Maureen Kincaid Speller, the late and sorely missed critic and Strange Horizons Reviews Editor, once embarked on a project to read and comment on Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s monumental anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2011). In setting forth her prospectus for the project, she noted how uncomfortable she had been with reading weird fiction. Her “dis-ease with the idea of the weird” flowed from its discongruence with her habits and tastes as a reader, which were largely informed by epic fantasy; her reading had been focused on the fantastic as rigidly taxonomized, opposed to the unsettlement of the weird, and had left her unprepared for the reading strategies necessary for grappling with it. The Lord of the Rings (1954-5) provided an apt example of all this: the tentacled watcher outside the Mines of Moria offered an unsettling intrusion—as the weird should be—but also an uncomfortable one, due to Tolkien’s unfamiliarity with the affect as a writer … and, just as importantly, Maureen’s as a reader. More compelling and more successful for both were the Dead Marshes—effective, Maureen noted, because of “the incredible beauty of the initial encounter, before the hobbits and Gollum try to understand the nature of what they’re seeing”: the dead submerged beneath the waters revealing themselves to be “all foul, all rotting, all dead.”
I never managed to settle on something that felt meaningful to say for the remembrances published in Strange Horizons’s 2023 special issue on criticism, even though Maureen was an influence on my critical practice, a warm correspondent, and the first editor to commission any of my writing. Here, three years late, is an effort to remember and honor her in a way that feels obvious in retrospect: by following her thoughts in writing about reading. In tribute to Maureen’s project reading the weird, I’m going to work through her observation about the Dead Marshes as a wider conceptualization of the moment of weirding and the act of weird reading.
In another essay, one of many trying to sketch out her critical practice, Maureen described her approach to reading speculative fiction as an active search for the sublime, and argued that “surely the very notion of sf is to invite the willing suspension of disbelief.” In addition to this larger suspension of disbelief, I will add that the ideal reader of the weird has to embrace a kind of wilful suspension of foreknowledge or generic expectation. This affected tabula rasa perspective requires, in turn, a critical approach, a practice of weird reading [1] hyper-attuned to the weird poetics of a piece as it signals its own weirding and becomes weird fiction. In an ideal world, being a reader of weird fiction would mirror being a character in weird fiction, unexpectedly encountering the irreal where you expected only the prosaic. That way, the affect of the weird can creep up (or irrupt!), unsettling reality and/or storyworld. In actuality, genre publications and reading habits being what they are, this is an incredible rarity. It’s far more often the case that a reader, aware that they’re entering the realm of the weird, preemptively reads weirdly, critically engaging with the text in search of clues and ways that the narrative has left the realm of the real and entered irreal territory. This is, moreover, a replication of the metaphorical experience at the heart of the mode of the weird. Maureen borrows from Adam Roberts that sf “is a fundamentally metaphorical literature because it sets out to represent the world without reproducing it.” This essay will go on to contend that weird fiction, too, is a metaphorical literature—because it generates a representation of the world without reproducing it and then actively unsettles it, and in so doing metaphorizes its own critique/criticism.
To begin our examination of this critical practice of weird reading, let’s turn to two momentous collections of/on the weird that were published last year. The Weird: A Companion (edited by Carl H. Sederholm and Kristopher Woofter), a nonfiction collection of criticism, theory, and history, and The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 1 (edited by Michael Kelly, publisher of Undertow Publications), a collection of weird tales selected as the year’s best by one of the genre’s preeminent editors. Both of these books are indispensable guides to the state of the weird in the twenty-first century. In their emphasis on the weird’s profusion around and beyond genre lines and lineages, their respective grapplings with both theory and application of the weird each provide incredibly fertile ground for the practice of reading as an active search for weirding.
Sederholm and Woofter set forth two objectives for The Weird: A Companion: First, to “demonstrate just how expansive the Weird has become as a mode,” [2] and second, to claim space for the weird “not only as an aesthetic tradition but also as a vibrant, expansive critical term” (emphasis theirs). Weird reading as a practice takes both of these into account. To think of the weird as a critical framework helps guide both the formation of the body of texts that we read as “weird fiction” and the way we read those texts. I’m particularly fond of Indigenous scholar Kali Simmons’s reference to the potential of weird fiction as “a suspicious critical method that seeks to unmake hegemonic realities,” and this is precisely how I would like to bring it to bear here.
