The Weird Part 1

The Weird.

Jeff VanderMeer.

Dedicated to Nicolas Cheetham, Gio Clairval, and all of the editors who helped us by way of example or advice.

Foreweird.

Michael Moorc.o.c.k.

KEEP Austin Weird, it says on a popular b.u.mper sticker for the city where I spend much of my time. That old Anglo-Saxon word for fate or destiny has taken on a lot of meanings. And, should you mention a coincidence to someone, they are likely to respond 'Weird!' That kid next door who prefers to read rather than play is weird. How weird is that? Weird has become one of those useful words which stands in for a certain look or rough telepathy we all know pretty much what is meant. And if we don't we ask, 'What kind of weird?' And the answer, as you'll find, might be in any one of these stories.

Science fiction was once described as the only popular fiction defined by what it is not. Perhaps the weird story can be defined in the same way. In popular terms, it came to mean a supernatural story in something of the Gothic tradition and we currently have a plethora of bad Gothic, 'shudder tales' topping the charts in the media. There vampires, werewolves and ghouls produce an effect of the kind which made bosoms heave by the thousand in early Victorian times before the genre was relegated to the ranks of the s.h.i.+lling shocker or the tuppeny blood, still popular with the general public, if not polite society. No doubt the same fate awaits the children of Twilight...

The 'blood' at the bottom of the literary pond was the 19th century's version of the splatter tale in the 20th and 21st. And what is left after other definitions are exhausted is the weird story. The weird story can contain all the quality of a fine Modernist writer like Conrad or Bowen, a great popular novelist like Greene or a master of the numinous like Lansdale, whose finest stories often contain only a slight twist in reality to make them so good. Weird? We're clearly comfortable with a term covering pretty much anything from absurdism to horror, even occasionally social realism.

There are no established rules for the weird tale, which is at least part of the attraction if the story an author wants to tell can't readily be told in an established form. Although it might often contain a supernatural element, or a suggested supernatural element, it does not have to do so. And I think we can now discard the notion that 'weird' in fiction only concerns itself with the manifestly supernatural and is written by heteros.e.xual boys without girlfriends. I think the downgrading in critical esteem for the weird story happened when the market found something else it could commodify and then aim at a large specialized market to the extent that a certain type of reader will now attack a story precisely because it doesn't fulfill the expectations of category. Both the Star Wars and Friday the Thirteenth franchises have much to answer for.

Generally, the real tensions in literary forms come from that which can be readily commodified and branded and that which cannot. Fritz Leiber, one of the best American stylists I knew, told me that he had talked about this with two Weird Tales contributors, Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame) and Henry Kuttner (primarily a science fiction writer). All had begun writing unrationalized fiction, having much in common with surrealism or absurdism, to discover very quickly that literary magazines wanted an approximation of realism and commercial markets needed to know why, forcing you to cook up some sort of rationalization for the events you described so that you came to see your failure to rationalize as some sort of flaw or laziness in yourself. These days, writing for the supernatural fiction market is one way of meeting commercial interests halfway but, once the ambitious writer has established a reputation, it is common, almost endemic, that they begin dropping the generic elements from their work and hope to take their readers.h.i.+p with them without otherwise compromising. Ray Bradbury, published originally in pulps like Weird Tales or Startling Stories, achieved this, as did J.G. Ballard, also first published in a generic fantasy magazine.

Crossword puzzles don't necessarily make good fiction. The reader of the Victorian Gothic of Lewis and Maturin demanded that most weird events be grounded in a 'realistic' explanation Romantic specters must be the result of villains working explicable, practical clockwork or novel scientific inventions such as candle-powered magic lanterns. The 1930s reader of Weird Tales did not mind the ghost being, as it were, real but there had to be a suggestion of a material motive, say, in the minds of lurkers at the threshold. Gothic revelations of base motives behind fake ghosts and so on eventually became absorbed into the popular 'thriller', especially those published in the first decades of the 20th century. The weird increasingly, since the days of Charles Williams to the present, shares much in common with supernatural fiction but it is not merely another name for it.

What is good about the majority of these stories is precisely that they leave you with many more questions than answers, the mark, in my view, of a superior kind of fiction. As in M.R. James's cla.s.sic Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad, it trusts the reader to be the ultimate interpreter. It does, in fact, what most of our best fiction does, irrespective of category. When the great actor Kemble dismissed the ghost in Hamlet and addressed himself not to the conventional white sheet but to an empty chair, he played an infinite jest on playwright and audience which continues to open that scene and others to a thousand interpretations. The audience's own imagination was tapped. Hamlet's sanity is thoroughly questioned. Not only do we continue to wonder who it is Hamlet truly loves, if anyone, but we can speculate endlessly about his state of mind. Is he always pretending to be mad? Is the specter a joke played by others on a disturbed, mourning young man or does he conjure specters from his own mind? If so, what can we make of that mind and its disturbed owner's motives? That is why Hamlet is perhaps the most and best performed and least readily understood of Shakespeare's plays.

