The New Weird
“The New Weird” is a literary genre that started in the 1990′s. Some people consider it a sub-genre of horror fiction or dark fantasy fiction. Like most literary genres, “the New Weird” is a label that was applied to a literary genre after the fact. At the store, we carry an anthology that defines the genre, and it’s titled, appropriately enough, The New Weird. The book was edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer.
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.)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 10:29 am and is filed under Horror Fiction, The New Weird. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’ve been pestering fellow members of a forum I belong to about hotlinking pictures for years.
One of them just did it again. In the interest of you not having to pay for my friends to look at a picture you’re hosting without ever going to your site, and to teach him a lesson, would you mind redirecting this link? Preferably to something that chides him for being a dumb thief.
http://www.eeriebooks.com/horror/book-club/pride-prejudice-zombies.jpg