The New Weird

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Inasmuch as so-called New Weird fiction defines itself in relation to what

now presumably must be considered ‘Old Weird’ fiction, any discussion
of the former must necessarily start with the latter—and, in keeping with
the complicated and fascinating etymology of the term ‘weird’ itself, it is
a discussion that spreads out in several directions. Contemporary English
speakers are likely to use the term ‘weird’ as an adjective to character-
ise something odd, strange, abnormal or unexpected. The Old English
wyrd, however, from which the contemporary usage is derived, was a
noun signifying ‘[t]he principle, power, or agency by which events are
predetermined; fate, destiny’ (‘weird, n.’ Oxford English Dictionary). The
werdys were the Fates, the goddesses in charge of determining the course
of human life—one hears this resonance in Shakespeare’s three ‘weïrd sis-
ters’ in Macbeth—and someone’s ‘weird’ was their appointed destiny, that
which was fated to happen to them. The use of ‘weird’ as an adjective
originally derived from the noun and connoted the supernatural power
to manipulate the destiny of human beings. From there, it generalised to
convey a sense of the strange, unusual and fantastic.
Rehearsing this etymology is useful because it plays at least implicitly
into terminological debates about what weird fiction is and where and
when it began; and, as we shall see, it has particular relevance to the fiction

J.A. Weinstock ()

Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 177

K. Gelder (ed.), New Directions in Popular Fiction,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52346-4_9
178 J.A. WEINSTOCK

of perhaps the central figure associated with twentieth-century weird fic-

tion (now the Old Weird): H.P. Lovecraft. Before getting to Lovecraft,
however, one might first consider two very broad definitions of weird fic-
tion. The first, resonating with the etymology of weird, would be fiction
that constructs a world in which the course of human affairs is directed by
external powers and forces (controlled by the werdys). This might include
a good deal of the literature of the ancient world—consider Odysseus’s
thwarted attempts to return to Ithaca or the tragic events of Oedipus’s
fated destiny, for example—as well as medieval romances in which a deity
or those with supernatural powers influence the course of events. This
could also include fiction written from a theological perspective presup-
posing the direct supervision of the world by a deity. The second defini-
tion, using the broad contemporary understanding of weird as an adjective
connoting anything strange, odd, outlandish or uncanny, would catego-
rise as weird fiction anything that includes bizarre or strange events or
characters.
Both of these possible understandings of weird fiction are perfectly
acceptable, but not especially useful due to their expansiveness. The first
would include almost everything written prior to the nineteenth century
and the second arguably almost everything ever written—with the added
complication in the latter case that what one person considers bizarre or
strange may be entirely commonplace to someone else. An alternative
approach to defining weird fiction is to go with the seemingly straight-
forward description offered by contemporary author and editor Michael
Kelly in the Foreword to the inaugural edition of Year’s Best Weird Fiction
(2014). Responding to the question of what constitutes weird fiction, Kelly
writes that ‘[t]he simple answer is that it is speculative in nature, chiefly
derived from pulp fiction in the early 20th century’ (2014, p. 7). Here,
he is referencing low-budget fantasy, horror and science fiction magazines
published in the first part of the twentieth century (the term ‘pulp’ refers
to the cheap wood pulp paper on which they were printed). Successors
to the penny dreadfuls and dime novels of the nineteenth century, the
pulps were characterised by lurid subject matter and often by sensation-
alistic cover art. Among the best-known pulps of the 1920s and 1930s
were Argosy, Adventure, Blue Book and Short Stories. The most important
for defining weird fiction, however, was the aptly titled Weird Tales. This
magazine, which initially ran from March 1923 until September 1954 (it
has been revived several times since), published a range of ‘speculative’
stories, often ‘crossing over from one genre to another’ (Liptak 2013).
 THE NEW WEIRD 179