The surrealists and the existentialists loved the fantastic story, the weird story, because they had been knocked sideways by psychoa.n.a.lysis and had come to understand how the unconscious told its tales, apparently through eccentric, innocent or unusual images and strange behavior. Is that, we asked, why we fear 'the unknown'? Because it reveals all the lies and delusions by which life becomes bearable? But modern relativism can't easily carry the Freudian narrative either, these days. Or perhaps singles out one possibility amongst many or rather takes it for granted there is one version amongst many. We modern readers must make our way in a complex world by resorting to complicated narratives, unending a.n.a.lysis. It could even be that, as populist rhetoric fills our print and airwaves, we tend to embrace complexity in the face of journalistic simplicities. We learn new or modified modes of story-telling precisely as we changed with the coming of film, TV or, more recently, the net. Many of the givens which helped us appreciate Modernism are today dismissed in favor of a multiplicity of interpretation. We're uncomfortable, too, with the idealistic optimism of those 20th-century writers who thought they followed Zola (though even the great Sinclair Lewis had to write some fantasy on occasions because sometimes only the weird tale will best suit the experience). This unsettling of the literary waters generally helps to enrich a work and make it freshly challenging, even confrontational, sometimes attacking what it perceives very accurately as misguided social a.s.sumptions just as magic realism, inspired by the likes of Borges, refreshed social realism at the point where it had become almost wholly generic and had therefore lost vitality, offering a comfort to the soul rather than confrontation with received ideas. Similarly, differences between generic and 'literary' fiction began to break down by the 1960s when the likes of J.G.Ballard began to appear in magazines such as Science Fiction Adventures, where stories like The Drowned World were placed because at the time nothing else in the author allowed him to approach the tragic dreamscapes of his imagination through any other form. Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. d.i.c.k and others sold to genre magazines. Mervyn Peake, the absurdist master who rarely made use of the supernatural, was published in Science Fantasy Magazine simply because I happened to know Peake and the magazine's editor and I acted as intermediary after Peake failed to place the story elsewhere. The story was weird and suis generis. The editor was delighted to run it.

For me, the appeal of the weird story is precisely that it is designed to disturb. At least if left to itself. Maybe all we can really say about it is that it suits a certain mood in the reader; that it's subtler and more complex than generic fantasy stories.

The best writers, as this collection shows, write the best weird stories. So the weird story is Bradbury, Kafka, Lovecraft. It is Borges, Leiber, Angela Carter, Chabon. Clever artistry guides our encounters with the unknown and the numinous. At its best the weird story commands us with a style both original and engaging but not necessarily good in the opinion of its day. My own great hero George Meredith who wrote a few weird tales and even some pretty good weird poetry (what a shame there wasn't room here for The Woods of Westermaine) was hailed towards the end of his lifetime as the greatest British writer since Shakespeare and today you'd be hard put to find even a second-hand copy of his late masterpiece The Amazing Marriage. Time and the multi-verse are fond of these ironic tricks.

That said, the weird story certainly endures. Otranto is still in print as are Frankenstein and Melmoth. None is especially memorable for its style but for communicating the novelty with which it struck the writer. Inspiration somehow smacks the reader between the eyes and keeps them reading no matter how gratingly bad the prose might be, even when a story has given birth to a million other stories so that the basic premise and story are familiar to millions more readers. Our opinions of a writer don't define where they'll end up in the canon and one decade's canon can be utterly forgotten by another. Half the writers I once championed as under-noticed or 'marginalized' are now regarded as central to any well-read reader's education. Equally, half the people I knew as friends and admired as writers, who were thought central to any contemporary syllabus, are often not even in print and it is often difficult to understand how or why they went out of fas.h.i.+on and others came in. The public and academia are pretty fickle in picking favorites. What made that weird musical The Wizard of Oz fail to get an Oscar in 1939 but become a perennial favourite to this day while The Rains Came, which did win the Oscar, is scarcely known now at all? Is the 'weirdness' that made Citizen Kane bad box-office in its day the same quality which gave the movie its enduring place among the ten greatest American films? Certainly a great many of the stories here were originally published rather obscurely, many of them in pulp magazines, yet have rarely been out of print since.

When I was young, few of the weird writers I enjoyed were known to the general public, yet now they go into many editions and translations. Even Kafka was somewhat marginalized. When I was young, only a few non-Argentinean Anglophones had read Borges. I had them related to me by a Spanish-speaking Swede while hitch-hiking across Europe. His first story in English was translated by Anthony Boucher (co-founder of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) in 1948 but further stories would not appear in English until 1962, published by Grove Press. Howard was still thoroughly in the margins, published in small editions by obscure presses: now he appears as a Penguin Modern Cla.s.sic. Few had heard of Lovecraft and fewer still admired him. I am sure that Grin, the great Russian fantasist, will eventually see translation and take his place beside the fine writers collected here. Firbank, the marvelous English absurdist, Richardson, creator of Engelbrecht, the surrealist boxing dwarf, Vian, who gave us the astonis.h.i.+ng L'ec.u.me des jours and died watching a bad movie version of his novel J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, have all yet to become familiar to the general US reader. If you are unfamiliar with them, I suspect your curiosity will be whetted enough for you to find them with the rest of those weird writers kept from this book by length.

