This is the first episode of a projected 12-episode series that will run exclusively at Weirdfictionreview.com, usually on Monday. Later this week, we will feature an interview with the webcomic’s creator, Leah Thomas.
“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 […]
One of our favorite anthologies this year has been The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron (Word Horde). Edited by Ross E. Lockhart and Justin Steele, The Children of the Old Leech features all new stories created with elements straight out of the weird fiction of author Laird Barron. It’s an exquisite collection of […]
The beach. The cove. Children were playing a brutal game of king of the hill on the pillar I’d once claimed as mine. Behind them, in the shadows of the cliff face, a temporary town, global nomads on the lam, their tents and sleeping rolls spiraling inward, three, four, five layers deep. I clung to the […]
Falling. Falling. Am I no more than some goldfish to be plopped back into the cold water when the sun runs so warm over my scales? Does the eater of the dead deserve no more ceremony than this? Oh, but all of a sudden I am ravenous for so much more than the dead. It is life I would […]
Swim into my mouth and straighten the needle, for I have lost the thread. Ridley DeLeure, I will never know you now, for the shade I pursue has folded his wings around the images and words. My digestive juices have eaten through the parts that might tell me why you came here and not some kinder place. Did […]
Swim into my mouth and I will tell you who you are. Have I said this part before? It’s impossible for either of us to know for sure; I can’t recall, and you’re certainly in no position to answer. The same forgetful straits that washed you down here confine utterance to the randomly spurting intervals between your death […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: Today and tomorrow, we’ll be featuring two stories from Marcel Schwob’s 1892 collection The King in the Golden Mask, forthcoming from Wakefield Press in a new translation by Kit Schluter: “The Plague” and “The Eunuchs.” The King in the Golden Mask has never been translated in its entirety, though a book of selected writings by Schwob was published […]
As Jacques-Stephen Alexis articulated in Paris, 1956 at the first International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, the Caribbean has always been a crossroads of civilizations, even before its multifarious encounters with Europe after Columbus. Published in the quarterly magazine Présence Africaine in the same year, Alexis’ piece “Du Réalisme Merveilleux des Haïtiens” covered a wide range […]
I confess I know little, and almost all of it circumstantial, about this atmospheric sketch of a gutter-dwelling worm. It was written by André Bay (1916−2013), for more than four decades a senior editor at Éditions Stock. Among the diverse writers he championed there were Jorge Amado, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Wolfe, Anaïs Nin, and Virginia Woolf. His […]