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

Various | Weird Fiction: An Anthology | Penguin | September 2024 | 208 pagesWilliam Hope Hodgson | The House on the Borderland | Penguin | September 2024 | 208 pagesAlgernon Blackwood | Ancient Sorceries | Penguin | September 2024 | 208 pagesGertrude Barrows Bennett | Claimed! | Penguin | September 2024 | 144 pagesRobert Chambers | The King in Yellow | Penguin | September 2024 | 112 pages

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 21st 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.