While I have managed to dodge the question of exactly what weird fiction is, I have helped, I hope, describe a little of its appeal. 'Weird', the modern-day synonym for 'strange' or 'unusual', has proven so useful that a modern style of fiction championed by the likes of China Mieville, M.John Harrison and Jeff VanderMeer is now known as 'the new weird'. Judging by the quality of work so far produced, it will do nicely for now.

Michael Moorc.o.c.k.

Rue St Maur.

Paris.

July 2011.

Introduction.

Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

A 'weird tale', as defined by H. P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est. 1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s. As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale 'has something more than secret murder, b.l.o.o.d.y bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains'. Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane a 'certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread' or 'malign and particular suspension or defeat of...fixed laws of Nature' through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.

With unease and the temporary abolition of the rational, can also come the strangely beautiful, intertwined with terror. Reverie or epiphany, yes, but dark reverie or epiphany not the lightness of 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' but the weight of, for example, seminal early twentieth-century weird writer and artist Alfred Kubin's sensation of being 'overcome...by a dark power that conjured up before my mind strange creatures, houses, landscapes, grotesque and frightful situations.' The Weird can be transformative sometimes literally entertaining monsters while not always seeing them as monstrous. It strives for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledges failure as sign and symbol of our limitations.

Usually, the characters in weird fiction have either entered into a place unfamiliar to most of us, or have received such hints of the unusual that they become obsessed with the weird. Whether It exists or not, they have fallen into dialogue with It; they may pull back from the abyss, they may decide to unsee what they saw, but still they saw it. Such stories can be terrifying, but do not always rely upon the scare central to horror fiction, nor the twist ending common to, for example, cla.s.sic Twilight Zone episodes. They remain universal because they entertain while also expressing our own dissatisfaction with, and uncertainty about, reality. In a context wherein the monsters stand first for themselves, their visceral physicality convinces us, at least while reading, of the existence of The Weird.

As a twentieth and twenty-first century art form the story of The Weird is the story of the refinement (and destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework but also of the welcome contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions, some only peripherally connected to the fantastic. The Weird, in a modern vernacular, has also come to mean fiction in which some other element, like weird ritual or the science fictional, replaces the supernatural while providing the same dark recognition of the unknown and the visionary. The best and most unique supernatural writers from prior eras, like Arthur Machen (his best short fiction written before 1910), would leave their mark on this newer weird, but not a boot print.

Because The Weird often exists in the interstices, because it can occupy different territories simultaneously, an impulse exists among the more rigid taxonomists to find The Weird suspect, to argue it should not, cannot be, separated out from other traditions. Because The Weird is as much a sensation as it is a mode of writing, the most keenly attuned amongst us will say 'I know it when I see it,' by which they mean 'I know it when I feel it' and this, too, the more rigorous of categorizing taxidermists will take to mean The Weird does not exist when, in fact, this is one of the more compelling arguments for its existence.

In its purest forms, The Weird has eschewed fixed tropes of the supernatural like zombies, vampires, and werewolves, and the instant archetypal a.s.sociations these tropes bring with them. The most unique examples of The Weird instead largely chose paths less trodden and went to places less visited, bringing back reports that still seem fresh and innovative today. The Weird is also darkly democratic: you can be a weird writer like Thomas Ligotti, in all that you do, or, like James Tiptree, Jr. and Karen Joy Fowler, you can feel the pull of The Weird in only some of your fiction; it doesn't matter, authenticity exists in the words on the page, on the shared frisson that rises from them. Authenticity in The Weird, increasingly throughout the twentieth century, also meant stories that, even if just subtextually, engaged the problems of modern life, and more so than past supernatural fiction, at times engaged with the extremes of that life, including the horrors of war.

Similarly, influences on The Weird in the twentieth century, streams of fiction that fed into its watershed, included many traditions: surrealism, symbolism, Decadent Literature, the New Wave, and the more esoteric strains of the Gothic. None of these influencers truly defined The Weird, but, a.s.similated into the aquifer along with Lovecraftian and Kafkaesque approaches, changed the composition of this form of fiction forever.

The Early Years.

The story of The Weird is often seen as the story of the rise of the tentacle, a symbol of modern weird. The tentacle and all it represented metastasized in Weird Tales and The Lovecraft Circle the group of writers surrounding Lovecraft that included Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, Howard Wandrei, and August Derleth. Although female contributors to Weird Tales were rarer, the Southern-US writer Mary Elizabeth Counselman had a significant impact, as did Francis Stevens (the pen-name of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, included herein with 'Unseen Unfeared'). It is important to remember that although many of these writers would sp.a.w.n imitators and thus render some of their visionary qualities more ordinary to a modern reader, in their day they, and Weird Tales, represented a revolution of sorts against old ideas about supernatural fiction. (In Europe, the Weird Tales equivalent was Der Orchideengarten, which translates as 'The Orchid Garden', established 1919.) The Lovecraft Circle is represented in the early pages of this volume, but not to the exclusion of all else. Why? Because in other places a similar impulse was arising. At roughly the same time Lovecraft penned tales like 'The Dunwich Horror' and 'The Call of Cthulhu', Jean Ray, in a Belgian prison, wrote stunning and sophisticated stories like 'The Shadowy Street' and 'The Mainz Psalter', j.a.panese poet Hagiwara Sakutar composed the hallucinogenic strangeness that is 'The Town of Cats', and Polish writer Bruno Schulz mythologized his childhood in weird stories like 'Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourgla.s.s'.