Weirding, in this sense, is an active unsettling, expressed both in the reading and the affective poetics that trouble, unsettle, and actively weird its material. I’m mostly concerned with the former here, but the latter bears mentioning, particularly in light of the metaphorical nature (or, at least, metaphorical reading) of the mode. Indeed, I’m not sure you can separate the two. Weirding as a critical perspective is embedded in both, since it characterises the attempt to write/represent/comprehend the unwriteable/unrepresentable/uncomprehendable as a critical way of thinking along all three axes. Destabilizing/unsettling/defamiliarizing is a method of challenging the reader, author, character all to look at and think about things differently. The reading of weird fiction, then, inculcates a critical approach, a practice of weird reading that centers the search for, and experience of, that defamiliarization.
Much has been written about H. P. Lovecraft’s emphasis on the inability of language to convey the weird, and perhaps for this reason his work has become (unfortunately) a synecdoche for the weird at large; but we don’t have to look far afield to find others doing the same thing. As Emily Alder notes in her chapter for Sederholm and Woofter on William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912), the book’s style “is integral to its uncomfortable qualities as a weird tale.” She quotes Greer Gilman’s point that the language of such books “is wielded as a defense against the unspeakable horrors it cannot represent, often ‘working by paradox, denying what it names. It finds estrangement in a throng of words.’” [3] Weird reading is the active search for this estrangement, just as weirding is the active creation of this affect in a text. Both are applications of Shklovsky’s ostranenie: defamiliarizing as an artistic technique to make the usual strange and to make perception/understanding slower and more difficult.
Think back to Maureen’s observation about the unsettling effort required of the hobbits and Gollum to try to understand the weirded nature of the Dead Marshes in their own moment of weird reading. Uri Margolin has pointed to the mirroring of writing/reading as inherent to the technique of defamiliarization, which leads to “both the slowing down and the increased difficulty (impeding) of the process of reading and comprehending and an awareness of the artistic procedures (devices) causing them.” Weird reading/weirding is particularly cognate, in this mirroring, with queer reading/queering: Both are practices of reading that find something within a text and simultaneously critical approaches to the thing being found. Indeed, Brian Johnson’s chapter in The Weird: A Companion, “From Qweird to Queered Weird and Back: Notes on Reading Lovecraft in the Closet,” notes the etymological similarity between “queer” and “weird” before suturing them into the jarring portmanteau of its title.
Weird fiction relies on this kind of liminal bleed—between writing and reading, between fields of knowledge and ontologies, and between the tools of the irreal and the unsettling—to weird something, to force it to be seen differently, to be understood outside of what was previously believed to be its nature. In the Companion itself, two of the axioms from Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s “Seven Weird Axioms” (a riff on Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “Monster Culture: Seven Theses”) are key to this discussion: “The Time of the Weird is a Spiral” and “The Motor of the Weird is Crisis Energy.” That idea of Spiralling time partly shapes what Sederholm and Woofter refer to as the weird’s tendency “to frame knowledge-seeking and deciphering as always-already heading toward an impasse.” (Brian Johnson similarly notes the “always already” sense inherent to queer weird readings.) In weird fiction, crisis energy is produced within “a moment of indeterminacy poised on the edge of the knife’s blade between the rightness or wrongness of the world” during a “transition from the familiar into the strange”; it is this that “propels the spiral of the Weird.” [4]
Weird reading rests on these crucial moments of criticism and crisis—which both stem, ultimately, from the Greek krī́nein, “to separate, choose, decide, judge,” and which spiral throughout the weird reading of weird fiction. The shape/movement of this crisis/criticism means that weird fiction can embed these moments in line-level poetics and/or structure throughout a story. As with the weird within the storyworld, sometimes it’s an abrupt irruption, even within the first lines of the story; sometimes it’s incredibly subtle; sometimes it’s only legible within the arc of the entire work.