It included fiction by Lovecraft, Conan the Barbarian creator Robert

E. Howard, Robert Bloch and Clark Ashton Smith, among many others.
To define weird fiction as ‘chiefly derived from pulp fiction in the early
20th century’, as Kelly does, would be to suggest that it possesses the sort
of strange, fanciful and often morbid character of the tales published in
the pages of these magazines. While perhaps not as broad a conception as
any fictional work suggesting a universe governed by supernatural forces
or any work including the unusual or bizarre, the Weird Tales definition
nevertheless allows broad latitude and could reasonably encompass almost
anything characterisable today as fantasy, science fiction or horror. Here
too an added complication ensues: the definition of weird fiction as that
which was published in Weird Tales requires one to be at least passingly
familiar with that pulp magazine. It is a little like defining Chinese food as
the cuisine served at Chinese restaurants: simultaneously indisputable and
not particularly helpful.
A more specific definition of the weird tale—one that distils the essence
of the Old English understanding of wyrd while yoking it to the mod-
ern conception of the bizarre and unusual—is offered by H.P. Lovecraft
in his non-fiction treatise on the weird tale, Supernatural Horror in
Literature (1927). Here, Lovecraft proposes that the weird tale evokes
repressed beliefs in the supernatural. Akin to dreaming and religion, the
weird tale—what Lovecraft defines as the ‘literature of cosmic fear’ (1973,
p. 15)—undercuts post-Enlightenment rationalism and posits instead the
co-existence of other worlds and supernatural forces. ‘The true weird
tale’, he writes, goes beyond Gothic conventions to suggest a ‘malign
and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which
are our only safeguards against the assaults of chaos and the daemons
of unplumbed space’ (p.  15). Dread, provoked by the suggestion that
humankind is insignificant and adrift through a cold universe of unimagi-
nable and often malign powers and forces, is the milieu of the Lovecraftian
weird tale. A solitary spectral form emerging at midnight from the closet
may be scary, but not especially weird in Lovecraft’s estimation. However,
the prospect that ghosts are all around us, invisible to most but able to
interact with the world and influence our actions, would partake of the
Lovecraftian weird. The frisson elicited by the uncanny upending of con-
ventional expectation is the affective terrain of the weird tale.
Lovecraft’s proposition concerning the weird tale thus weds the archaic
understanding of wyrd as the external manipulation of one’s destiny with
the contemporary comprehension of weird as absurd or bizarre, while
180 J.A. WEINSTOCK

giving it a specifically modern spin—because a post-Enlightenment ratio-

nalist perspective must be in place precisely in order for it to be undone.
In order for the idea of a room full of ghosts to be weird, there must be
a conception of normal that it violates. The weird tale for Lovecraft can
in fact be construed as both anti-rationalist and anti-humanist; it unsettles
both confidence in the modern scientific method and human pretensions
to grandeur. In Lovecraft’s own fiction, this anti-rationalism is demon-
strated through repeated representations of science and the experimenters
who practise it as shortsighted and flat-out wrong, because the supposed
laws that govern the universe are bent, battered and finally broken as fully
as the minds of the fictional protagonists who confront these violations.
Science in Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’ (1927), for example, is
completely baffled by a mysterious meteorite and the effects that ensue
after its arrival; in ‘Pickman’s Model’ (1927), supernatural creatures of
myth are proven to stalk the cemeteries and subway tunnels of modern
Boston; and in Lovecraft’s most famous story, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, first
published in Weird Tales in 1928, monstrous extraterrestrial entities defy
time and interstellar space. This recognition of the incompleteness or erro-
neousness of science then precipitates the characteristically Lovecraftian
revelation of humankind’s impotence, resulting in an anti-humanist prick-
ing of humankind’s pretensions. In ‘From Beyond’ (1934), the pros-
thetic enhancement of the human sensorium reveals our existence among
other dimensions inhabited by malign and monstrous beings that ignore
us only until we notice them; Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness
(1936) even suggests that life on Earth was the result of an experiment by
winged barrel-shaped extraterrestrials referred to as the Old Ones or Elder
Things. In what is perhaps the clearest articulation of Lovecraft’s anti-
rationalist anti-humanism, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ opens with the unset-
tling proposition:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance
in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowl-
edge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful posi-
tion therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the
light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (1999a, p. 139)
 THE NEW WEIRD 181