These non-Anglo versions of The Weird were not aberrations. In the 1910s, Ryunosuke Akutagawa published the j.a.panese contes cruel 'The h.e.l.l Screen' and Franz Kafka, still to remain relatively unknown for decades, wrote the cla.s.sic of weird ritual 'In the Penal Colony', while in India Rabindranath Tagore wrote his most supernatural tale 'The Hungry Stones' and in Italy Luigi Ugolini penned 'The Vegetable Man', a tale of weird transformation.

Also near the start of the twentieth century, the writers Alfred Kubin, Algernon Blackwood, and F. Marion Crawford, in very different ways, helped usher in the modern era of The Weird: Kubin as a representative of symbolist and decadent writers; Blackwood as a forerunner of Lovecraft; and Crawford as the early manifestation of an impulse toward the more commercial weird tale as later exemplified by, among others, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Bloch. Kubin, in particular, chose a path that would be echoed and amplified by Kafka, Schulz, and others, and taken up in the modern era by writers like M. John Harrison, Leena Krohn, and Michael Cisco. (William Hope Hodgson's novel The House on the Borderland in 1908 had a profound influence on weird science fiction and the cla.s.sic weird tale but was too long to include in this volume.) These writers came from vastly different backgrounds, but were bound together by some common impulse in their imaginations, some need to make sense of 'the fearful and fascinating mystery' that is life, in a particular way. For their efforts, a disproportionate number of them died in poverty and were marginalized as outsider artists or hacks with the strangest (read: the most imaginative) ignored or misunderstood, even within the already cast-out genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Some were shot or sent to death camps during times of war. Too many committed suicide, sometimes driven there by an impulse closely tied to the unique nature of their creativity. A lucky few gained popularity and a wide readers.h.i.+p for their efforts.

What all of these writers and the writers who would come after them shared was some element of the visionary in their writing, some impulse or worldview that catapulted them beyond the everyday. In some, it is expressed in their writing as just a glimmer or glint from a deep well. In others it is a great, raging fire at the center of their work. In either instance, subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous. Did these writers believe in the supernatural elements they described? In some cases, the evidence would suggest, yes. In the majority, the impulse to entertain combined with the impulse to remind readers of the strangeness of the world and the limits of our understanding of it. A few simply saw the world so differently that what to them seemed normal strikes readers as deeply weird. In some strands, The Weird represents a clear quest not just to understand the inexplicable; it represents a fascination that at times embraces the inexplicable, eschewing the terror of such a search. Many of these stories hold up to repeat readings for this reason.

Modern Weird.

Three events created a kind of cut-off point between the early manifestations of twentieth-century weird and modern weird: Lovecraft's pa.s.sing in 1937, World War II, and the widespread translation of Kafka into English in the 1940s (which created webs of influence still existing to this day).

The 1940s and 1950s were in a sense a period of expansion of The Weird in the US and UK. The rising popularity of horror and fantasy in major magazines like Playboy provided high-profile markets for the Bradburys, Leibers, Beaumonts, and Blochs who, as Michael Moorc.o.c.k doc.u.ments in his foreword, attracted a wider audience by consciously wedding the visionary aspects of surreal weird fiction to more traditional storylines, modern subject matter, and a less ornate style. Women writers entering The Weird in the US found more opportunities for their work, too, including (on the genre magazine side) Margaret St. Clair and (on the 'literary' side) s.h.i.+rley Jackson.

In the 1960s, the British New Wave created an opposite and equally useful renovation to that exemplified by Bloch and Bradbury by mixing the best of science fiction and fantasy with mainstream and experimental influences, some of which also referenced the decadents and surrealists. Out of this period came such giants as Michael Moorc.o.c.k (whose work only peripherally touched on weird fiction), M. John Harrison (the most significant twentieth-century critic of the weird tale through his fiction), and J. G. Ballard (whose surreal science fiction often reads like weird fiction). Harlan Ellison provided a visceral, pa.s.sionate American counterpart to the London-based Brits with early tales like 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream' and the later story 'The Function of Dream Sleep' included in this volume.

Outside of the US and UK several new manifestations began to put forth fungal tendrils of influence during this time period. The phantasmagorical in The Weird was kept alive, although with a thready pulse, through the works of Merce Rodoreda, Amos Tutuola, and Olympe Bhely-Quenum, whose 'A Child in the Bush of Ghosts' received the blessing of no less than Andre Breton. The Latin American Boom, presaged by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, provided The Weird with fine works by Augusto Monterroso, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Julio Cortazar, that stretched the weird tale by bringing to it magic realism and an appreciation for the surreal and political. In France, Claude Seignolle repurposed French folktales to create elegant and sophisticated supernatural stories.

