals which I have been talking about, yet each in my mind embodies the spirit of upheaval and revelation, madness, despair, horror and also, sometimes forgiveness, accommodation and change that seem to mark our apocalyptic moment. Among these writers are many names you may not recognize, and this is, to my mind, a good thing. They are writers from different countries, different languages, and different traditions. Many of these writers may not consider themselves to be weird writers in the strictest of terms and that as well is a good thing. As the editor of a volume that sets out to define the genre I confess I have the same reservations that M. John Harrison had in 2003: that weird fiction has on the one hand become too stable, too easily recognizable, and on the other so diffuse that the term no longer has any meaning at all. There is a danger with labels, but also an opportunity.

We are living in weird times. As I write, a snap election in the UK has just shocked the nation with another upending of the pollsters’ predictions and the future seems very uncertain. In moments such as this, time itself seems out of joint. We need new tools to interrogate our present moment. We need a new language to understand it, to articulate our concerns, our hopes, our dreams—our possibilities. The writers within this volume have been, first and foremost, witnesses to their world. Their stories suggest a new language, not only for weird fiction, but for a contemporary fiction that looks for new answers in unexpected places.

Helen Marshall,
Cambridge, England

The post The State of Weird appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Helen Marshall should be familiar to fans of Weird Fiction Review—she has contributed articles on Stephen King and Kelly Link. She’s an author of fiction as well. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After (2014), won both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. Marshall has a PhD in Medieval Studies and currently serves as Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England.

In terms of writing, I haven’t seen much from you since Gifts for the One Who Comes After. What have you been up to since then?

I’ve been working on a novel entitled Everything That Is Born, which is forthcoming from Random House Canada in 2019. It builds on my love of weird fiction and follows a seventeen-year-old girl named Sophie who lives in a version of Oxford devastated by flooding and disease. For the children in that world who are diagnosed with a mysterious condition, death comes to mean something else—an irresistible ushering towards transformation. After her younger sister drowns, Sophie resolves to steal her body from the morgue. Yet as Sophie watches her slow transformation, she discovers that perhaps there is hope after all—if she can be brave enough and strong enough to go after it. The novel springboards off my interest in catastrophes, modern and medieval, and attempts to find connections between the various crises we’re facing now and those of the Middle Ages, when the Black Death killed close to fifty percent of the population of Europe.

I know you did a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford in which you studied literature during the Black Death. Can you tell us more about your interest in the Black Death? Since disease has often been a theme in weird fiction, do you feel like your interests in the Black Death and weird fiction are related?

I became interested in the Black Death, in part, because I had expected there to be a clear link between the trauma of the catastrophe and the literature of the period. In Italy, for example, you have Boccaccio’s Decameron being set explicitly in the midst of an outbreak, with a group of nobles retreating to the countryside in order to tell stories to distract themselves. But in English literature I found a curious absence. Certainly, it does change the way literature is produced and the way in which writers (and others) are educated but it doesn’t leave the same kind of traces in the text themselves. Disease does have a link with weird fiction, I think, because diseases change us. They remind us that we live in our bodies and of how fragile our bodies are. And so my novel is interested in ways in which disease comes to figure within weird fiction, both as a cause of catastrophe and as a cause of change.

Since you’re a teacher, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on how you would teach weird fiction if you were to teach a course on it. How would you structure the course? What pieces would you include?

In fact, I have proposed a module along these lines for the MA in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin, which will also be adapted for the writing module in our new MA in Science Fiction and Fantasy. The module I teach next term, called “Writing the Apocalypse”, takes its inspiration from Junot Diaz’s article “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal” which argues the apocalyptic event must “in its disruptive moment clarify and illuminate ‘the true nature of what has been brought to end.’ It must be revelatory.” This module uses a number of “weird” cross genre texts to interrogate the nature of the revelations that a crisis can expose. Some of the texts we’re looking at include work by Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Margaret Atwood, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba. There are other writers I’d love to teach and have put on various syllabi: Etgar Keret, Kelly Link, Aliya Whiteley, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Paul Tremblay, M. John Harrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Usman T. Malik, Indra Das, Nina Allan, Shirley Jackson, Robert Shearman, oh all sorts. But this gives you some indication of the kind of writing I like. I’m interested in blurring the line between realist and non-realist fiction, genre and experimental fiction, and showing the value of both modes in revealing the strangeness of our world.

You moderated a panel at WorldCon 75 called “Rise of Weird Fiction.” Can you give us a brief synopsis of this talk?

I would say that my introduction to The Year’s Best Weird Fiction lays out my thinking on this and that much of the panel explored definitions of weird fiction, its history, and where it might go now.

Kathe Koja purposely didn’t read the first volume while Strantzas did read the previous volumes. Did you read any of the previous volumes? Why or why not?

I didn’t set out deliberately to read through the previous volumes though I had read a number of them before Mike Kelly talked to me. One of the strengths of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction as a series, I think, is that each editor has space to come to his or her own definitions of the weird. There is a huge scope for personal taste in this, particularly because the weird exists at the intersection of a number of traditions, genres and modes. I would expect my volume looks quite different from previous volumes for exactly that reason.

The lineup for YBWF4 is very diverse. The stories come from authors from all different walks of life and backgrounds. This has been a somewhat controversial topic in weird fiction and I was wondering how as an editor and academic you think we should value diversity against other merits like the quality of a story’s prose.

I think it is a mistake to set up diversity as a category that seems to be opposed to quality of prose. The problem is that stories are considered good for a variety of reasons: technical skill, freshness of voice, participation in a tradition, manipulation of tropes, surprise, comfort, familiarity. Beyond a certain point, choice is about taste and so the argument that a more diverse list means lowering quality for some stories simply doesn’t hold true for me. There are more people writing and submitting stories than ever. There is no lack of quality short stories!

