— 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.

The third entry in the Year’s Best Weird Fiction series is guest edited by author and editor Simon Strantzas. Strantzas should be no stranger to fans of Weird fiction. He recently edited the Robert Aickman tribute anthology Aickman’s Heirs which won two Shirley Jackson Awards—one for best Edited Anthology and one for Lynda E. Rucker’s story “The Dying Season.” Strantzas was gracious enough to stop by Weird Fiction Review to answer questions about how he defines Weird fiction and how he selected stories for YBWF3. From his responses, I find it interesting that while not every fan may agree with his definition of Weird fiction, Strantzas still provides a very clear and critical framework for how he understands it, along with some insights into what the Weird looks like today and where it may be headed. As a side note, I would also encourage interested readers to check out our interviews with Laird Barron, who edited the first volume, and Kathe Koja, who edited last year’s second volume, in order to gain some perspective into how the Weird is viewed differently by other practitioners.

Weird Fiction Review: Did you read the previous years’ volumes? I’m wondering how you think your selection of stories differ from those of Laird Barron or Kathe Koja.

Simon Strantzas: I dipped into both volumes upon their release, picking my way through the stories that were new to me, revisiting some that weren’t. It seems to me that the first volume was focused on giving a very broad overview of the what constitutes Weird fiction (or at least did so at the time), whereas the second drilled down into a side of the field that hews closer to Fantasy than Horror. This makes it the perfect follow-up in my eyes. Michael Kelly’s mandate for the Year’s Best Weird Fiction series is to show the diversity of the field, and that second volume proved to be a jolt to those who thought they knew what “Weird fiction” was—both those that embraced the term, and those that felt alienated by it. It was a bold and impressive choice, and I think immediately it freed the series from spiraling down a predictable hole.

My own sensibilities about what Weird fiction is and what makes it interesting differ in some ways greatly from those two volumes, yet also stay on perhaps more traditional paths. I suspect I have a greater interest in British and European Horror than the previous editors do, which is likely reflected in my choices. I also lean closer to the Horror side of the Weird fiction spectrum, so many stories I find the most interesting explore the Horror mode in some way. One thing I hope to see more of in future volumes in an influx of writers from outside the Western world, though that carries a number of hurdles, language barriers being only the most obvious.

WFR: In your introduction, you make the case that Weird fiction is just another name for Horror fiction. Would you say that they are completely interchangeable? Or are there perhaps stories that are Weird but not Horror or vice versa?

Strantzas: I wouldn’t call them interchangeable, no. I consider one to be a subset of the other. My argument (laid out, I hope, much more cogently in the introduction to the book) is simply that though there has been fiction called Weird for a long time, the contemporary use of the phrase is relegated to describing the newer forms Horror fiction is taking in this post-millennial age. It’s a term often (not always, but often) used as a short-hand to suggest that because these forms are new and different, they are inherently better than what preceded them, so they need to be divorced completely from what came before so there’s no confusion. “Weird” is too often used as a form of elitism.

One has to remember, though, that all these names are but artificial constructs created to examine and categorize fiction after it’s been written in order to study or sell it. Authors (good ones, at least) don’t tend to worry about such categorizations while writing. What makes weird fiction “Weird” is the author’s desire to tell stories in a different way or with different tools than have been traditionally used. But that’s the same for all leading movements of art, I’d think. I don’t argue that Weird fiction is an interesting and distinct place, I just argue from the perspective that it’s not far enough from its precedents that it can be branched. The Weird is simply new Horror.

WFR: You also acknowledge in your introduction that there’s no consensus around what constitutes Weird fiction. I wonder if you have any theories around why the Weird is such a nebulous genre.

