Torn Pages Discovered in the Vest Pocket of an Unidentified Tourist (note the rust-red discoloration in the lower left corner) AN EXCERPT FROM HOEGBOTTON’S COMPREHENSIVE TRAVEL GUIDE TO THE SOUTHERN CITY OF AMBERGRIS Chapter 77: An In-depth Explanation For the City’s Apparent Lack of Sanitation Workers (And Why Tourists Should Not Be Afraid) Upon the […]
This year marks the first time that The Twenty Days of Turin, written by Giorgio De Maria in 1975, has been translated into English. Its translation couldn’t be any more timely: De Maria’s novel, partly a reaction to the violent fascism that plagued Italy during the 1970s, perfectly reflects the bleak political landscape and uncertain times we find ourselves […]
Ray (R.B.) Russell is an English author, publisher, composer, and filmmaker. His written works include numerous short stories and novellas, the most recent of which is The Stones Are Singing. Russell’s fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award, and works such as Bloody Baudelaire and The Dark Return of […]
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 […]
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. Stefan Grabiński (1887 – 1936) was a Polish writer of horror fiction who considered himself an expert on […]
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 […]
The follow story originally appeared in The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes (Two Dollar Radio, 2014). It is reprinted here with permission of its author. An interview with Rombes is also available today. The problem with The Insurgent, as Laing told me before handing it over to me, was that it had […]
Back in 2014, we featured an excerpt from Nicholas Rombes’ novel The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing alongside an interview with Rombes about his novel. Today we’re featuring a story that appears in the same novel called “The Insurgent” and to go along with it, we’ve got another interview with Rombes but this time we’ve asked him general […]
Kij Johnson (b. 1960) is an American author of several novels and dozens of short stories of fantasy and science fiction. She received a BA from St. Olaf College, an MFA from North Carolina State University, and has taught writing at Louisiana State University and the University of Kansas, where she is associate director at The […]
The Weird is a notoriously nebulous mode to define. Ask ten different authors or readers to define the genre and you’re likely to get ten different responses. But this aspect of Weird fiction need not be a bad thing. In fact, one of the great things about the Year’s Best Weird Fiction series from Undertow Publications is that it leverages the ambiguity […]