Another tradition feeding into The Weird, Gothic literature, began to be substantially overhauled and repurposed, first through the phantasmagorical work of Mervyn Peake in the 1940s and 1950s, followed by the thoroughly modern stories of Daphne du Maurier in the 1960s and 1970s. In the UK, du Maurier did for the weird tale, through her Gothic influences, what Bradbury, Bloch, and Leiber had done in the US through the influence of Lovecraft: popularized it without losing the elements that made predecessors so compelling and strange. A frequent contributor to Weird Tales, Tanith Lee also made a splash within genre circles around this time, penning a number of cla.s.sics with Gothic antecedents.

During the 1960s and 1970s, two important and eccentric works of weird fiction bloomed like strange orchids feeding on rich, rare soil. Frenchman Michel Bernanos came out of seemingly nowhere to write the short novel The Other Side of the Mountain, perhaps the finest weird tale of the 1960s. Bernanos managed in just this one cult cla.s.sic to combine the traditions exemplified by Jean Ray and Algernon Blackwood with his own brand of surreal existentialism. In the 1970s, the utterly original US writer Eric Ba.s.so, entering The Weird through a kind of avant-garde approach to the Gothic, combined with surrealist and modernist influences, produced one of the most unique of all modern weird tales, the short novel 'The Beak Doctor'. Like a three-dimensional version of Kubin's stylized The Other Side, 'The Beak Doctor' used Joycean technique combined with clinical detail to create a dreamlike phantasmagoria about a strange sleeping sickness.

The rise of female writers outside of genres like Gothic fiction (including the traditional ghost story) starting in the 1970s also influenced The Weird, as it did many other forms of fantastical fiction. Several of these writers wrote weird fiction, even if they did not self-identify as writers of The Weird. James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Angela Carter, Jamaica Kincaid, Joanna Russ, Leena Krohn, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Hand, and Joyce Carol Oates all published significant weird tales during this period. Their diversity of approaches, taking in every possible influence, would enrich non-realistic literature for decades to come.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Stephen King's success created a new market for supernatural novels and a new naturalistic approach to American horror. T. E. D. Klein and Karl Edward Wagner also contributed to American horror, riffing off of their wide knowledge of weird fiction. In England, the publication of Clive Barker's Books of Blood in the 1980s provided a new and different model: transgressive stories that went beyond the scare to examine views of the body, alienation, and the nature of monsters. Barker's influences seem so various as to be useless to list, and in his monumental masterpiece 'In the Hills, the Cities' the visions of Bosch and the surrealists are integrated with the character detail more common to stories from the New Wave era. As importantly, American Thomas Ligotti would begin to publish dozens of stories that could be considered cla.s.sics of weird fiction, taking his place alongside Kafka and Lovecraft as one of the most gifted weird short story writers of the twentieth century.

The urban horror or urban weird that took root during the 1970s and 1980s was also exemplified perfectly by the claustrophobic stories of Ramsey Campbell, a clear descendent of Lovecraft who diverged from his influences in part by focusing on gritty working cla.s.s English settings. Yet one byproduct of this new emphasis on naturalistic horror was a partial estrangement from the weird tale. By the early 1990's US-horror boom, non-supernatural tales of serial killers and the extremes of s.e.x and violence portrayed by the Splatterpunks had fewer commonalities with The Weird. (Influential writers like Peter Straub tended to reserve The Weird for novel-length works.) However, even as the US-horror community increasingly turned away from the idea of surreal or visionary horror, a handful of writers like Jeffrey Osier, Jeffrey Thomas, Kathe Koja, Poppy Z. Brite, and Caitlin R. Kiernan continued to write recognizably weird fiction. Kiernan in particular would become perhaps the best weird writer of her generation.

The final significant development for The Weird came in the early twenty-first century with the emergence of the New Weird movement initially discussed online by, among others, M. John Harrison, Steph Swainston, China Mieville and, in initial opposition, Jeff VanderMeer. The term New Weird came to be applied to those writers as well as, most notably, K. J. Bishop, Michael Cisco, and Brian Evenson. In a sense, the New Weird was a re-enquiry into approaches and issues raised by the New Wave of the 1960s bringing along all of that movement's a.s.sociated influences but in this case primarily from the perspective of The Weird rather than science fiction or fantasy. Mieville in particular managed to reinterpret, rewire, and overhaul The Weird in novel form, synthesizing the tentacle horrors of Lovecraft with the intellectual rigor of the New Wave. A ghostly counterpart who has never truly received his due, American Michael Cisco also has created an amazing oeuvre of novels, perhaps more influenced by Kafka and Eastern European literature. K. J. Bishop's contributions came primarily with a decadent slant to them, while Swainston re-imagined heroic fantasy for The Weird.

Since then, The Weird has again fragmented, perhaps in preparation for a future coalescing of a Next Weird or perhaps not. Late period examples by Stephen Graham Jones, Reza Negarestani, Micaela Morrissette, Brian Evenson, and K. J. Bishop demonstrate an intimate knowledge of both the Kafka and Lovecraft strands of weird fiction, but recombined in strange and exciting new ways. Others, like the work of Laird Barron, seem more traditional but through their unique style and vision still manage to surprise.

