Lovecraft Revisited and Revised

The New Weird

Weird fiction has been a subgenre of horror since the early 1900s. Like the word Gothic, the term weird has a particular meaning in literature. In his 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” H. P. Lovecraft insisted that weird fiction is disturbing in a way that goes beyond the tropes of ghost stories and Gothic horror. For Lovecraft, a weird story has an ethereal quality because it deals with things beyond the physical world. It incorporates cosmic fear, or a fear of the unknown and unknowable. Events in weird fiction are truly unmoored from rational or scientific understanding; the weird is alien to humanity, whether from outer space, beneath the ocean, or another universe that is just a hair’s breadth away at any moment. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer define weird fiction like this: “Although dark like horror, it is generally about encounters with the inexplicable where there may never be a full explanation for strangeness.”

Authors like Margaret St. Clair and Daphne du Maurier, and their successors in the era of the pulps, used the weird as a door into commercial fiction, a world that seemed to be mostly male. In fact, women who write have always used uncanny and supernatural storytelling for sharing tales about their lives and for illustrating the deep traumas of life. They continue to do so today in greater numbers and more diverse forms, maybe because women’s experiences are discredited and considered…well…weird in a patriarchal society. When fiction embraces the strange, the odd, the otherness, women can relate. Women know what it means not only to exist on the margins of society but also to revel in that existence. And so women flock to writing the weird because they can write the nastiest of it, the strangest of it, the most magical of it. Women can see what exists beyond the “normal” society—and we are glad they can.

Although the term weird fiction most likely calls to mind Lovecraft and his early twentieth-century contemporaries, a more recent iteration of this subgenre has emerged. The so-called new weird began in the 1990s and continued into the millennium with works like China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (Macmillian, 2001), which features a grimy dystopian cityscape and opens with a sex scene between a human character and a half-beast cockroach-like character. New weird fiction may incorporate some themes and tropes of the old (cosmic horror is still a favorite), but authors are moving past Lovecraftian-type mythos and exploring social and political inequalities, race, and gender. More writers of color and women are engaging with the weird than ever before.

One of the first women to write the new weird is the Australian K. J. Bishop. The Etched City, her first novel (Prime Books, 2003), seems to transcend genre, although it’s usually classified as science fiction. The book is influenced by the Decadents of the late nineteenth century, such as Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, with its excesses, weird imagery, and the coexistence of art and corruption. We meet the story’s main characters after they’ve lost a civil war. In the titular city, Ashamoil, the two men find various cultures, warlords, strange creatures, shamans, occultists, mediums, and medical doctors. The lines between living and dead, and between dreams and reality, are razor thin, and the very existence of the city is called into question. A review in Publishers Weekly described the novel as “equal parts of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station,” with “a dash of Aubrey Beardsley and J. K. Huysmans.” Locus magazine compared it to the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, both writers of postmodern works that defy labels.

The Canadian horror writer Gemma Files described weird fiction this way: “For me, the appeal is the idea of creating something that will make the person reading it look over their own shoulder uneasily, but also feel as though they recognize it on some inmost level…to create an unnatural concept which nevertheless seems part of the natural order.”

She achieves this level of uncanny weirdness in her 2015 Shirley Jackson Award winning novel Experimental Film (ChiZine Publications, 2013). In it, a film critic named Lois who is struggling to come to terms with her son’s autism diagnosis attends a film festival for an article she’s writing. While there, she sees a rare piece of silver-nitrate silent-film footage that is part of a larger project called Untitled 13. This scrap of footage shows a woman wrapped in a white veil and holding a scythe, and Lois becomes obsessed with learning all about it and its creator. Weird events ensue as she attracts the attention of the woman in the footage…who might not be mortal and who might have some thoughts on Lois’s fascination. In true forbidden text fashion, Lois is haunted by the film she shouldn’t have seen. The Los Angeles Review of Books compared Files’s writing to that of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, as well as contemporary authors Thomas Ligotti and Jeff VanderMeer.

Another writer who’s been affiliated with the new weird since the appearance of her first work is Ireland-born, Alabama-raised Caitlín R. Kiernan. Kiernan studied vertebrate paleontology and has written papers in the fields of herpetology and paleontology, and these scientific interests are clearly visible in her fiction. She is a prolific and award-winning writer who so far has penned ten novels, several comic books, and more than two hundred stories and novellas. In the introduction to their 2012 anthology of weird fiction, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer call Kiernan “perhaps the best weird writer of her generation.”

Kiernan’s well-received 2009 novel The Red Tree (Ace) won the best novel category of the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Locus Awards, and the World Fantasy Awards. It follows Sarah Crowe as she moves to Rhode Island, in an attempt to run from her problems, and discovers an old manuscript in her new home. The novel stands out for many reasons, among them the central queer relationship and the use of an unreliable narrator through the postmodern technique of reading a so-called edited journal. In the course of telling a supernatural story, Kiernan also addresses themes of mental illness and the ambiguity of reality.

Recently, Kiernan added to her weird oeuvre with her novellas Agents of Dreamland (Tor, 2017) and Black Helicopters (Tor, 2018). Both include dark Lovecraftian forces stalking the Earth, black-ops secret agents for unknown agencies, and characters damaged by science experiments gone wrong.

Kiernan’s writing demonstrates the fluidity of the new weird genre, moving freely between the boundaries of science fiction and dark fantasy and speculative fiction. Other writers have a more direct connection to the weird fiction of the early twentieth century. For women re-visioning H. P. Lovecraft, check out Cassandra Khaw and Kij Johnson. Johnson’s novella The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (Tor, 2016), which won a World Fantasy Award, is a woman-centered revisitation of, and commentary on, Lovecraft’s 1943 novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Arkham House). In it, Johnson weaves a brand-new tale set in a world inspired by Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle series. Mathematics professor Vellitt Boe, who teaches at an elite and otherworldly women’s college, must go on a fantastical journey to rescue a student who has ticked off her grandfather (who is a god, by the way) by running away with a dreamer from the waking world.

Malaysian writer Cassandra Khaw has married the Lovecraftian weird with noir detective fiction in her novellas Hammers on Bone (Tor, 2016) and A Song for Quiet (Tor, 2017). In the former, a child hires a private eye, who just happens to be a monster, to kill his abusive stepdad, who is also a monster. Khaw carefully inserts an underlying Lovecraftian monstrous horror beneath the terrifying experience of domestic abuse. All of her writing is weird, from her female werebears rooming with vampires in Bearly a Lady (Book Smugglers Publishing, 2017) to Food of the Gods (Abaddon, 2017), part of her Rupert Wong series that includes various gods from all over the world and a cannibal girlfriend.

Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Nadia Bulkin also deserve mention. Link’s three short story collections, Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press, 2001), Magic for Beginners (Small Beer Press, 2005), and Get in Trouble (Random House, 2015), have garnered comparisons to Neil Gaiman, George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Jorge Luis Borges, and…Karen Russell. Link’s fellow Pulitzer finalist, Russell has written fine and unnervingly weird tales such as Swamplandia! (Knopf, 2011), about a family of alligator wrestlers who live in a Florida theme park; St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories (Knopf, 2006); and the novella Sleep Donation (Atavist Books, 2014), about an insomnia pandemic that corporate America tries to solve by monetizing sleep that has been donated to insomniacs from healthy sleepers. Bulkin’s 2017 short story collection She Said Destroy (Word Horde) is hard to classify. She uses plenty of cosmic horror that Lovecraft fans will recognize, but her work doesn’t fit neatly into any category.