Some have commented on the fact that few of the names in my line-up were well-known. That’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t indicate any decline in quality in the work of the usual suspects but rather that I was interested more in writing that was on the fringe of what we consider “weird.” Weird writing is by definition marginal or fringe—or it should be—because once writing becomes mainstream then it becomes increasingly familiar. This is the problem that the horror genre has encountered. When a mode of writing is predicated on an emotion that comes in part from some element of surprise or discomfort—as weird fiction does—then it needs to reinvent itself on a regular basis. What is shocking one year can be assimilated very quickly. So the weird ought to be continually looking outside of itself for new influences and new voices.

I will say that I did need to examine my own processes pretty closely. Initially I drew up a long list that was about a fifty-fifty split between male and female writers (to the extent I could identify them based on their names). The first pass at the short list saw a large number of the female names dropped and I had to stop myself and ask why. And the answers I often came to was that the male writers were more familiar to me, I knew their names, I knew the traditions they were working in better, sometimes I knew them personally. So I deliberately went back and drew up a second short list, forcing myself to ask what elements of the story I was prioritizing and if there were stories I was veering away from simply because they didn’t fit as clearly into the tradition. Which is good, I think. Because the tradition, let’s face it, is not particularly diverse. There are plenty of women writing in non-realist modes but more of them have found success in literary or mainstream publishing. So unless we start searching out material from outside the regular stable of writers we recognize it will be hard for the tradition to change. But as new voices enter the field I suspect they’ll encourage others to follow.

Were there any trends you spotted in weird fiction while working on YBWF4? Any things you’d like to see more of or less of?

I would like to see less Cthulhu and less Lovecraft. It feels anathema and weirdly dangerous to say this, though, which says something about the depth of his influence and the commitment of writers to this tradition. When I was reading anthologies for the Shirley Jackson Awards close to half of what was submitted was Lovecraft-themed. There are many writers doing interesting and innovative things with Lovecraft at the moment—Kij Johnson and Victor Lavalle are great examples but far from the only ones!—but there’s just too much of it at present. It’s colonizing the voices of new writers. Yes, there is a test of skill in taking the themes of another writer and responding to them, innovating within a tradition, producing work that speaks back to its sources. But I do feel as if we’re in a moment where, in the words of T. S. Eliot, last year’s words belong to last year’s language. Contemporary writers need space to develop a new language and it’s difficult to do that when you’re commissioned to use someone else’s words, tropes, and themes.

That being said, I can’t fault any writer for taking a commission. Writing is hard work and anthologies can offer steady, more secure work.

Can you tell us about a couple of stories that you included in YBWF4? 

It’s a book of stories that I would happily give to anyone to say: this is what I like! Some of my favourite finds were “Waxy” by Camilla Grudova. This story was published by Granta and was included in her current short story collection The Doll’s Alphabet. It is an unpleasant, deeply confrontational piece that reminds me of something of a cross between Kelly Link and Thomas Ligotti. I really enjoyed Malcolm Devlin’s story “The End of Hope Street” which reminds me in some ways of the work of Julio Cortazar and also Stephen King in its focus on small communities. It studies the lives of a group of people in the suburbs in which houses, one by one, become unlivable and the survivors must go live with their neighbours. It captures themes of migration, which are interesting to me, but also the deep discomfort of English politeness, which can be tremendously funny and tremendously sad. “Beating the Bounds” by Aki Shilz is barely a weird fiction story at all. It’s hard to tell if it is true or not. It is an odd history of Hanwell, a west London suburb, told in an experimental style. But I loved it because it questioned my hold on reality and it made a pedestrian place come alive with possibilities. Those are only a few of the stories, and readers will find in this anthology examples of nature writing, a sentient race of dolphins, exorcisms, zombies and even a Cthulhu story or two.

In both your introduction and the article you wrote on Stephen King’s “The Man in the Black Suit” you talked about how you felt unsettled over recent events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. You go on to connect this feeling with the Weird. Do you have any thoughts on why we as readers enjoy this feeling as a form of entertainment even when considering our uncertain times?

We live in uncertain times. We have always lived in uncertain times. I think what makes the weird inherently attractive is that it speaks to a part of us that knows, consciously or not, that the rules we play by, the realities we choose to agree to and normalize, have cracks in them. Increasingly, I think that putting realist modes and non-realistic modes at opposite ends of the spectrum does a disservice to both. Realism is conservative in that it tells us what we believe is real is in fact real. But it isn’t. It’s also consensual, questionable, open to interpretation, and often ignorant of other, competing narratives. We are in a moment when the consensus is beginning to shift. Non-realist modes seem to help us get a handle on this faster because they teach us the consensus was never absolute to begin with. People were excluded, people dissented. This breakdown is enjoyable at some level even as it’s also frightening. It means elements of our lives which we lacked the ability or will to question suddenly seem disputable, something we can fight back against. Breakdown gives us an opportunity to see what lies beneath, for better or worse. Increasingly what strikes me as strange about Lovecraft’s fiction is the sense that once the monstrous is encountered, the only options are madness, forgetting or death. And that in its own way is a conservative way of thinking: there are many more options. Resistance, recuperation, remembering, rebirth. This is the energy that comes from the collapse of the consensus—the possibility of change.

How has being an editor on YBWF4 informed your writing and teaching? Is it something you’d like to do again or do you prefer to focus more on writing and teaching in the future?

I loved this experience. I loved how it gave me license to read the field and to explore what lay outside of the field, as we tend to look at it. I would do it again, absolutely.

The post Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 4: An Interview with Helen Marshall appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.