What The Weird holds next for readers is unclear, but given the past manifestations, we can be sure it will adaptable, idiosyncratic, and involve some of our best stylists. It will also continue to be at times discredited, misunderstood, and denigrated for being unapologetically transgressive, imaginative, and strange. Nonetheless, The Weird will endure.

Organizing Principles and Enhancements.

A compendium like this one is neither as complete as an encyclopedia nor as loosely organized as a treasury. Our purpose is to showcase the wealth, depth, and breadth of The Weird over the past 100 years while also mapping certain tendencies and preoccupations. We have arranged the book chronologically from earliest story to latest story as the best way to show the evolution of and diversity of The Weird. Translated fiction is ordered in the anthology by when it first appeared in print, not by date of first translation into English. This preserves the 'chain of evidence' while pointing out the possibilities of initial influence across non-Anglo writings.

Among the interwoven threads in The Weird you will find a dedication to showcasing what one might call traditional weird, mainstream (or commercial) weird, weird science fiction, weird ritual, surreal weird, feminist weird, and avant-garde weird. 'International weird' is a meaningless term given the longstanding and complex literary traditions of the countries represented in this volume. However, we have tried to chronicle a clear tradition of j.a.panese surrealism and horror that feeds into The Weird, strong examples of Eastern European weird, evidence of weird fiction from India, African-nation weird, and those samples from Latin America that fall somewhere beyond magic realism. A few stories were unavailable to us because of rights issues, but we see them as an extension of this anthology as well: Philip K. d.i.c.k's 'The Preserving Machine' (weird science fiction), J. G. Ballard's 'The Drowned Giant' (New Wave weird), Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings' (Latin American weird), Otsuichi's 'The White House in the Cold Forest' (j.a.panese weird). Because this anthology is so vast (over 750,000 words), we were able to include novellas and even short novels, including these important works: Michel Bernanos' The Other Side of the Mountain, Eric Ba.s.so's 'The Beak Doctor', Leena Krohn's Tainaron, and Brian Evenson's The Brotherhood of Mutilation.

In pursuit of certain stories, we were also able to commission original translations. These translations include such major stories as Ryunosuke Akutagawa's 'The h.e.l.l Screen', Michel Bernanos' The Other Side of the Mountain,Julio Cortazar's 'Axolotl', and Georg Heym's 'The Dissection'.

The Other Side.

Alfred Kubin.

An Excerpt Translated into English by Mike Mitch.e.l.l.

Alfred Kubin (18771959) was a visionary Austrian writer and artist who ill.u.s.trated works by such notable early purveyors of weird fiction as Edgar Allan Poe and ETA Hoffman. While living in Germany, Kubin was mentored for a time by the writer Franz Blei, a friend of Franz Kafka. Kubin's masterpiece was the novel Die Andere Seite (The Other Side), first published in 1908. The Other Side is a dystopic fantasy set in the strange and oppressive city of Pearl. In its synergy of symbolism, decadent-era literature, and the weird, the novel suggested an early twentieth-century break with supernatural traditions of the past. In this excerpt, the narrator describes a strange sleeping sickness and the beginning of the ruination of the city.

An irresistible sleeping sickness had Pearl in its grip. It broke out in the Archive and from there spread across the whole of the Realm. It was an epidemic and no one could resist. One minute a man would be boasting how wide awake he was, the next he had succ.u.mbed to the germ.

The infectious character of the disease was quickly recognised, but the doctors could find no cure. The American's proclamations were ineffective because as soon as people started to read them they began to yawn. Anybody who could stayed at home, so as not to be struck down by the malady in the middle of the street. They just retired to a cosy nook and contentedly accepted this latest turn of events. After all, it didn't hurt. The first sign was usually a feeling of profound lethargy, then patients were seized with a yawning fit, their eyes seemed to fill with sand, their eyelids grew heavy, their thoughts went fuzzy and they would sink wearily to the ground where they stood. Sufferers could be brought round now and then with strong smelling salts sal ammoniac, for example but they just mumbled a few words and relapsed into torpor. With individuals of a strong const.i.tution a brisk rub-down with a towel would put back the onset by several hours, but then it was just the same. In many cases the out-break of the illness was very rapid. One speaker was delivering a tirade on the political situation when he suddenly bent down over the table, lowered his head and started to snore rhythmically.

Anton in the coffee house, on the other hand, could scarcely keep his eyes open, and yet was still serving. But, heavens, the things we had to do to keep him moving! We literally had to bombard him with sugar lumps and coffee spoons. He was exceedingly forgetful and when he did finally bring the order, the impatient customer had often fallen asleep himself. We had to keep a sharp lookout to make sure the cigars of comatose patrons were properly extinguished.

On the parade ground the military were busy training to prepare them for the threatened revolution. But it was no use the sergeants bellowing at them, one soldier after another just lay down on the ground.

There were strange and amusing incidents.

Thieves slept the sleep of the just, their fingers still in someone else's till. Melitta spent four days stretched out in Brendel's apartment, while her husband was dreaming, bent over the table, his nose in the mayonnaise.