Strantzas: If we accept the tenet that Weird is its own mode, I suspect its nebulousness comes from its relative newness. Established modes like Horror and Science Fiction have existed long enough, and are distinct enough, to have developed tropes and clichés that define them. Should I describe a story where a family moves into a house where a person was murdered, and they suffer through a night of strange noises and unexplained premonitions, you would be hard pressed to find a reader who wouldn’t define that as Horror; just as a story about a rocket ship and an alien planet whose society is both ancient and advanced would be considered Science Fiction. It’s easy for someone to identify these modes. But Weird? Just what exactly is that? Is there a story construct that everyone would agree on as being Weird? The mode is not codified in the same way. In fact, everyone has their own slightly different impression of Weird means. And I don’t consider that a problem. Weird hasn’t existed as a defined (or loosely-defined) thing long enough to develop its own mode-defining hackneyed baggage—it’s still primarily filled with stories on the forefront of literature. It’s and exciting place, but I do wonder if it requires that codification to remain relevant to readers. I remember a similar issue with “Dark Fantasy” a decade or so ago. It was another term bandied around by people who didn’t want to use the word Horror to describe the fiction they liked, but just as Weird fiction it was nebulously defined, and once a generation of readers grew past the term it fell out of favor. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone called a Dark Fantasy author without irony or derision. But perhaps I travel in the wrong circles.

WFR: There are a number of writers in Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 3 that are well established (Ramsey Campbell, Tim Lebbon, Reggie Oliver, etc). Were there any writers that were new? Perhaps new to Weird fiction or even new to you?

Strantzas: About a third of the stories selected for the book were from authors I’d never before read. Michael Kelly does a great job at casting a wide net over the field, looking not only for new voices, but new voices in atypical venues for Weird fiction readers. As a result, the stories he sent me to consider were widely varied in style and subject matter. Some were quiet, some explicit; some were realistic while others fantastic. In essence, he was able to provide a healthy spectrum of work to consider, which made my job harder, but much more interesting. I read each story blind so I might assign it an unbiased ranking on several different levels. Then, on re-read, I ranked each again and took an average. This whittled down my list of serious candidates for the book. At that point it was only a matter of re-reading them again to puzzle out the best fit for style and variation. Simple, but not so simple at all. When dealing with the best of the field, selecting which “best” is better than another is a bit of a fool’s errand. In some case, it boiled down to what appealed most to my own sensibilities. The book as a whole is a reflection of the sort of fiction I enjoy, and another volume filled with dissimilar stories could easily have been assembled from the same material and been as good. The stories in all these best-of series are never the qualifiable best of the year, but rather some of the best that are being presented for the readers’ review.

WFR: Do you consciously strive for a balance of well-known and newer writers, or does this balance arrive more or less as a natural part of the editorial process?

Strantzas: Once I was in the final stage of picking the table of contents, I went through the narrowed-down list I’d assembled with my blinders off and linked each titles to its author. This allowed me to make corrections in balance I might not have been able to otherwise. When I ran into a situation where I had two stories I liked equally well, I considered other factors outside the story to lean toward a final list that was balanced by sex and nationality and experience. I could easily have put together a volume of stories written by only straight white men, but I don’t think that properly reflects the field or the talent in it. These best-of books are more than a book of favorites—instead, they function as an overview of what’s happening in the field and what’s exciting. For me, different voices are what’s exciting, especially new voices. I was thrilled to be able to gives some fledgling writers their first taste of being in a curated best-of anthology, and I have no doubt this won’t be the last time for any of them. I must also admit I was excited to be able to include a new story by Robert Aickman in the volume. Aickman’s work has been transformative for me, and it was surely kismet that I should be invited to co-edit YBWF during the year a major new story of his was first published.

WFR: Speaking of Aickman, you talked about the Strange Tale in your introduction. What are the hallmarks of the Strange Tale? Were there any stories in YBWF3 that you would categorize as Strange Tales or Aickmanesque?

Strantzas: I’d probably call the Aickman tale “Aickmanesque”, but it’s not the only one. I see the Strange tale as a more European style of story telling, as opposed to the American style of Weird fiction. The former is weighed down with such a long history that the stories tend to turn inward, whereas the latter are turned outward in exploration of what the world and the cosmos has to offer. American Weird is thus more direct, and more showy that the Strange. (And, again, let me restate that these are arbitrary divisions intended to aid in understanding movements, not define them). Most of the British writers in the book wrote stories I’d call Strange, and the American writers wrote what I’d call Weird, but this was not always the case. I’d suggest the British D.P. Watt’s story falls closer to the Weird scale, and American ex-pat Lynda E. Rucker’s tale falls closer to the Strange. It’s about atmosphere and mood, and plenty of great stories in this book and elsewhere entwine the two irrevocably.