Put succinctly, humanity is in for quite a shock if and when the sciences
conclude man’s true insignificance. What Lovecraft does here is to fuse
wyrd with weird: modern rationalist understandings of how the universe
works are shown to be merely a flimsy façade erected over the shifting
substrate of premodern belief vindicated as true. Lovecraft’s weird fiction,
as exemplified in stories such as ‘From Beyond’, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’,
‘The Colour Out of Space’ and so on, thus ‘weirds’ the world, showing
how any assumption of safety is merely an illusion bolstered by human
ignorance of the true precariousness of existence.
In his chapter on weird fiction for The Routledge Companion to Science
Fiction, China Miéville—a central author, and critic, of New Weird fic-
tion—observes the connection between the Lovecraftian weird and ideas
of the sublime. The focus of weird fiction, Miéville claims, ‘is on awe, and
its undermining of the quotidian. This obsession with numinosity under
the everyday is at the heart of Weird Fiction’ (2009, p. 510). Rather than
keeping the sublime at a distance, weird fiction allows it to seep into and
suffuse the world of conventional reality: ‘The Weird…punctures the sup-
posed membrane separating off the sublime, and allows swillage of that
awe and horror from “beyond” back into the everyday….The Weird is
radicalized sublime backwash’ (p.  511). What is interesting for Miéville
about this weirding of the world performed by weird fiction is that, rather
than attempting then to domesticate strangeness and invite it back into
the fold of the normal, the weird instead seeks to foreground and retain
the strangeness of the strange: ‘The awe that Weird Fiction attempts to
invoke is a function of lack of recognition, rather than any uncanny resur-
gence, guilt-function, the return of the repressed’ (p. 512). Weird fiction
along the Lovecraftian model is thus not about recognising ourselves in
the other, but rather the undoing of egocentrism. The universe is a much
stranger place than we ever imagined and does not really give a damn
about us at all.
Roger Luckhurst describes weird fiction’s weirding of the world as the
‘transgression of boundaries’ (2015, p.  201), a transgression that reso-
nates on two levels. First, Old Weird fiction persistently thematises cat-
egorical breakdown. This may have to do with teratological ‘body-horror’
(p. 201), in which monsters of various forms trouble conventional mor-
phological distinctions; it may have to do with non-Euclidean geometry,
which constitutes ‘a disturbing disruption of the space-time continuum
that marks the intersection of impossible planes of existence’ (p.  201);
or it may have to do with the supernatural, which calls into question
182 J.A. WEINSTOCK

conventional understandings of the natural. Whatever form it takes, how-

ever, it participates in the leakage of the sublime back into the every-
day, as discussed by Miéville. Second, weird fiction—both old and new,
as we shall see—transgresses established generic boundaries when it draws
on and incorporates elements of the Gothic, science fiction, fantasy and
horror. ‘The weird’, writes Luckhurst, ‘is miscegenate, a lowly mongrel
that tends to slither out of reach’ (p. 202). Less a genre than a ‘mode’ in
Luckhurst’s estimation, the weird insistently foregrounds its own generic
instability through explicit and implicit references to its own ‘textual fore-
bears and literary contours’ (p. 200).
In addition to outlining a specific understanding of the weird tale as the
literature of cosmic fear, Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature
also took the first steps towards the formation of a canon of weird literature
by identifying those works most fully representative of his own particular
conception of the weird. The weird tale for Lovecraft is a late nineteenth-
century development coming out of the earlier Gothic novel; but in place
of the familiar trappings of the Gothic—‘secret murder, bloody bones, or
a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule’—the weird tale, as he
puts it, substitutes a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable
dread of outer, unknown forces’ (1973, p. 15). Finding its origins in the
work of Edgar Allan Poe, the weird repeatedly thematises humanity’s exis-
tence on ‘a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity’
(1999a, p. 139). Exemplary of this for Lovecraft are works by Algernon
Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M.R.  James and Lord Dunsany (Edward
John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany). In Blackwood’s
‘The Willows’ (1907), for example, two canoeists on the swollen Danube
river find themselves menaced on a small island by a sinister personified
world and the alien forces that animate it. In Machen’s The Great God Pan
(1890), the world as we know it is shown to be a façade obscuring ancient,
chaotic, inhuman forces. In James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You,
My Lad’ (1904), an ancient whistle summons a mysterious and terrify-
ing supernatural force that shatters the protagonist’s modern, materialist
worldview. Somewhat different in character to the works of Blackwood,
Machen or James, Dunsany’s fiction is singled out by Lovecraft for its
creation of a ‘gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic vision’
(1973, p. 98) as it imagines fantasy worlds inhabited by foreign gods and
exotic creatures.
Weaving together these various threads, we can now propose the fol-
lowing as a provisional definition for ‘Old Weird’ fiction: late nineteenth-
 THE NEW WEIRD 183

