“We Shall Dwell Amidst Wonder and Glory For Ever”: On Weird Fiction

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On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, the British science fiction and fantasy writer M. John Harrison asked a question on Third Alternative magazine’s messageboard: “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?” This incited a taxonomic fury, as writers, fans, and amateur scholars attempted to define this new subgenre. Harrison eventually offered his own definition; the New Weird, like stories published in the namesake early twentieth-century pulp magazine Weird Tales, is a mix of “horror, sf, and fantasy,” with an emphasis on the horror.

Harrison and some of the other British writers he suggested as New Weird writers—China Miéville, Justina Robson, Steph Swainston—soon grew tired of the term, but stateside it took off. The American author couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer adopted “New Weird” for their work and put together The New Weird anthology in 2008. Of course, defining the New Weird required an understanding of the Old Weird, and in October 2011, the VanderMeers put out The Weird, a massive anthology with over 100 stories dating from 1909–2010. China Miéville wrote the afterword (or, to use his term, “Afterweird”). 

While this was going on, a group of philosophers and theorists associated with speculative realism—including speculative materialism and object-oriented ontology—began writing articles and books about speculative realism in the work of H.P. Lovecraft and others; books like Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet (2011), Graham Harman’s Weird Realism (2012), and Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2016). 

The Weird kept coming. Since 2015, the academy has seen the publication of a special issue of the journal Genre titled “The Old and New Weird” (2016), James Machin’s Weird Fiction in Britain: 1880–1939, Jonathan Newell’s A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937 (2020), Michael Cisco’s Weird Fiction: A Genre Study (2022), and Kate Marshall’s Novels by Aliens, Weird Tales and the 21^st Century (2023), among many, many others. For general readers, NYRB Classics published Shadow of Carcosa, a collection of early twentieth-century Weird stories, in 2015. The British Library has released over sixty-five volumes on its Tales of the Weird imprint since 2018. And in 2024, Penguin UK released five books in its own Weird Fiction series, all of which are now available in the U.S. and Canada. 

Let’s back up. What is Weird fiction? Weird fiction is a fictional mode, related to but not wholly contained within the horror genre. The primary affects are fear, disgust, and wonder. Standard Weird motifs include tentacles, eldritch horrors beyond the capacity of language, scientists discovering that which should not be discovered, and strange artifacts with world-altering auras. In The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher says that the Weird “involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here.” Weird Fiction as a genre comes into focus in retrospect as the type of stories published in Weird Tales’ heyday (1923–1939), specifically the work by or resembling H.P. Lovecraft. In his genre-defining essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft says:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

Historically, the Weird emerged from the Gothic, the literature of “secret murder, bloody bones, and clanking chains.” From its birth in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic was powered by a particular fear: the fear of the return of the repressed. Rational, industrious, Protestant England was not always so. At the margins, in its poetry and folk ballads, in towns outside the centers of commerce, are glimpses of the Merrie Olde England of yore, of faerie and magick and *gulp* Catholicism. What if these malicious forces were not in fact destroyed by modernity? What if they remained?

In narratives set in Catholic southern Europe, the Gothic staged the return of the repressed; in crumbling castles and cruel monasteries, men and women of reason were brought to the edge of insanity by spooky knights and nuns and such (the monsters themselves are never as frightening as the novels’ atmosphere). The quintessentially Protestant Gothic novels were often thinly veiled polemics, tantalizing readers with the horrific splendor of the past before banishing it in favor of cold, calm reason. As Henry Tilney explains to the Gothic-crazed Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, “Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians.” Nothing truly Gothic could happen at Northanger Abbey.

What became the Weird was forged from Gothic materials in the smithies of the American magazine. Edgar Allan Poe’s poetic stories took narrative motifs from Gothics and transplanted them into atemporal dream space. When Gothics take place in Europe, it’s the fairy tale Europe of the imagination; when they take place in America, it’s anonymous towns and landscapes. There’s no history to repress—the horror is present and its origins unclear.

