Eugene Thacker – Weird, Eerie, and Monstrous: A Review of “The Weird and the Eerie” by Mark Fisher

Fisher’s interest in Lovecraft stems from this shift in perspective
from the human-centric to the nonhuman-oriented – not simply a
psychology of “fear,” but the unnerving, impersonal calm of the weird
and eerie. As scholars of the horror genre frequently note, Lovecraft’s
tales are distinct from genre fantasy, in that they rarely posit an
other world beyond, beneath, or parallel to this one. And yet, anomalous
and strange events do take place within this world. Furthermore, they
seem to take place according to some logic that remains utterly alien to
the human world of moral codes, natural law, and cosmic order. If such
anomalies could simply be dismissed as anomalies, as errors or
aberrations in nature, then the natural order of the world would remain
intact. But they cannot be so easily dismissed, and neither can they
simply be incorporated into the existing order without undermining it
entirely. Fisher nicely summarizes the dilemma: “a weird entity or
object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or
at least that it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here,
then the categories which we have up until now used to the make sense
of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all:
it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.”