and early twentieth-century stories that undercut anthropocentrism by

thematising the insufficiency of science and human reason to comprehend
the universe. Associated generally with pulp magazines such as Weird Tales
and specifically with authors such as Blackwood, Machen, James, Lord
Dunsany and Lovecraft, Old Weird fiction utilises elements of horror, sci-
ence fiction and fantasy to showcase the impotence and insignificance of
human beings within a much larger universe populated by often malign
powers and forces that greatly exceed the human capacities to understand
or control them. Old Weird fiction is thus less a discrete genre than a pes-
simistic orientation to human potential. For the writer Michael Moorcock,
there are ‘no established rules for the [old] weird tale’, but its appeal ‘is
precisely that it is designed to disturb’ (2011, p. xiii). For Miéville, this
early weird fiction is a response to the crisis of modernity at the heart of
which was the unprecedented carnage of the First World War: its ‘revolu-
tionary teratology and oppressive numinous’ develops out of the burgeon-
ing twentieth-century sense that ‘there is no stable status quo but a horror
underlying the everyday, the global and absolute catastrophe implying
poisonous totality’ (2009, p.  513). In the weird, there is an ‘awareness
of total crisis’, but it is a crisis that resists signification: ‘Weird does not so
much articulate the crisis as that the crisis cannot be articulated’ (p. 514).
With a working definition for Old Weird fiction in place and some sense
of where it came from, we can now turn our attention to the idea of the
New Weird and the questions of whether it exists at all; and, if it does exist,
to what extent it differs and in what ways from the Old Weird fiction that
preceded it. In an unusual turn of events for discussions of literary ideas and
genres, the New Weird can in fact be dated precisely. On Tuesday, 29 April
2003, M. John Harrison posted the following provocation on the electronic
message board of the British speculative fiction zine The 3rd Alternative:

The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything? Is it even New?
Is it, as some think, not only a better slogan than The Next Wave, but also
incalculably more fun to do? Should we just call it Pick‘n’Mix instead ? As
ever, *your* views are the views we want to hear—. (Cramer 2007; see also
VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2008)

Harrison’s string of questions elicited a variety of responses from list par-

ticipants, some cynically rejecting the term merely as a marketing ploy,
others speaking eloquently in defence of the idea as a legitimate contem-
porary literary phenomenon.1
184 J.A. WEINSTOCK