The compression of Poe’s stories, which were necessarily shortened for magazine publication, is key to their effect. Gothics are luxurious, with lengthy passages devoted to descriptions of landscapes and ornate dress. It takes nearly half of Anne Radcliffe’s epic-length novel The Mysteries of Udolpho for the characters to arrive at Udolpho, the titular castle. The reader can ease her way into the horrors. Poe’s stories don’t allow for that ease. At their best they are bent, fragmented, hurried, and obscure. Poe never pauses to elaborate on suggestions of past incest in “The Fall of the House of Usher”; in “The Black Cat” an unnamed protagonist barely explains his cruel, nervous violence”; in “The Story of William Wilson,” the narrator is followed by a mysterious doppelgänger, whose origin is never supplied. You experience these stories in a nightmarish rush. 

Furthermore, take “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), which opens the Penguin Weird Fiction anthology. It begins, “The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.” But this  “country,” where are we? While later details give a European flavor to the proceedings—there is a fête, there is a prince, there is Latin—the story remains placeless. The narrator takes pains to set the scene, explain the palace’s strange color scheme, outline the party’s rules, and then the actual narrative ends as suddenly as it begins, leaving us with a mess of dread and symbols. 

Poe’s compressed and deranged advances into the Weird are picked up by Baudelaire, who compresses and deranges in turn, and then passes the Weirding baton to the Symbolist poets—Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, etc. The Symbolists are followed by the Decadents. The English Decadents—most famously Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Algernon Charles Swinburne—who congregated around the magazine The Yellow Book (1894-1897), combined aestheticism—a belief in art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake—with what Decadent critic Arthur Symons called “a disease of form,” a belief that society was diseased and must be represented by diseased art. It was in this milieu that the Weird finally crystallized as a distinct artistic mode.

A plausible year zero for the Old Weird is 1890, which saw the publication of two major Weird texts: Hauntings, a story collection by Vernon Lee (a.k.a. Violet Paget) and the first part of The Great God Pan, a novella by Arthur Machen. The Penguin series includes the major American contribution to the Decadent Weird, Robert Chambers’s collection The King in Yellow (1895), but excludes five of the original ten stories. Some of these exclusions are understandable. During Robert Chambers’s life he was mostly famous for his historical romance fiction, and most of the excluded stories predict this turn. More baffling, the series editor Edward Kirke excludes “The Mask,” one of the collection’s four most integral stories.

The four main stories all center on a fictional play called The King in Yellow. They are prefaced by unsettling excerpts from the play, and involve people driven insane by its horrible images, all of which are merely alluded to rather than described. The first story, “The Repairer of Reputations,” darkly comic until it is not, features a man who becomes convinced he is the Yellow King and believes he must kill New Yorkers whom he determines stand between him and the throne. It takes place in a fascist future America, and it is suggested that the entire world has become infected by the play. A later story, the book’s masterpiece “The Yellow Sign,” depicts a proto-Dimes Square milieu of downtown NYC Decadent Catholics, who discuss but do not produce world-changing art. These scenesters are especially susceptible to the sinister charms of The King in Yellow, which they read with disastrous results. 

The Mount Rushmore of the Old Weird includes Machen’s “The White People” (1899), Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907), H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1931), and C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau” (1934). None of these stories are included in the new Penguin series. On the web page announcing the series, the editor Edward Kirke is quoted, “I was aiming for balance… As when you’re recommending any selection of books, it’s good to offer a mix of undiscovered gems as well as the really beloved classics.” The series strikes a somewhat odd balance. 

The King in Yellow and William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908) are certified Weird classics. Algernon Blackwood is a major Weird writer, but the selection of his stories Penguin offers is idiosyncratic. While titled Ancient Sorceries after its most famous story, the book is mostly a reprint of John Silence—Physician Extraordinaire (1908), a collection that was a blockbuster success in its day. It doesn’t include most of the stories upon which his reputation rests, such as the aforementioned “The Willows,” “The Wendigo,” “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” and others. What unites this collection is Dr. John Silence. Silence is Blackwood’s contribution to the occult detective tradition of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius, Stoker’s Van Helsing, and Hodgson’s Carnacki: a private investigator and physician who specializes in paranormal cases. The good doctor spends too much of every story explaining how the narrative’s eerily open-ended events line up precisely with the orthodoxies of fin-de-siècle occultism. Consider the very good “Secret Worship,” in which an English silk merchant travels back to his old school, run by an isolated community of devout German Protestants. As he makes his way to the school, he begins recalling unsettling elements and feelings of isolation during his two-year stay, recollections that grow more and more fervid as he enters the monastery to find that many of the priests who used to run the school are still there and haven’t aged at all in the intervening thirty years. It devolves in unpredictable ways, and our protagonist seems in real danger, until he’s suddenly saved by an illusion-shattering pedant, who explains the various occult mechanisms behind what has just happened. The pedant? John Silence.