Chris Campbell’s story in Kelly’s anthology, “In the Palace of Science,” opens with the classic weird fiction tactic of a warning that spirals throughout the rest of the story: “If you’ve found this recording … a grave danger to humanity most assuredly survives with it.” Uchechukwu Nwaka’s “An Offering of Algae,” on the other hand, immediately announces itself as post-apocalyptic science fantasy, leaving the reader to piece together what’s particularly unsettling, particularly weird, about the setting. Rachael Jones’s “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus,” meanwhile, establishes a science fictional world and weirds the narrative only at its very end, reaching back to estrange what the reader encountered at the beginning. These moments are more abstract elsewhere: Nicholas Royle’s “British Wildlife” manages to estrange the quotidian with an overwhelming emphasis on menace and implication within the line level; Joe Koch’s “These Are His Memories” does so by blurring its narrative voice, the “you” of an embedded story and the “you” of the second person narration metafictionally reminded that “you, too, are made of paper”; telling both character and reader that the weird has “so many causes and effects, failures, losses, but lots of them good, the things you worked for and wanted, happy occasions. It’s never one thing. There is no straw. It creeps up on you.” Whether overt or subtle and diffuse, these moments of indeterminacy and unsettlement, these liminal spaces of critical thinking, are where weird fiction happens, where things are weirded.
Toni Morrison, in reference to the opening lines of Beloved (1987), pinpointed this moment as a “fully realized presence of the haunting,” which was “both a major incumbent of the narrative and sleight of hand” and acted to “keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world.” The former, the effect upon and effort required by the reader, is what I’m focused on here, but I never want to lose track of the latter, which was the emphasis of “Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism,” to which the current essay might be thought of as a companion piece. Homi K. Bhabha built upon Morrison’s shocking crisis moment of the fully-realized haunting as a “moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion” in the “beyond” where “there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction.” Finding oneself suddenly in the beyond is exactly what weird reading does (or should do)—and the disorienting, disturbing depaysement of the weird means that dread and the numinous, both amorphous and ambient affects, are often more important for the weird than horror or disgust.
Charlotte Tierney’s story in the Kelly, “A Woman’s Place Is in the Haunted Home,” centers this weirding affect of reading. Its protagonist Lisa, a new mother, reads and constantly cites texts, both real and fictional, as part of her “critical analysis” of infant care. The story posits pregnancy and postpartum anxiety as weird hauntings: Lisa accrues many thousands of ghosts, each one created by a crisis moment of worry about her child’s safety. In an expression of the always-already of dread and the weirded spiral, “Lisa knew a haunted house was, customarily, already haunted prior to a ghost’s manifestation.” The story also twists and weirds its ghosts to emphasize its distance from horror; rather than the appearance one would expect based on prior fiction (“Unreal, uncanny, and unlikely”), they look real, “empty and sad, rather than horrifying.”
Thomas Ligotti, in his “‘In the Night, in the Dark’: A Note on the Appreciation of Weird Fiction” (originally the foreword for his 1994 collection Noctuary and reprinted in Sederholm and Woofter), riffs on the oft-explained etymology of the weird as a form of fate to note that “[t]he entrapments presented in weird fiction may go so far as to be absolute, a full illustration of what was always in the works and only awaited discovery.” Or, to pull from Thomas Ha’s “Alabama Circus Punk,” collected in the Kelly and wherein a digital lifeform has been infected with a cybervirus which corrupts its language capabilities, leading to its realization that “nothing was safe or whole or solid, and none of it ever really was.”
But, in true weird spiral fashion, we must—before digging into that moment of the weird verb—begin with the weird as noun. As much as I want to avoid the genre-wrangling so endemic to writing about the weird, I find that it’s necessary to explore a little how the verbed weird creates the noun weird. Sederholm and Woofter’s introduction, indeed, begins their book with the declaration that “[a]nyone who writes about the Weird eventually must address the daunting prospect of definition.”