The most detailed response to Harrison’s set of questions came from

Stephanie Swainston, an author who has described New Weird fiction as
exercises in world building characterised by a heterogeneity of sources,
genres and details. The New Weird in Swainston’s estimation is particularly
eclectic, mixing modern street culture with ancient mythology; in a pro-
cess of ‘grab[bing] everything’, it acknowledges, borrows from and mixes
together other literary traditions and genres (‘New Weird Discussions’,
2008, p. 319). It also emphasises detail in its creation of fantasy worlds:
‘The details are jewel-bright, hallucinatory, carefully described.…The
New Weird attempts to place the reader in a world they do not expect, a
world that surprises them—the reader stares around and sees a vivid world
through the detail.…It is visual, and every scene is packed with baroque
detail’ (p. 319). Secular, politically informed, eclectic and detail oriented,
New Weird writing, Swainston concludes, is an energetic modern response
to the older tradition of ‘jaded heroic fantasy’ (p. 319).
Not long after the April 2003 online discussion on the 3rd Alternative
message board, Miéville presented his own New Weird manifesto of sorts
in the print version of 3rd Alternative, emphasising, like Swainston, the
New Weird’s heterogeneity, while also asserting its politically progressive
valence. For Miéville, New Weird fiction cheekily sidesteps the bound-
aries between fantasy, science fiction and horror as it seeks ‘lovingly to
invert, subvert, culvert and convert the clichés of the fantastic’ (2003,
p. 3). The New Weird, according to Miéville, is self-reflexive in its aware-
ness that literature and the world of which it is a part are both ‘politically
constructed’; and it is ‘messy’ because it seeks to engage with questions of
politics and morality while avoiding didacticism. Referencing the 1999
protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington,
Miéville pronounces the New Weird to be ‘fiction born out of possibili-
ties, its freeing up mirroring the freeing-up, the radicalisation in the world.
[The New Weird] is post-Seattle fiction’ (p. 3).
From here, we flash forward five years to 2008, the year in which author
and scholar Jeff VanderMeer sought to distil the essence of the New Weird
in an article for The New York Review of Science Fiction and in a collection
titled The New Weird, co-edited with his wife Ann VanderMeer, which
included a sampling of New Weird fiction, a ‘symposium’ featuring reflec-
tions on the New Weird, and a ‘laboratory’ consisting of a ‘New Weird
Round Robin’ in which seven authors not generally associated with this
kind of fiction worked collaboratively on a New Weird story. VanderMeer’s
article, ‘The New Weird: “It’s Alive?”’, offers an overview of the ‘origins’
 THE NEW WEIRD 185

of New Weird fiction, crediting not only the influence of the pulp maga-
zines of the first half of the twentieth century, but also the inspiration
that the New Weird draws from the experimental literary sensibilities of
New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and the ‘unsettling grotesquery’
of Clive Barker’s body-centred ‘transgressive horror’ of the 1980s (2008,
p.  19). VanderMeer goes on to note the shift towards the New Weird
in the 1990s in his own work and the work of authors such as Michael
Cisco and Kathe Koja, before emphasising the impact of China Miéville’s
Perdido Street Station (2000), the ‘first commercially acceptable version of
the New Weird’ (p. 19). The article rehearses the 3rd Alternative discus-
sion board debate about the existence and definition of New Weird fiction
and outlines the effect of its success on the publishing industry, before
ending with a ‘working definition of New Weird’ that, as the most specific
overview available to date, is worth quoting at length:

New Weird is a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the

romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choos-
ing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for cre-
ation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and
fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses
elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects—in
combination with the stimulus of influence from New Wave writers or their
proxies (including also such forebears as Mervyn Peake and the French/
English Decadents). New Weird fictions are acutely aware of the modern
world, even if in disguise, but [are] not always overtly political. As part
of this awareness of the modern world, New Weird relies for its visionary
power on a ‘surrender to the weird’ that isn’t, for example, hermetically
sealed in a haunted house on the moors or in a cave in Antarctica. The
‘surrender’ (or ‘belief’) of the writer can take many forms, some of them
even involving the use of postmodern techniques that do not undermine the
surface reality of the text. (p. 21)

VanderMeer’s piece for The New York Review of Science Fiction is repeated

as the introduction to The New Weird collection also published in 2008,
where it is supplemented by commentary from a number of other
authors and critics. Most useful here is Darja Malcolm-Clarke’s ‘Tracking
Phantoms’, which emphasises the role of the grotesque in New Weird writ-
ing. In some cases, this grotesquerie has to do with the corporeality of the
bodies of the characters themselves. In other instances, it has to do with
the ‘socio-political milieu’ (2008, p. 339) constructed within the works:
186 J.A. WEINSTOCK