WFR: You’ve worked in the Weird fiction field for quite a while. Did you spot any trends while editing YBWF3?

Strantzas: I came away from the experience with two observations. The first was that the first-person narrative is popular among many writers of Weird fiction. I’m not certain why this is, but I suspect it’s the same at the vanguard of other modes and fields as well. Perhaps the first person narrative is more engaging because it immediately establishes a rapport between reader and narrator, providing a voyeuristic look into another’s life. Or perhaps the subjectivity of first-person works well with Weird fiction because it allows bizarre encounters and effects to be delivered through experience-by-proxy, which heightens the emotional connection. Whatever the reason, I found after reading through a number of first-person stories that encountering one written from the more traditional third-person perspective was an oasis.

The second thread I noticed deals primarily with what newer writers are bringing to this sort of fiction. We used to speak a lot about cross-genre fiction, but whereas once each mode was its own silo with the occasional writer attempting to mix the contents of one with another, newer writers don’t seem to recognize the existence of those silos at all. Instead, they write as though all the speculative fiction fields were one, and glide between aspects without any sense of inhibition. Within the last few years we’ve seen the field shift in this direction out from under those authors who were working at Weird fiction’s vanguard a decade ago, authors who were still working through the influence of the boom period on their fiction and on the field as a whole. These new writers coming of age now not only missed the influence of that boom period, but because the field became so fallow in its aftermath that they instead found their inspirations elsewhere. That they’re bringing those influences back into our recently revitalized field only bodes well for where it’s going.

WFR: How did editing YBWF3 compare to editing other anthologies like Aickman’s Heirs? I know you’ve talked before about editing fiction after Shadows Edge and you said that you enjoyed writing more. After the success of Aickman’s Heirs, which won a Shirley Jackson Award for best anthology, do you see yourself editing more in the future? What about in the near term?

Strantzas: I edited Shadows Edge because I wanted to understand what the editing process was like, and I discovered I didn’t care much for it. Well, that’s not entirely true; I do love reading new stories by my favourite authors, and I do like introducing readers to names they may not have been previously familiar with. And as much work as editing a book is, it’s still less work than writing a book. But that aside I found the task to be a burden that took time away from my own writing, an endeavour I am much more passionate about than editing. So, I decided then that Shadows Edge would to be my first and only foray into editing. And for a time it was.

When the current wave of tribute anthologies we are going through now was initially ramping up, it occurred to me that I might enjoy contributing to one that focused on Robert Aickman. His influence on the field was becoming obvious, and the timing appeared perfect. But no one else seemed to realize that, and after a while I had to accept that if such a book was ever going to exist, it would have to be because I made it happen. So my second (and, I was adamant, final) foray into editing occurred because I saw a hole that needed filling and filled it. As for the award and its nominations, I’m certainly very happy with the acclaim, and I think the notice the book and many of its stories has garnered is proof that my initial instincts about its need to exist were correct.

Both these books involved me assembling a list of my favourite writers and determining who would be able to write great material related to the theme. It’s almost the reverse of a volume like Year’s Best Weird Fiction, where I was reading stories by authors I didn’t know, authors who were exploring their own themes. Editing a book like that requires putting one’s own feelings aside and absorbing each story as a single unit, and only at the end of the process determining how those units interplay with one another, and if there are any general themes or undercurrents that unite them.

As to editing another book in the near (or distant) future, you know what they say: never say never. But there are no plans, firm or inchoate, at present.

WFR: Do you have any projects you’re currently working on that you’d like share with our readers?