Lovecraft liked to criticize the more occult horror writers, writing that for them “the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness than do those who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order.” When the cosmic is explicable, it’s no longer Weird. In Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, he describes an aesthetic phenomenon called the “dynamical sublime.” Kant explains the concept through images of violent hurricanes, boundless oceans, and erupting volcanoes. Viewed from a safe distance, an erupting volcano seems at first terrifyingly vast and powerful. It is only after realizing your safety that you can intellectually understand the eruption in its totality—that there was a time before the eruption and there will be a time after, that the lava will cease to flow and will cool and become stone. It is this experience of the power of intellect and  comprehension that causes aesthetic pleasure. The Weird lives in the terrifying space between apprehension and comprehension. The explained occult brings us right to comprehension, all Weirdness nullified.

How does the most obscure text in the Penguin series, Gertrude Barrows Bennett’s Claimed!, stack up? Is it Weird? It is certainly a weird (note the lowercase) choice. While MIT Press’s Radium Age imprint has recently republished Bennett’s The Heads of Cerberus and various short stories, Claimed! has remained relatively untouched. Bennett is an interesting historical figure: one of the earliest women pulp writers, she experimented in a variety of genres under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. With respect to Bennett’s literary-historical importance, I am sorry to say that Claimed! is neither good nor particularly Weird.

Claimed! comes from the H. Rider Haggard school of adventure stories, itself a mutant, shoddy, often racist offshoot of the type of boys’ adventure tale perfected in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. In the Haggard-style story, a group of White Englishmen hear of some sort of treasure, usually lying in wait in the heart of Darkest Africa. In novels like Haggard’s She or Claimed!, the adventure is spurred on by the discovery of an ancient artifact, which contains a sort of map. If this sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve probably seen an Indiana Jones movie.

In Claimed!, the artifact is a green box, etched with strange text on its bottom. The box causes seizures and visions of horses and rising tides, and when psychically sensitive people hold the box, they see images of crumbling, blood-red cities and emerge from their hallucination muttering about some archangel. While this is an intriguingly Weird premise, it’s revealed that this sunken city, from which the box has come, is… Atlantis! And the malevolent force, causing the seizures and the visions? None other than “Poseidon, the sea god, who was supposed to have founded [the Atlantean] government.” By the time of the disappointing reveal, the narrative has devolved into a typical adventure story, complete with wet-clothed damsels in distress and cigar-chewing sea captains.

While some of Penguin’s choices are baffling, its Weird Fiction anthology is pretty great. The classics are well chosen. For example, while “The Call of Cthulhu” isn’t my favorite Lovecraft story, it’s one of his most characteristic, and a solid first story for neophytes. Kirke also does his part in the recent push to highlight undersung women Weirdists. Edith Wharton’s “Kerfol,” May Sinclair’s “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched,” and D.K. Broster’s “Couching at the Door” were all recently anthologized in Melissa Edmundson’s Women’s Weird anthology (2019) from Handheld Press, but they remain excellent and underread examples of the Weird tale, deserving of a place alongside the more canonical male-authored tales. While Wharton and Sinclair are both part of the highbrow canon, they’re less often read for their contributions to the canon of genre fiction. 

William Hope Hodgson, the author of The House on the Borderland, is currently nowhere near the highbrow canon. William Hope Hodgson is always on the verge of a revival. During his life, his work was critically appreciated and commercially spotty. He died young on the fields of WWI. Some influential fans, Weird Tales mainstays Clark Ashton Smith and C.L. Moore among them, kept his work in conversation throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Lately, his major works have been reissued, with helpful introductions, by The British Library’s Tales of the Weird imprint. In 2023, he received his first major academic monograph, William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird by Timothy S. Murphy. We will see if this time it takes.

