The Weird

The ways the “Weird” has shifted and traveled from a generic term associated with horror pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and Strange Tales,³ to an expansive global phenomenon is noteworthy. Moreover, to speak of the Weird is, increasingly, to indicate a complex blend of worldview, school of suspicion, atmospheric effect, and rhetorical stance—all these variously characterized by dreadful speculation, spectacles of radical otherness, meditations on human finitude, and an anti-anthropocentrism that wavers between an attitude of cosmic pessimism and a kind of willful abandon. Weird works often combine shocking confrontations, randomness, strangeness/“wrongness,” sublimity, and ambiguity to generate an affective response to the world that shifts from surprise, to despair, to a surrender that is, at turns, terrifying or euphoric.

So far, our discussion of the Weird has appealed to a broad sense of the term, what it might mean, and how to think about it in the widest possible sense. For some readers, this approach will be especially welcome because they want to move beyond too much reliance on H. P. Lovecraft. Although we share an interest in breaking new ground, we will return frequently to Lovecraft in this introduction, not to suggest that his work or theorization of the Weird marks some kind of beginning (his own 1927 historical survey Supernatural Horror in Literature attests to that not being the case), but rather as a pivot point in our own understanding of the Weird’s modal and ontological underpinnings. The diversity of topics and approaches in this collection alone should serve to suggest (despite the frequency with which Lovecraft’s name is invoked) that the Weird is a broad and shifting phenomenon made up of convergences, oppositions, subversions, and reactions with respect to other traditions (not only literary, cinematic, and generic but also cultural, political, and philosophical).

Although Lovecraft’s fiction and correspondence both coined and expanded “Weird” in important ways, he would nevertheless likely be surprised by how much it has become not simply a means of naming a body of texts with shared themes, but also a distinctive, discursive perspective on things. By perspective, we do not suggest something fixed—a shared politics or set of biases. As we have seen with authors like Lovecraft himself, the Weird can carry a variety of reactionary positions while still attempting to unsettle our sense of reality.⁴ For our purposes, it is this unsettling quality that gives the Weird its most distinctive power. It is also the source of what we see as a poetic orientation to the Weird tradition. As Marxist-socialist Weird author China Miéville states,

I am profoundly unconvinced that there are any direct lessons to be learned as political activists from the Weird. We should never start from the position that because we like this particular set of art there must be a useful political methodology to derive from it. It simply does not follow; there may be exceptions, but it cannot be a given. Start from the position that the stuff you are into is just not very important. You cannot derive your politics from it. Which does not necessarily mean you cannot learn from it—specifically, do learning from it—or do performative politics with it. (in Bould, 2016, 19, original emphases)

Following Miéville’s sense of “do[ing] learning,” we argue that both Weird artists and scholars can “do things” with the Weird—things that challenge our sense of the world, that suggest perspectives beyond the human, or the earthly.

In response to what we perceive as a flourishing Weird sensibility in various corners of art, culture, philosophy, and academia, this collection can be said to have at least two major purposes. The first, and perhaps more expected, of these is to demonstrate through a wide variety of subjects and approaches just how expansive the Weird has become as a mode. That is, if genre is meant to suggest a set of texts with certain key categorical definitions, tropes, and conventions (however hybridizing or constantly shifting and in tension), a mode is meant to indicate a particular orientation toward the world, a methodology or strategy.⁵ Accordingly, even though this collection is by no means exhaustive, it nevertheless strives to be the most far-reaching, diverse, and globally focused series of essays on the subject to date.⁶ To highlight this variety, we have organized this book into thematic sections meant less to drive toward some ultimate categorical definition, than to indicate the conceptual flexibility and broad applicability of the Weird. While Lovecraft still looms large, there are other trends, such as those explored before Lovecraft (e.g., in the works of William Hope Hodgson), contemporaneously with him (e.g., in the works of Uruguayan-Argentinian author Horacio Quiroga), and after him (e.g., in the works of M. John Harrison) that reveal various confluences of the Weird.⁷ As we developed the volume, we asked each author to think primarily about a topic (or a problem) that could be addressed as Weird, either for direct (e.g., generic, practical, thematic) or more implicit (e.g., conceptual, theoretical, philosophical) reasons. The result, as we hope you will agree, is a series of instructive and provocative discussions that should expand our overall sense of how the Weird—particularly as it has come to be defined by thinkers since Lovecraft—functions across a variety of media and schools of thought.