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The film historian Jeanine Basinger, in her book on Anthony Mann (1979), wrote that noir is not a genre but a “virus” which “attacks healthy genres and makes them sick, dark, discouraged, and disillusioned.” This is how we should think of the weird as well. Noir sickens, the weird weirds; both are verbs, active critical perspectives brought to bear by writers but also readers (and critics, who are nothing if not readers who write). In the Kelly, Natalia Theodoridou’s “Nocturnal” weirds itself immediately by unmaking a familiar tableau: As a child, the second-person subject was put to bed by her mother; but she is then told stories by “your not-mother, your other-mother” who “looks just like your mother, except she’s taller and there is no love for you on her face.” Decades later, the dying mother tells her daughter, herself now a mother, that stories are “[v]accines to guard against the cruelties of the world.” But the critical crisis moment of deciding which of these mothers to trust powers the story, vaccine or no. This mirrors the real experience of reading to find out when the weird declares itself, to discover the moment when a piece shifts itself into weird fiction.
This active and expansive shift is an important aspect of Sederholm and Woofter’s conception of the weird, informed by Mieke Bal’s idea of “traveling concepts”—ideas that move across scholarly disciplines and, in the process, “change, develop, and hybridize.” This slipperiness and perpetual elision of boundaries typifies the act of weirding and the act of thinking about/reading the weird. In Bal’s words, “[w]hile groping to define, provisionally and partly, what a particular concept may mean, we gain insight into what it can do.” The weird, Sederholm and Woofter are at pains to argue, weirds things, forces a perspectival and critical reappraisal by way of estrangement. Weird reading is what picks up on that action.
We can further complicate the weird as a traveling concept by emphasizing its apophatic nature. Part of what invites critical, close reading in weird fiction is the fact that the weird thrives in voids and productive ambiguity even more than in direct explication, leaving the reader to interpret and fill in what the text does not. The metaphor of the weird as a void and a traveling concept appears directly in Richard Gavin’s “Banquets of Embertide,” in which the population of a small Northern town in Canada gathers for an annual banquet, a liminal ceremony to usher in the change from autumn to winter. It culminates in an intruder at the door (“Something foul is knocking at the door to our world!”), a guest which reveals itself as “a great absence, a thing (or rather a no-thing) of darkness, a negation whose absolute stillness permeates all.” This intruder, revealed to be the very concept of the grave, “has no qualities whatsoever. It holds no odour of the soil from whence it came, nor any traces of its previous occupants. In fact, nothing about it is inherent.” This is an incredible co-incident/spiraled echo of Alison Sperling’s assertion, in her chapter in the Companion on “Weird Queer Ecologies,” that the weird is an “affective (and therefore subjective) atmosphere more than a particular quality that inheres.”
I’ve often been frustrated with the overdetermined emphasis on genre multiplicity in discussions of weird fiction. Emphasizing an affective, apophatic atmosphere, Gavin’s negation—whose absolute stillness permeates all—provides a much more convincing alternative. For their part, Sederholm and Woofter argue that the weird is not a genre but 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.” This orientation, to hammer the point, is a critical one, in two important senses: As a model applied to works of fiction ex post facto through weird reading; and in the sense that, within the works of fiction at hand, the weird lives in moments of crisis/critical indeterminacy for its own thematic material. To return to Maureen, for a weird reader, “various taxonomies of literature and marketing come into play, in an effort to define as precisely as possible what it is one is after … It is only later that the realisation dawns that taxonomies are not only more fragile than might be supposed, and thus liable to collapse, but that this is a good thing, and indeed a necessary thing.” Similarly, Cristina Rivera Garza has emphasized the power of interrogating in and between genres; not “hybridity or the melting pot, or with things that fuse together harmonically” but “friction and constant questioning” so that you can “consider the frictions that happen when you jump from one way of writing to another.”
In other words, for the purposes of weird reading in particular, it isn’t that weird fiction partakes of different genres, but that it thrives in the friction that builds when moving between them. (Or, more accurately for our present purposes, in the intrusion of the mode of the weird into the host genre of the story.) Most obviously or stereotypically, this friction can be found in the shift from the real to the irreal in these crisis/critical moments of weird reading—emphasizing the movement and agentic character of the weird.
