The Uncanny Power of Weird Fiction

Many weird writers, especially before
our modern era of the ultra-professional, were indeed odd, and
sometimes akin to outsider artists. The stories that surround them are
fraught with eccentricity, the disreputable, and tragedy. The great
Belgian writer Jean Ray, convicted of embezzlement, needed the catalyst
of a prison stint to craft two of the twentieth-century’s greatest tales
of the unknown, “The Shadowy Street” and “The Mainz Psalter.” Austrian
writer and artist Alfred Kubin, whose 1909 novel The Other Side
features a whole city transported to Central Asia and a dissolving of
the border between the real and the unreal, was forever being re-made by
his hatred of his father and the aftershocks of an early seduction by
an older woman. Even Franz Kafka, staid by comparison, was described by
his friend Max Brod as a shy, seldom-seen moon-blue mouse.