Strantzas: I’m somewhere in the weeds of my fifth collection of short fiction. It’s slowly coming together and I’m hopeful it will be completed and polished for a 2018 release. If all goes well, it will be as much of departure from the last book as that book was from the one that preceded it. After that I’ll be turning my attention back to the short novel I’ve been writing for the past few years. I don’t know when that will see print, or even if, but I’ve grown quite fond of the story as time has progressed and I’m eager to finally see how it all ends. Should it work out well, I have another few ideas for novels that will likely take me the rest of my life to complete. Between these projects, short fiction will continue to appear sporadically in magazines, journals, and anthologies. I have three due in various books that have fallen behind on their publishing schedules, so I’m not sure when they’ll appear, but I remain ever hopeful and patient.

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With an author line up featuring Karen Joy Fowler, Caitlin R. Kiernan and Karin Tidbeck, you’re in fairly safe territory (or should I say, weird waters) in expecting high-quality stories from the collection. From the opening imagery of floating purple flowers made of bleached human heads in Nathan Ballingrud’s The Atlas of Hell, this collection doesn’t disappoint.

Where weird fiction can often fall down is in treading the line between maintaining an undisclosed threat and slipping into vagueness, so the stories that stand out have a strong sense of voice and the confidence to deliver it. Stories such as Carmen Maria Machado’s sinister The Husband Stitch, which caused me to visibly shiver in my seat when the stitch in question is revealed. Or Hidden in the Alphabet, where Charles Wilkinson skillfully unpicks the strands of family relationships and memory, leaving just enough for the reader to break down the events that came before.

While the quality of stories in this collection is high, sometimes there is that one rare story that stands above the others. In this collection it is Julio Cortázar’s tale of mancuspia farmers Headache, translated by Michael Cisco. By bombarding the reader with vertiginous sensations, Cortázar produces the kind of sophisticated storytelling where the sensation experienced by the reader reflects that of the narrator. Headache perfectly captures that sideswiping feeling weird fiction should deliver, the glancing back saying “What was that?” as something shoots past faster than vision.

Also of note is Amanda C. Davis’ masterclass in flash fiction, Loving Armageddon, where a husband has a hand grenade for a heart. While the heart replaced with a mechanical item is not a new concept, her execution is succinct and demonstrates depth in only a few pages.

From other stories, it is a single line that will haunt me. “This is the blue hour. The ravenous night.” Siobhan Carroll, Wendigo Nights. “Someone once told me dust has no religion.” Usman T. Malik, Resurrection Points. Or the original imagery in Isabel Yap’s A Cup of Salt Tears, of throwing an engraved cucumber into the river to prevent the Kappa from stealing you away.

In examining the collection as a whole, a number of themes stand out: women young and not-so-young manipulated by sinister forces (Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story, The Girls Who Go Below, Bus Fare, A Cup of Salt Tears); amputation and limbic damage (The Husband Stitch, So Sharp the Blood Must Flow, A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide); and monsters, always monsters.

Each year a new editor takes on the challenge of Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and this year’s best table of contents has been released here. Michael Kelly is the series editor, who read a whopping 2,800 submissions for this book alone. The wider value of these ongoing collections is gathering an understanding of movements in the contemporary weird, so that in future years they can be compared. It’s always wonderful finding a collection twenty years later, and recognizing the achievements of those names in the years since.

Here’s to many more weird years.

The post Review: Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume Two appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Cover art by Tomasz Alen Kopera. Design by Vince Haig.

If there was any doubt about the resurgence of interest in weird fiction, they should be assuaged by the October publication of Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 2 from Undertow Books. Looking back to last year’s debut of the series, it might have seemed perilous to risk launching such an endeavor with so many other popular “Best Of…” anthologies in the fields of horror, dark fiction, and related genres that intersect with the weird. However, the release of this second annual volume would seem to indicate that the series is finding its own unique space and an audience that is hungry for more.

For Volume 2, series editor Michael Kelly and guest editor Kathe Koje have pulled together a remarkable table of contents, with authors ranging from the well-known (Julio Cortázar, Karen Joy Fowler, Caitlín R. Kiernan, etc) to the new and promising (Usman T. Malik, Isabel Yap, etc ) and everywhere in between. The stories have been selected from publications as diverse as Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com, Crossed Genres, and even WeirdFictionReview.com itself. These are only a few of the primary sources from which these pieces have been curated, and it may serve as an excellent indicator of the health of the field that there are so many venues for high-quality work in the weird.