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In The Weird: A Companion, Timothy Jarvis and Helen Marshall’s excellent chapter on “M. John Harrison’s Radical Vision of the New Weird” teases out some of the implications of a critical approach that spirals forward-and-backward within both text and corpus. [5] Pointing to Harrison’s insistence that the weird is “not ‘Lovecraftian’” but “a way of writing about the real,” Jarvis and Marshall situate the weird as a revelatory critical method used “to crowbar open the world to get at some quality of reality.” Against the tendency that sets Lovecraft as “a fountainhead for the Weird, with various tributaries springing forth from his tradition of cosmic horror,” they suggest that perhaps “the Weird should be described, not as a river, with waters flowing downward from a source, but as an estuary where freshwater and ocean mix to form a rich, brackish murk hiding many reefs and islands? Such a way of thinking about literary history emphasizes transmutation over transmission.”
I would push this excellent idea even further: The spiral/brackish temporality of the weird also troubles the periodized approach to weird fiction as bifurcated between the so-called old (or “haute”) weird and the new. As opposed to a Lovecraft-descended canon—whose emphasis on historical weight has more of a Gothic tenor than a weird one—we might say that the brackish approach is weirding the weird, emphasizing a more formal, close-reading approach to how the weird reads critically across genres. The brackish weird actively subsumes irreal crisis/critical moments even in stories by writers with no familiarity or active engagement with weird fiction as a Lovecraftian canon (for example, Franz Kafka or Toni Morrison). This ecumenical approach to the weird definitely infests The Weird: A Companion: There’s an incredible hodgepodge of texts under scrutiny, from movies, novels, and TV shows to black metal, visual art, and, of course, what I would call the most apt form of the weird, the short story.
The Best Weird Fiction of the Year takes it for granted that weird fiction takes place in short stories. Michael Kelly’s previous series, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, with a series of guest editors, ran from 2014-2018; this new book is a sequel, or sibling, to those earlier selections (“Welcome, once again, to the weird” the back cover proclaims, in a nicely spiraled timeline). It contains publications from 2024. Michael Kelly’s introduction to the anthology, while brief, is illustrative. Kelly is firmly in the brackish camp, with an expansive approach to the critical weird that demonstrates its generic profusion. He is anthologizing around genre gaps, selecting fiction that is “speculative, and often (but not always) works to explore and subvert the laws of nature,” expressed as “unceasing distortion and buckling of ambient space and time”—what a depiction of crisis energy!—“where plot, theme, atmosphere and voice coalesce. Hence, the lens from which you view the world is askew and occluded.” What’s noteworthy here is not just the critical viewpoint spotlighted as the effect of the weird, but that the you in question is not specified between character and reader.
This conception of weird fiction emphasizes not lineage but approach, a weird critical reading protocol in Samuel Delany’s sense, where, stressing the impossibility of defining genres, he emphasizes instead that “[a] more fruitful way to characterize the distinction between genres is to view it as a set of distinctions between reading protocols, between ways of reading, between ways of responding to sentences, between ways of making various sentences and various texts make sense.” Weirding in this guise is as much a function of reading as authoring, a critical view that spills beyond the text into a way of reading the weirdness, disjunction, and unsettlement of the world. As Borges wrote about Kafka, both hugely important authors for the brackish weird:
Kafka’s idiosyncracy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem “Fears and Scruples” by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. The word “precursor” is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it from any connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
In other words, the conception of the past brackish pool of weird writings both constitutes its own reading and is, in turn, constructed by it.
Dan Sinykin, in a recent article on “Sociology and Allegory,” notes that a critical reading in the spirit of Pierre Bourdieu “recognizes in texts allegories for the literary field.” That is, “to be reductive—that a book is always about its own attempt to succeed.” The visual art critic Clement Greenberg situated this kind of self-reflection as the bedrock of modernism writ large: “The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself.” [6] And so, as I promised earlier, in turn, I’m going to argue, with tongue only mostly in cheek, that weird fiction is a metaphor for critically reading weird fiction.
