Tag Archives: weird fiction

Oobmab and other Weirdnesses

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So I found a clean version of Oobmab’s “The Flock of Ba-hui” in (GB) Chinese (「巴虺的牧群」2013). The source is a very interesting Fantasy dojinshi and translation discussion forum called “The Ring of Wonder” (which looks completely different in its mobile format btw). There are many other works of HPL-inspired horror available on their Cthulhu board and, interestingly, the “Cthulhu” board is only one of three subforums of “the  Mirror of Obscurity – 幽暗之镜” category–which also includes subforums “Surreal Lullaby: General Subcultures 异夜咏谣” and “SCP Foundation.” A lot of translations from “CopyPasta” and things like Charles Stross’s Lovecraft-inspired SF “The Laundry Files.” Cha has a detailed review of “Flock,” and this site has a brief one.

Why Cosmic Horror is at the root of post-modern nihilism.

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Why Cosmic Horror is at the root of post-modern nihilism.

tl;dr

The version of existence which acknowledges the horror of an unknowable cosmos has been called “weird realism” or “speculative realism”[7] and it undermines all anthropocentric belief systems (religious or humanist). There is a tendency, even nowadays, to think of the world in which we live as a product/representation of mind or language: a human construct[8]. As John Gray of The Atlantic put it: “For Lovecraft, human beings are too feeble to shape a coherent view of the universe. Our minds are specks tossed about in the cosmic melee; though we look for secure foundations, we live in perpetual free fall.” [9]

Lovecraft’s Otherworldly Xenophobia – Areo

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Lovecraft’s Otherworldly Xenophobia – Areo

Other qualities further entangle Lovecraft’s horror fiction with his personal ethnocentrism. As well as fear, Lovecraft’s creatures vividly evoke disgust and the threat of disease—they are “oozing,” “gangrenous,” “gelatinous,” “putrid” and trickling with “foetid greenish-yellow ichor.” Lovecraft was acutely sensitive to his own health, complaining throughout his life of various miscellaneous ailments: headaches, dizziness and “spells of poor concentrating power,” which at least some observers attributed to hypochondria. One can speculate, without being too reductive, on the influence of the death of Lovecraft’s father, apparently from syphilis, on his son’s preoccupation with illness and hereditary contamination.

Weird Fiction: A Primer

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Weird Fiction: A Primer

Some of the recent attention trained on weird fiction can be attributed to Jeff VanderMeer. His acclaimed Southern Reach trilogy shows off weird fiction’s range, encompassing elements of science fiction, Lovecraftian terror, paranoid conspiracy thrillers, and body horror. He’s written about literature as it relates to the first season of True Detective, and has acted as an advocate for authors who deserve a wider audience, including Michael Cisco and Thomas Ligotti. His work as an editor includes (in collaboration with his wife Ann) The Weird: A Compendium of Dark & Strange Stories. (The two also founded the site Weird Fiction Review, which “exists in a symbiotic relationship” with the periodical Weird Fiction Review, edited by H.P. Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi.) The Weird is stun-your-enemies huge: over 1,100 pages in length, and covering over a century’s worth of fiction. Its afterword is by China Miéville, whose generally indescribable fiction has also helped raise the profile of weird fiction.

An Interview with Kelly Link: “All Books Are Weird”

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An Interview with Kelly Link: “All Books Are Weird”

Weirdfictionreview.com: Was weird fiction welcome in your household growing up? And what kinds of weird things did you read as a child?

Kelly Link: My parents were both big readers. There are only two books I remember my mother taking away from me. One was Bored of the Rings. The other was A Confederacy of Dunces. As a child, everything seemed pretty weird, and that was good: Clan of the Cave Bear, Flowers in the Attic, Grimbold’s Other World, The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Is Rising sequence, the Greek and Norse myths, Stephen King, Joan Aiken, Saki, Margaret Storey, the Earthsea books, M. R. James, Dracula, Stranger in a Strange Land, Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borrible novels, Diana Wynne Jones, The Amityville Horror, Reader’s Digest’s Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. Oh, and we had a large record collection of musicals. Godspell, My Fair Lady, Camelot. Musicals: pretty weird. If you were to do an archeological dig for formative influences, all of the above would be a start. And yes, I maintain that all of these books are weird.

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

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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.”