We caught up with guest editor Kathe Koja to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the second entry in this anthology series.

WFR: Give us an idea of how this volume came together. Also, why did you decide to edit it?

Mike Kelly asked if I was interested, and I was! Simple as that.

WFR: What sort of criteria did you look for in your weird fiction stories when deciding whether to put it in the anthology? What makes a weird fiction story successful?

All pleasure in reading is idiosyncratic. So what makes a story — whether weird fiction or not — successful, is subjective, beyond the writer’s ability to write well, to make “characters” become individuals, to create and present a narrative — that’s a given, that’s the price of admission.The rest, for me, came down to each story’s sensibility, to authorial voice: Was the story one that spoke to me? If it did, it went onto my list.

WFR: I’m interested to know how you think your volume compares or contracts to the first volume (edited by Laird Barron). Do you think there were some stories you chose that Barron wouldn’t have?

I wanted to come to the task without any guideposts or editorial presence, however subtle, from the first YBWF, so I scrupulously did not read it. With YBWF2 finished, I can be a civilian reader again!

WFR: Were there any stories you felt deserved inclusion but for one reason or another you were unable—maybe copyrights prevented you or you felt the story didn’t fit in some way?

I was able to include all my choices, thanks to Mike hunting down permissions and doing all the editorial heavy lifting.

WFR: Do you feel like you’ve gained anything from editing YBWF2, and would you ever consider being an editor again?

It’s a tremendous amount of work. When I received the stories from Mike, I read seriously, and tried to keep my mental palate cleared between stories, which meant not gulping them down, letting the stories sit, then rereading. All this takes time, which was by far the hardest aspect of the job.

WFR: What projects are you currently working on, or what have you worked on since YBWF2?

I finished a new YA novel; and the third book of the UNDER THE POPPY trilogy, THE BASTARDS’ PARADISE, is about to come out (November) from Roadswell Editions, so I’m planning launch events in NY and elsewhere, as well as being a special guest at this year’s World Fantasy Convention. And I’ve adapted, and am directing and producing, DRACULA with my performative fiction ensemble, nerve, for a Janaury 2016 debut. Whew …

WFR: What advice would you give to writers of the Weird who may be seeking to be included in future volumes?

Make sure Mike Kelly gets your stories! Mike was diligent and sent many, many calls for submissions, through many different channels of communication: writers, make sure you keep your ears open. No editor can love and choose what s/he doesn’t get to read.

The post Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 2 appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Laird Barron, with countless anthologized short stories and a recognizable and respected name in weird fiction, was a formidable choice for first guest editor. Barron recently won the Bram Stoker award for his collection The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Michael Kelly’s weird fiction credentials are no less impressive with two collections, a novel, and a yearly anthology of weird fiction called Shadows & Tall Trees. The first Year’s Best Weird Fiction hits shelves October 7th (although the ebook is out now) and needless to say, we were incredibly excited to talk with Kelly and Barron about finally having a best-of series.

Weird Fiction Review: Was anything special about this year in terms of starting the series? Was there maybe a tipping point in that you felt there was enough Weird Fiction being published to sustain a yearly best-of series?

Michael Kelly: Many have claimed that there has been a renaissance of ‘Weird Fiction’ in the past few years. In a sense that is true–simply in the fact that there’s been renewed interest in the writings of Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman, and others, along with the emergence of ‘new’ voices like Caitlin R. Kiernan, Sofia Samatar, etc. But I believe there has always been an interest in the weird mode, and that its proponents, readers and writers, numbered as many fans as other modes of literature. Several specialty presses–Tartarus, Ex Occidente, Egaeus, Swan River, to name a few–have been publishing and promoting weird fiction for a number of years. Ellen Datlow and Gardner Dozois, bless them, have been editing their respective ‘Year’s Best’ anthologies for three decades now. Truthfully, there could have–and some would say should have–been a ‘Year’s Best Weird’ for 3 decades (or more), as well. It’s an idea I’d been cultivating for a few years, and thanks to the power of crowd-sourcing it’s a vision that is about to be realized. So, there wasn’t any real tipping point. I knew that there would always be enough material to fill the volume. Indeed, we could have filled two volumes.