More seriously, it’s a metaphor for thinking about the world weirdly, for a weird critical reading of the world in crisis. In the brackish, Delanyian sense, the search for weird knowledge, the quest to find the crisis moment of weirding, is the reading protocol that determines weird fiction, by metafictionally recapitulating the narrative’s moment of crisis/criticism. In this more sober sense, weird reading as a way of thinking critically about the world is literalized in several of Kelly’s selections. In Greg van Eekhout’s “Across the Street,” a man fleeing “a fair number of damp, drizzly Novembers in my soul”—and sharing Ishmael’s urge to step “into the street and methodically [knock] people’s hats off”—instead spends his lunch break walking past a string of corporate chains and franchises to cross the street in search of something weirder: mysterious footprints, a pet store featuring dragons, street signs with shifting alphabets, screaming churches and noises his brain had not evolved to process. He asks a passerby about portals elsewhere, and is told, “Everything’s a portal … It’s whatever you’ve always imagined is on the other side.” Pandemonium, unravelings, rebirth, apocalypticism: “These are only metaphors. Pale reflections of the beyond.” Of, in other words, Homi K. Bhabha’s “moment of transit”! Even more apt for our constant return to the spiraled time of the weird, the man comes across a street sign for “The World is a Sphere but Time is Linear Avenue.”
The protagonist of Seán Padraic Birnie’s “Black Water” also moves in metaphors and critical theories, haunted by his weird reading of the nature of reality. He “often felt as if he had not quite woken up: Some days it was twilight all day long. He had theories about that, but the trip was supposed to take him out of that frame of mind in which he developed theories. A theory, he knew, could get you in trouble.” In particular, it is his theory regarding the fictionality of the world—“That none of it’s real[,] not really [... which] haunts me.” The perspectivism of the weird is also expressed in the chronic pain and infestation or impregnation of the story’s male protagonist: He awakes in his captivity and sees through the “dim translucency” of his belly “eyes flitting through a flowing substance akin to smoke or black water.”
Black Water is also the title of a pair of Alberto Manguel anthologies that typify, without using the term, the brackish weird—collected stories where Manguel found “the impossible seeping into the possible, what Wallace Stevens calls ‘black water breaking into reality.’” Intertwined ghosts and metafiction do something similar elsewhere in Kelly’s anthology, too—in Zachariah Claypole White’s “Ghost Story.” A tightly coiled spiral told in the future tense (“In the ghost story, a boy will vanish”), it presents the meta-story of a ghost story about a missing boy, his single mother, judgmental townfolk, and a weird forest. The story is told, retold, and changed (somewhat) in the telling. Some things stay the same, including the fact that “The boy will not be found. Or at least not in a way which satisfies the ghost story.” The ghost story rendered as an agentic entity fulfills a similar role to Richard Gavin’s visiting absence: embodiments of the traveling concept of the weird. The story, then, is another metatextual expression of the critical power of the weird, a ghost story about a ghost story in which the ghost story is expressing certain expectations of ghost stories.
White’s story ends with the mother exerting her agency against the town. Staring into the forest, she will “call to its impossible clearings and black roots, beckoning them closer, toward the town that consumed her son.” This is an example of the unsettling numinous weird (or consonant weird, see note 5) as a crisis point that emerges at the end of a weird tale—and draws the reader into active engagement with productive ambiguity. Sohni Chakrabarti, in her Companion chapter on the weird as metaphor for Chicana feminist resistance, makes reference to the weird as “a kind of orientation or critical disruption” which “upsets and disrupts essentialist and dominant notions of identity, home, and belonging,” allowing writers to weird spectral female figures as—in the words of her subject, Mexican writer Gloria Anzaldúa—“the maternal, the germinal, the potential.”
