I wouldn’t have described “Jack” by China Mieville as horror necessarily, although it was definitely horrific. If I had to put a label on the story, I’d call it “fantasy” or “dark fantasy”. But I can see what this particular short story has in common with some of Clive Barker’s work, and I feel like I’m coming to terms a bit with the concept of “the New Weird”.

I also did some more reading on the subject of “the New Weird” yesterday, and about the anthology itself. Apparently the anthology is organized very specifically, with a section for some of the recent ancestors of the sub-genre, some examples of the genre itself, and then some analysis and literary criticism in the form of essays about “the New Weird”.

I’m also engrossed in a novel right now called The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb. I’d read She’s Come Undone a few years ago and liked it, but I LOVE The Hour I First Believed so far. It’s one of the only novels that’s actually moved me to tears, which is a rare and important achievement in a work of literature. (Literature is supposed to affect you emotionally, otherwise, what’s the point?) I’m only about halfway through the book so far.

We do carry copies of both books at the store here. Neither one is horror, strictly speaking, not in the sense of vampires or ghosts. But much of The Hour I First Believed is concerned with the Hurricane Katrina and Columbine, which are two of the more real-life horrific events in our country’s history. So I’ve included it in our stock here.

I’ll write more tomorrow. My son’s got strep, and I have to take him to the pharmacy to get some antibiotics today.

One way of looking at “the New Weird” is to compare it to “the Old Weird”. (That’s not actually a literary genre; I just made the phrase up.) But for our purposes, we can consider the “old Weird” to be the literary ancestors of the “New Weird”. Stuff like Weird Tales magazine, or H.P. Lovecraft might be considered the antecedents of this new literary movement.

But what is “The New Weird”?

According to the back of the anthology on my desk here at the store, “The New Weird” is “Edgy, urban fiction with a visceral immediacy…” The back of the book goes on to say that “…the New Weird has descended from classic fantasy and dime-store pulp novels, from horror and detective comics, from thrillers and noir.” Other words used to describe the genre from the back of the book include:

• innovative
• literate
• shocking

I haven’t yet dug into The New Weird to read the stories, but it sounds like something I’d be interested in. The back of the book advertising goes on to talk about “shadowy cities” and “grotesque rituals”. I like stories about those things. “When everything is lethal and no one is innocent…” I can definitely see how the genre has been influenced by the concept of film noir.

My friend Shane would probably call “the New Weird” just a pretentious label for just plain horror fiction, and I’m not sure how wrong he’d be if he did call it that. On the other hand, labels can be useful in terms of categorizing anything, including horror literature. So I’m not ready to judge until after I’ve done some reading. I’m going to spend the afternoon doing some reading here in the collection of stories. I’ll either write a new blog post reviewing some of those stories, or I’ll update this post with some of my thoughts.

By the way, welcome to our new blog. I’m Randy Ray, and I’m going to write about lots of stuff related to the horror genre here. I plan to write about horror movies, horror books, horror games, and more. You can look forward to daily updates. Not only will I continue this thinking about “the New Weird” here, I’ll also be writing a review of Arkham Horror (the boardgame) soon, as well as some thoughts on Italian horror movies and Asian horror movies. (Both of which are new categories for stock here in the store.)