Laird Barron: Weird fiction has been resurgent over the past decade. The VanderMeers have championed the cause through a couple of anthologies and the founding of a major weird-oriented web site. Weird’s relatives—horror and fantasy—are well-represented by year’s best anthologies. Genre categories often overlap, but a number of people have rightly noted that a gap remains when it comes to the weird. Michael Kelly stepped in and addressed that lack. With the proliferation of the small press, there is an abundance of excellent horror, dark, fantasy, and weird fiction circulating. We could have easily done a second volume.

WFR: Give us an idea of how this first volume came together. Like how it came about, who did what, etc.

MK: I knew from the get-go that I wanted Laird Barron to be my partner in crime. No-one, in my opinion, encapsulates the contemporary weird fiction movement as much as Laird does. He’s a treasure. And he’s got extensive contacts. Laird reached out to his many colleagues for suggestions, (reading hundreds of stories), while I manned the slush pile, reading upwards of 2700 stories. Laird’s task was especially difficult as most of his reading involved stories that were exceptional to begin with (and fit our criteria), while a vast majority of the submissions I read could be dismissed relatively easily due to poor writing or the fact they just didn’t fit the weird mode. So, I would pass along the best weird tales from my readings. Laird, though, was given the unenviable task of ultimate arbiter. Because of rights issues, there were a couple stories we weren’t able to secure, unfortunately.

LB: Mike asked me to helm the inaugural volume. He’s an experienced editor and publisher. His vision for the series appealed to me—a guest editor each year to infuse the series with new blood while Mike acts as curator. Simple and elegant. For Volume One, he read slush and passed along prospects. My own search ranged far afield. I managed to secure most of the stories I wanted. However, as Mike notes, due to rights conflicts, we were unable to reprint a couple of pieces I had my heart set on. In addition to slush-reading, Mike handled the business end of the project. That left me free to agonize over the final table of contents and the honorable mention roster. It was a great partnership and a great experience.

WFR: Looking over the table of contents for YBWF, I see that there’s a nice mixture of established writers along with several newer and lesser known writers. Was that purely coincidental? Should we expect more newer writers in future volumes?

MK: We couldn’t ignore the new voices. They had to be heard. We are witnessing a remarkable era for weird fiction, and the inaugural volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction reflects that. So, indeed, purely coincidental that we have managed to compile such a great mix. I’ve no doubt that weird fiction will continue to offer us exciting and relevant new voices.

LB: I made an effort to dig deep when assembling this ToC. The mix is a function of abundant talent and fortuitous timing. It so happened that 2013 saw a wave of terrific work from newer and neglected authors.

WFR: What sort of criteria did you look for in your weird fiction stories when deciding whether to put it in the anthology? What makes a weird fiction story good?

MK: While it may be hard to codify and attach a genre label to weird fiction, to me, weird fiction, at its best, is an intersecting of themes and ideas that explore and subvert the laws of Nature. The Other. The Alien. A sense of unease. These, I believe, were our benchmarks. If a story can touch on those things and resonate on multiple levels, then you’ve a good tale.

LB: I selected for weirdness quotient, and of course that’s a subjective parameter. I selected for excellence; another subjective category and one that is informed by my personal judgment. I selected for a variety of themes and tropes. I selected for diversity in the voices represented. I feel that the utility of a truly great year’s best is more nuanced than simply declaring a handful of stories “the best.” Hartwell and Cramer have referred to such endeavors as snapshots of the field. I interpreted my job as to take the widest angle, highest fidelity shot possible. The weird covers a lot of ground. I attempted honor that.

A proper weird story may consist of any number of elements, but at the core it’s concerned with irrationality, with the alien, and strangeness. Reality is mutable and subject to contravention. Dislocation and dissonance prevail.