Potential, here, should be understood as latent crisis, and as a way of understanding the weird as an affect. To spiral back to 1937, Clark Ashton Smith wrote in “Atmosphere in Weird Fiction” that his titular subject can be distinguished in the kinetic and the potential varieties—the former “comprising all the effects of overt surface imagery,” the latter the more important type for his (and our) purposes, as the one in which “all the implications, hints, undertones, shadows, nuances, and the verbal associations, and various effects of rhythm, onomatopoeia and phonetic pattern” plus the “ambiguity, the lack of precise definition, stimulate the reader's imagination and evoke shadowy meanings beyond the actual words.” It demands, in other words, active critical engagement on the part of the reader to read weirdly and parse the weirdness behind and in between the words. Back in 2024 and in the pages of Kelly’s anthology, the ambiguity in Kay Chronister’s Evensonian “Ruminants” invites unresolvable potential and untapped crisis. In the story, refugees trapped on an island are compelled to work as handlers for some kind of uncanny animal: “The ruminants are not cows but they are something like cows” which have “some wrongness in them that might somehow be transmitted to us if we were to consume them.” The characters are stuck critically, within the dread of krinein, of crisis and criticism, that is capable of being but not yet in existence within the spiraled time of the weird. This sense of crisis is generated by the text, particularly in its points of productive ambiguity, and left in inconclusiveness and perpetual crisis, in the place where critical thought happens.
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Maureen Kincaid Speller, in writing about and reading the weird, suggested that, within the mode, “the pleasure derives from the ongoing uncertainty but also from the potentiality of the situation.” As usual, she was on to something. This is the form of the disrupted, crisis-riddled world we find ourselves in—and a critical weird reading of that potentiality helps us make metaphorical sense of our perpetual feelings of dis-ease. It’s fitting that Maureen left her reading project on The Weird unfinished, in a liminal, indeterminate state. After spending six months on it and covering about a third of the anthology, she left it for three years before returning in 2015 for one last entry on Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd” (1943). At the end of her discussion of this story about a mass of onlookers who cluster around car accidents, Maureen concluded that, regarding the question of the crowd’s mysterious origins, “[w]e never know. In fact, we never can know. That’s the beauty of the story. And yet, ever afterwards, you can never look at a street accident in quite the same way.” The best weird fiction leaves us with this uncertainty, this impossibility of knowing for sure. Immersed in the brackish pool of the weird, we can never look at reading in quite the same way.
Endnotes
[1] Eileen Joy has written about her practice of weird reading in an essay of the same name in Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism. I’d love to engage with that here and spell out some differences (and similarities) between her project of weird reading as a philosophical inquiry and my project of weird reading as a way of engaging with and finding weird fiction, but for the sake of not stretching this piece any longer than it already is, I’ll just say that’s an essay prompt for another day. [return]
[2] This proper noun capitalization occurs sometimes in writing about weird fiction, but I won't be replicating it here outside of direct quotes. [return]
[3] For simplicity’s sake, essays and stories outside of the two books under discussion will be hyperlinked; anything without a hyperlink will be found in either The Weird: A Companion or The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 1. [return]
[4] Speaking of crises: The climate crisis is frequently used as the go-to metaphorical reading of weird fiction; to such a degree that I find it such well-worn territory that I think it will be interesting to elide it here, even with the understanding that it is perhaps the foremost crisis of the twenty-first century and underlies so many of our social crises. [return]
[5] I find “the New Weird” to be a useful name for the specific movement of post-New Wave, post-Viriconium (1971-1984) work that embedded the weird within fantasy novels and which reached a boiling point about two decades ago; “new weird fiction” as a generalized reference to modern weird tales much less so. A much more useful distinction, I think, would be between the consonant and dissonant weird as sub-types of the affect, the former emphasizing transcendence and an embrace of monstrosity. The consonant weird thrives within the post-Clive Barker “new weird,” scare quotes very intentional. [return]
[6] I keep threatening to write an essay arguing that weird fiction, particularly in its resurgent late twentieth/early twenty-first century version, is an amalgam of reading strategies pulling on modernism by way of speculative fiction’s New Wave—with unsettling affects pulled largely from horror. One of these days I’ll actually do it. [return]