I hope it does, because at least The House on the Borderland is a sort of masterpiece. Set in the outposts of a remote village in the west of Ireland, the novel features malicious pig men, H.G. Wells–style time travel, monstrous houses made of jade, and impossible geometries. Despite all this, the novel is strangely meditative and subdued. Most of the novel consists of a found manuscript, which becomes increasingly damaged and fragmented as the narrative proceeds. An older man, whom critics call The Recluse, purchases a home with teleportational abilities. The house starts teleporting The Recluse into a far-off land that might be Earth in the distant past or future. Teleportation induces feelings of cosmic insignificance, The Recluse recalls, “I, a fragile flake of soul-dust, flickered silently across the void, from the distant blue, into the expanse of the unknown.” The house also teleports things back to the present—pig men, first and foremost. At one point The Recluse’s long-dead lover suddenly appears in the narrative. She is offhandedly and scarcely discussed, as if already reintroduced, though it seems she came from the titular borderland.

In the book’s most extraordinary section, The Recluse experiences a gradual speeding-up of time. It resembles the depiction of time travel in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, but far surpasses it in imaginative audacity, as the narrator depicts the movement of the sun across the sky becoming a flickering, as the sun begins to “have the suspicion of a trail of fire behind it.” At one point The Recluse turns to touch his dog with his foot: “at the action, gentle thought it was, he fell to pieces. That is what happened; he literally and actually crumbled into a mouldering heap of bones and dust.”

So far, I’ve just indirectly mentioned H.P. Lovecraft. This is not because I don’t think he’s important. In fact, I typically agree with Mark Fisher’s injunction that any “discussion of Weird fiction must begin with Lovecraft.” Any version of Weird fiction that does not include Lovecraft is a false one. If the Old Weird were Mario Kart, and every major Weirdist was a playable character, Lovecraft would be the Mario. 

The problem with Lovecraft is that he, like many Old Weird writers, was a right-wing racist. And not in ways that can be ignored. Lovecraft’s racism is intimately bound with his fiction. The Cthulhu cycle—his greatest works and the series of stories that have had the largest impact on subsequent horror—began in 1926, immediately following a harrowing couple of years in New York City. During this time, Lovecraft’s marriage fell apart, he failed to get employment, he had to move to smaller and smaller apartments in cheaper and more dangerous neighborhoods, and he was repeatedly robbed. He blamed, predictably, immigrants. 

In Michel Houellebecq’s book on Lovecraft, he convincingly argues that Lovecraft’s famously imitable style—the pileups of archaic adjectives and adverbs, slithering around but never properly attaching to their designated nouns—comes from the obsessive racist neurosis that developed during his time in New York. Houellebecq quotes a deranged letter to fellow Weird Tales writer Frank Belknap Long, in which Lovecraft describes the people living in the Lower East Side as “Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid… monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely molded from some stinking viscous slime or earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing,” etc. Reprehensible, and with a few minor alterations it would be a totally characteristic description of the average Lovecraftian monster.

So why read this shit? Why reissue it? 

Weird fiction is a literature of crisis. The main narrative move of every important Weird fiction story is the Weird intrusion, the appearance of the new and wrong object or sensation or practice that does not belong. These intrusions challenge and endanger the protagonist’s sense of metaphysical stability. In the King in Yellow, the Weird intruder is the titular play—the madness of the text refuses to remain on the page. China Miéville argues that this awareness of crisis makes Weird Fiction uniquely open to interpretation: a “leeway for readings against the ideological grain is part of what makes Weird Fiction such an ongoingly fascinating field.” The Weird is not just a literature of fear and repulsion; it also always includes wonder and attraction. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” – Lovecraft’s contribution to the Weird Mount Rushmore – depicts the state’s extermination of a group of racially ambiguous New Englanders who made the mistake of breeding with fishy foreigners. Despite this, the story ends in sublime ambiguity [spoiler for a nearly century-old story to follow]. The protagonist, who has spent the rest of the story in hateful terror of the Innsmouth locals, discovers that he is one of them, and in my favorite passage in all of Lovecraft, decides to go to the sea with his cousin and embrace The Weird: “We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’hanthlei, and in that layer of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.” What was once feared is now cause for exultation. The move between terror and wonder recurs throughout the Weird corpus—if you’re attuned to its Weird frequencies.