WFR: Were there any stories that were really good but didn’t fit into the anthology because they didn’t maybe fit the weird fiction label?

MK: The weird mode, perhaps more than any other mode, is a nebulous thing. It isn’t a genre, as such. It encompasses horror, the macabre, fantasy, science fiction, and other, chiefly speculative, genres. Because a tale has some weird shit going on in it, that doesn’t necessarily make it a Weird tale. There were quite a few excellent tales, truth be told, that we didn’t deem a fit. Many superlative, psychological horror stories, some Westerns, some mediaeval fantasy. These were good stories, yes. Just not Weird stories.

LB: Indeed. As I’ve said, a weird tale may be a composite of different genres or traditions. To qualify for this year’s best, the primary component had to be weirdness. I read a lot of wonderfully dark fantasy and even darker horror, among other genres, that contained some degree of weirdness, but insufficient to make the case for their inclusion. Sorting the borderline cases was a tough time.

WFR: The idea of having a different guest editor each volume is rather interesting. What’s sort of the idea or goal behind this?

MK: I’ve always admired The Best American Series of books from Houghton-Mifflin. Each of their many volumes has a Guest Editor and a Series Editor, so that the flavor of subsequent volumes is different from the previous year’s volume. When I was first cultivating the idea of a Year’s Best Weird Fiction I knew that this was the course I wanted to take. There’s no doubt that the current editors of the various ‘Year’s Best’ anthologies do a great job. They have exemplary taste, and I enjoy their books. But it’s their taste. I like different flavors, different perspectives. What would Laird Barron’s book be like? How about a volume from Kathe Koja? It’s a unique, fresh vision from each editor. Different voices and different approaches make life, and books, interesting.

LB: It’s perhaps the strongest aspect of Mike’s vision for the series. You get consistent editorial overview with Mike as curator. Then every year you bring in a fresh perspective with a guest editor. The system is geared toward diversity.

WFR: I’ve always felt there were different types of weird fiction. For example, there’s American-based weird horror, which seems to be graphic and terrifying, and European-based “strange tales,” which focus more on creating an unsettling and disturbing atmospheres. Did you notice these at all when working on YBWF? Or did you see any other trends in weird fiction?

MK: I think that there used to be a clear demarcation in the two strains of weird fiction. I don’t see that as much, any more. The lines are blurring. The current crop of writers penning weird tales is well schooled in both strains, I believe. That is evidenced in this inaugural volume. It features a wide range of themes and tones.

LB: Historically, you have a point. I agree with Mike that the lines are blurring. Brian Evenson and Aimee Bender can do ambiguity with the best of them. Conversely, Conrad Williams and Clive Barker aren’t afraid of explicit violence. Nonetheless, trends in horror notwithstanding, the weird tale is often one of restraint on both sides of the pond. Once again, it’s the slippery nature of definitions. Many of the tales I find “graphic” or “terrifying” skew toward horror rather than the weird.

WFR: There are a number of great weird fiction anthologies out there including Shadows & Tall Trees. Were there things that made this anthology different from other weird fiction anthologies besides being just a best-of?

MK: I think what makes this a unique anthology is that finally—FINALLY!!—we have an anthology dedicated to a mode of literature that pre-dates all genre classifications and codification. This volume is well past due. And I hope it continues for decades.

LB: An anthology is an artifact of its composition and composers. The selections of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One are necessarily unique as a product of my critical taste, that of Michael Kelly, and the labors of the authors. It’s a diverse anthology and by virtue of being a year’s best, it possesses a rare intensity of purpose.

The post Interview: Year’s Best Weird Fiction appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Cover by Santiago Caruso

The short story is by far the most popular form of weird fiction — after all, when an idea or situation becomes familiar, it ceases to be weird. Thus, we find the landscape of strange literature littered with short story after short story — some good, others bad. With thousands of potential new short stories being written each year, it’s nothing short of a herculean task to weed through them all and find the best ones. Michael Kelly and Laird Barron have undertaken this chore though with the inaugural volume of a new best-of series, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One.