Castringius was struck down while playing cards. He was leaning back comfortably in his chair in a low dive, the jack of diamonds in his paw. I very quickly withdrew to my room and that was where the illness. .h.i.t me. I had just turned back the covers and gone over to draw the curtains. The last thing I saw was banknotes fluttering, one after the other, out of the window of the princess's apartment across the road; a gentle autumn breeze was wafting them like withered leaves down the street towards the river. I just had time to get to my bed.

During the first two days after the outbreak of the epidemic the trains still arrived, though with huge delays, since new staff had to be brought on at every station. After that the service stopped entirely. The last number of the Voice was printed on one side alone, and even then it was riddled with incomplete sentences and scores of typographical errors. The entire last page, which usually contained a round-up of silly miscellaneous items, was missing.

There was no point in fighting it. Pearl slept. This state of complete unconsciousness probably lasted six days. At least that was the time calculated by the barber who based his estimate on the length of his customers' stubble.

During that time there was only one person in the whole of the city who, it was said, did not sleep at all, or only very briefly: the American. On one of the days, when he was walking down Long Street like a latter-day prince from Sleeping Beauty, he claimed he saw, through the coffee house window, one of the chess players make a move. From that he concluded that they, too, had escaped the illness. Otherwise you fell over sleeping bodies everywhere. Not only on all the benches in the public parks, even staircases and entrances were covered with well-dressed men and women, lying higgledy-piggledy, just like the homeless, contented smiles on their faces, despite their bizarre situation.

As people gradually came to, many simply continued their interrupted activities. This was a blessed relief, not only for Brendel, but for the poor old nag at the knacker's yard which had spent days tied up, waiting for the coup de grace. Now it received it. For the strange thing was that animals remained impervious to the sleeping sickness.

For most people nothing had changed, at least not immediately. When I woke up and, in need of sustenance, went to the cafe, the barber was there already, ravenous but also in a very bad mood. A fourpenny piece had gone missing, which had led to a permanent rift between the barber and his a.s.sistant who of course, like all animals, had remained awake.

The Dream city woke up and found itself in a kind of animal paradise. During our long sleep another world the animal kingdom had spread to such an extent that we were in danger of being swept aside. I have to say, though, that even in the time prior to the sleep it had been noticeable what a good year it seemed to be for rats and mice. There had also been complaints about the depredations of birds of prey and four-legged chicken-thieves. The gardener had even seen wolf tracks in Alfred Blumenstich's park. They laughed at him, but no one laughed any more when, the following day, a pair of horns was all that was left of Frau Blumenstich's pet, a snow-white Angora goat.

But how can one describe the astonishment of all those who had gone to sleep alone and undisturbed and woke to find themselves in unwelcome company? There might be a large green parrot sitting at the window or weasels and squirrels peeking out from under the beds. It was only gradually that we realised what was going on.

When they woke up, the butchers had to drive a large pack of jackals away from the slaughterhouse. Attacks by wolves, wild cats and lynxes increased frighteningly and even our pets suddenly turned disobedient and vicious. Almost all the cats and dogs left their masters and hunted for their own food. The newspapers, that had started to appear again, reported a horrifying case: a bear had climbed into the ground-floor apartment of Apollonia Six, a pork butcher's widow, and completely devoured the poor lady while she was fast asleep.

Hunters and fishermen came into the town bringing fantastic-sounding reports of gigantic, shambling animals they claimed to have seen. But being regarded as professional exaggerators anyway, no one believed them. Then suddenly peasants and other Dreamlanders living in the country started to arrive in droves, thundering up on their ma.s.sive horses, together with carts jampacked with women, children and the more valuable of their household goods. They were very unhappy and demonstrated outside the Palace and the Archive, complaining that no soldiers had been sent to protect them. Herds of buffaloes, they said, had devastated their farms, and they had only managed to escape the attacks of hordes of large apes by the skin of their teeth. The beasts were fiends and spared neither women nor children. Soon afterwards the tracks of colossal bipeds were identified in the clay soil of the Toma.s.sevic Fields on the edge of the city. That gave cause for concern.

The plague of insects was horrendous. Clouds of greedy locusts descended from the hills and wherever they went they left not one blade of gra.s.s. A swarm destroyed the castle garden in one single night. Bugs, earwigs and lice made our lives a misery. All of these species, from the largest to the smallest, seemed to be in the grip of an elemental procreative urge. Despite the fact that they were all eating each other up, quadrupeds and hexapods were multiplying in uncanny fas.h.i.+on. Even the official issue of guns and poison and the promulgation of strict orders to keep windows and doors closed had little effect, the fertility was just too great. Squads of volunteer hunters were organised to support the military and the police. Many buildings had embrasures made in the outside walls to shoot through.

One morning the wife of the coffee-house owner woke to find fourteen rabbits in her bed. Since her bedroom was only separated from mine by a thin part.i.tion, I could hear the baby rabbits squeaking.

But the most terrifying of all were the snakes. No house was safe from them, the vile beasts got everywhere, into drawers, wardrobes, coat-pockets, water-jugs, everywhere. And these insidious reptiles displayed a horrifying fecundity. If you went to your room in the dark you would tread on the eggs lying around and they would burst with a squelch. Castringius devised an 'egg dance', which he performed to perfection.