The series follows an interesting format in that each year, a new guest editor will join the project. For the first year, series editor Michael Kelly chose Laird Barron, a well known and well respected name when it comes to weird fiction. The anthology opens with an informative foreword by Kelly. I was rather disappointed to hear that many publishers did not respond to Kelly’s requests for material. I hope that the success of this first entry might remedy this.

The next chapter, “We Are For The Weird,” is a introductory essay by Barron on what sorts of parameters define the weird tale and what makes a story worthy of inclusion into this best-of collection. It also gives some background to Barron’s life and his admiration for weird writers like Algernon Blackwood. The name itself is a clever play on name of the short story collection by Robert Aickman and Elizabeth Jane Howard, We Are for the Dark.

This is then followed by a opening chapter by Simon Strantzas called “The Nineteenth Step” which served as the introduction to the anthology Shadows Edge. This narrative is reminiscent of the introduction of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in terms of both function and excellence. From there we begin to dive into a series of weird tales starting with Tremblay’s “Swim Wants to Know If It’s As Bad As Swim Thinks” which chronicles a meth addict’s encounter with sea monsters. Tremblay has been on my radar since I first read his work in The New Black. Tremblay is followed by the humorous scifi adventure from A. C. Wise, “Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron,” which gives a few nods to past weird writers.

Then came one of my favorite entries, “The Year of the Rat” by Chen Qiufan, a futuristic scifi story that describes a weird battle between Chinese soldiers and genetically engineered rats. I was rather impressed by both Qiufan and his translator, Ken Liu, a writer who sometimes translates Chinese fiction. I think story affirmed why anthologies are essential: to help readers discover new authors and works outside their normal periphery. Another standout in the book was “Olimpia’s Ghost” by Sofia Samatar, who recently won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and British Fantasy Award for Best Novel. It weaves a rather interesting narrative through a chain of correspondences from a young girl who has dreams involving E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann.” It starts out innocent enough but soon descends (or ascends?) into the realms of weird. In terms of weirdness, Jeff VanderMeer’s “No Breather in the World But Thee” was weird even by weird fiction standards and served as the final entry to the anthology.

On the creepier, darker side of the weird fiction spectrum, Scott Nicolay deftly crafts a modern Gothic tale in the “Eyes Exchange Bank” that recalls Poe’s writings. Nicolay’s debut collection has received a lot of praise and it’s easy to see why. In addition, there was also a story from Kristi DeMeester, which managed to be both short and creepy; Richard Gavin’s tale “A Cavern of Redbrick,” which features the ghosts and jinns as part of a horrific family drama; a story about Emily Dickinson from Jeffrey Ford, which worked out well even though I was initially a bit skeptical; “Fox into Lady” by Anne-Sylvie Salzman that featured a weird sort of birth; and “Furnaces” by Lisa Llewellyn, about a young girl from a small town where things aren’t what they seem.

Some of my favorites in this collection came from authors I had not read before. Damien Angelica Walters presented a fragmented story involving two lovers in “Should I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?” In “The Krakatoan,” Maria Dahvana Headley crafts an interesting family story told through the viewpoint of an astronomer’s child. Karin Tidbeck’s story “Moonstruck,” which also centered around a celestial theme, follows a child whose mother is obsessed with the moon. Finally, in “The Girl in the Blue Coat” by Anna Taborska, we get an interesting ghost story set in Poland during World War II.

There were also some solid stories from authors I was well acquainted with like John Langan, Joseph S. Pulver Sr., and W. H. Pugmire. Overall, I was pretty impressed with Barron’s and Kelly’s ability to balance out established weird writers with some of the newer and lesser known voices.

The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One leans slightly more towards the darker end of the weird fiction spectrum, but it does so without sacrificing the unique prose that has been a mainstay in the tradition. Certainly, the variety of stories is one of the book’s strengths. In the end, I think it’s a very satisfying anthology that should appeal to fans from those new to weird to even some of the more erudite. Without a doubt, the series has much promise. It should be interesting to see how next year’s volume with Kathe Koja at the helm will compare.

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