People in the French Quarter could scarcely put up with the vermin any longer. However, even during the beastly invasion, most kept their heads. It became the done thing to shoot your stag from your window and invite your friends straight round to share the game pie. From the skylight of the house where I used to live you could see a long way out over fields and meadows. Now the area had been transformed into a monstrous zoo. Even the river had its share: crocodiles, which after years of strenuous effort had been banished downstream, reappeared. The baths had to be closed because of the deadly electric eels which had taken up residence in the cabins.

One of the few good things about those difficult days was the fact that it was easy to come by a tasty roast and other rare t.i.tbits.

During this time old Professor Korntheuer enjoyed great respect. He gave public lectures in which he taught the Dreamlanders to distinguish dangerous bugs from harmless ones. Armed with a triple-barrelled shotgun, he was up and about at first light, wandering through the herds of gazelles, wild boar and marmots, stalking game. But the animals soon got used to the eccentric bespectacled huntsman and came to love the old gentleman. Our windows, on the other hand, suffered so much damage from his gun that it had to be taken away from him.

At night we could only go out if armed with a lantern and a gun, and even then we had to take great care. Traps, snares, pitfalls and spring-guns made the city even more dangerous than it already was. But to allow something like that to put them off the pursuit of pleasure was the one thing that never occurred to the Dreamers.

II.

The depths to which public morality had sunk presented a great opportunity to my fellow artist Castringius. His p.o.r.no-graphica were sought after, he was the fas.h.i.+on. Drawings such as The Lascivious Orchid Inseminating the Embryo were much admired. Hector von Brendel bought a complete series from him because Melitta thought them 'fun'. At first she was very much taken with them and had them nicely framed and hung in her boudoir. But it turned out to be merely a caprice and after a few days they had to go. An occasional beau of hers, an officer of dragoons, was allowed to take them; in return he presented her with a pair of antique emerald earrings. That very same evening the officer took the drawings to the cafe where they happened to be holding a raffle. The proceeds were to go towards helping those who were suffering the consequences of their dissolute ways; until then there had been no ward for them in our hospital. Quite a lot of money was collected, Blumenstich not the junk dealer made up the deficit and soon afterwards the first patients were being admitted to the ward next to the children's hospital in the monastery.

As irony would have it, I was the one who won the drawings and now they were hanging in my room. One day I met Castringius in the street. He was looking for a new apartment, he told me. His studio window and skylight were broken and there were bats hanging like smoked hams from his curtain rail. While he was telling me all this he kept having to ward off the attentions of an importunate ibex with his walking stick. I invited him up, and there were the pictures. His jaw dropped in amazement.

'How did you come by these pictures?'

I explained.

'They're very good. The White-striped Whip is my most mature work. It represents a synthesis of future morality. There's not a woman alive today capable of understanding the implications. It has a real tang to it.'

I agreed with him entirely. I was the only person in the Dream Realm capable of appreciating his artistic achievement. He was an oddball, but I liked him. And why not? He that feels pure, let him cast the first stone.

Suddenly there was noise in the street. We went over to the window. A lot of people were standing round laughing. And there was something to laugh at. Just imagine, the monkey had downed tools and gone on strike! The previous day already Giovanni had left one customer half shaved when his attention was drawn by a horde of macaques rus.h.i.+ng past. A beautiful long-tailed guenon had waved at him and the temptation had been too much for our barber's a.s.sistant. That time his philosophical master had managed to restrain him with a combination of the cane and the argument that time was divisible into tiny eternities. Now, however, no amount of reasoning could hold him back. He gracefully climbed up the drainpipe, grasped the princess's coffee flask with his prehensile tail, made himself comfortable on the window-ledge of my former apartment, now in a ruinous state and empty, and played on a Jew's harp he had concealed in his cheek pouch. The old princess gave a shriek of horror and tried to hit the coffee-thief with a broom, but he immediately threw the flask away and grabbed the broom. You should have seen the speed with which the lady disappeared, to reappear on the second floor. We had a perfect view of the duel from my window. Giovanni Battista was having a high old time. First of all he wrested her main weapon an old pair of fire-tongs from her and let her have the broom back; in the course of this he almost became a flying monkey! I had left a number of bottles of Indian ink behind and he used these as missiles. And an excellent shot he was, too; we all cheered him on while the princess swore like a fish wife.

Suddenly he reappeared, wearing the old woman's filthy bonnet, swung out of the window and slid back down the drainpipe, grimacing grotesquely. At the window upstairs the princess was calling for the police, while at the bottom the barber was waiting with his cane. 'You should be ashamed of yourself', he shouted at the monkey.

Alfred Blumenstich, a smug smile on his face, was just emerging from the apartment of his nine little darlings, where he had once more been dispensing his own particular brand of charity. His carriage was waiting. With a tremendous leap the monkey sprang onto the head of the stallion and off they went. The onlookers went wild and cheered until the vehicle and its bizarre rider had vanished into the distance.