the foreign and disorienting urban spaces through which ‘physically weird,
aesthetically grotesque’ characters move (p.  340). For Malcolm-Clarke,
the categorical confusion elicited by New Weird grotesquerie challenges
‘the way we see our own world, and ask[s] us to re-envision what we know
about, or rather, how we conceptualize, the metaphysical makeup of our
own world’ (p. 338). Put concisely, the weird functions as an implicit chal-
lenge to and interrogation of the normal.
Before turning to an analysis of specific works, one other moment in the
development of New Weird fiction must be observed: namely, the 2012
publication of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s massive anthology, The Weird:
A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Featuring a ‘Foreweird’
by Michael Moorcock, an introduction by the editors, 110 stories pub-
lished between 1908 and 2010 and an ‘Afterweird’ by China Miéville,
this 1,126-page omnibus promotes itself as ‘the biggest Weird collection
ever assembled’. On the one hand, it clearly extends the work of canon
formation begun by Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature and,
in its very ponderousness, seeks both to solidify and to authenticate the
weird as a discrete genre; winning the 2012 British Fantasy Award for
best anthology, it has been characterised as an ‘authoritative’ overview of
weird fiction (Lovegrove 2011) and as ‘standard-setting’ (‘Weird, The’
n.d.). On the other hand, the promiscuous intermingling of, for example,
Algernon Blackwood, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury,
Clive Barker and Poppy Z. Brite (to stick just with the Bs)—authors with
very different styles, concerns and generic affinities—complicates (and
perhaps intentionally so) the construction of any specific conception of
the weird. It also seems to undo the distinction between (Old) Weird and
New Weird that Jeff VanderMeer in particular has been keen to cultivate.
Perhaps the final, inevitable gesture of the New Weird, then, is to ‘weird’
itself: to call into question its own existence as what one thought it was.

CRISIS ENERGY AND MUSHROOM DWELLERS: CHINA

MIÉVILLE’S PERDIDO STREET STATION AND JEFF
VANDERMEER’S CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN
The remainder of this chapter will focus on four works by authors central
to the New Weird, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, Caitlín Kiernan and
Laird Barron. I shall suggest that work categorised as New Weird fiction
bifurcates along main two tracks. The first is the detailed and grotesque
 THE NEW WEIRD 187

fantasy world model outlined by VanderMeer and Malcolm-Clarke: for

example, Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and VanderMeer’s City
of Saints and Madmen (2001) create densely textured urban environments
populated by grotesque denizens with exotic customs. The second track
showcases the Lovecraftian legacy of cosmic fear. Kiernan’s The Drowning
Girl: A Memoir (2012) and Laird Barron’s The Croning (2012) both take
place in a world at least initially recognisably our own; however, over the
course of each narrative that sense of familiarity is undercut by the intru-
sion of other forces and possibilities that call into question what we think
we know about ourselves and the world as the normal progressively shades
into the weird.
As both author and critic of the New Weird, the contributions of China
Miéville have been important in mapping out the terrain encompassed by
the movement; Perdido Street Station, his second novel and the first of
three set in the fictional world of Bas-Lag where magic (called ‘thauma-
turgy’) and steampunkish technology go hand in hand, is considered by
Jeff VanderMeer as a ‘flash point’ in the development of the genre (2008,
p. 19). The winner of the 2001 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction,
Perdido Street Station centres on scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, who
lives in the sprawling city of New Crobuzon, a city inhabited by various
different species of sentient beings. The events of the novel are set in
motion when Isaac is presented with the challenge of restoring flight to
Yagharek, a member of a race of fierce bird-like creatures called garudas
whose wings have been severed as punishment for a crime.2 In the pro-
cess of developing a strategy to fulfil Yagharek’s commission, Isaac naïvely
allows a monstrous creature called a slake-moth—an entity that feeds on
the mental energy of its victims, leaving them permanently catatonic—to
escape from his laboratory, and he must find a way to stop it from terroris-
ing the city.
Perdido Street Station is epic in scope and a dense, detailed exercise in
world building. It is also exemplary of one track of New Weird fiction in
its emphasis on grotesque corporeality and urban settings, the cobbled-
together nature of each within the novel seeming to resonate with the
other. In addition to human beings and garudas, Miéville introduces a
bewildering array of somatically distinct species. Isaac’s lover Lin, for
example, is a khepri, a creature with a woman’s body and a head resem-
bling an iridescent scarab. Illustrative of the grotesque corporeal detail
that Miéville infuses through the novel, the first chapter conveys Isaac’s
reflection that ‘It was when she ate that Lin was most alien’ (2000, p. 9)
188 J.A. WEINSTOCK

and then offers a description of the process: ‘Light glinted in Lin’s com-
pound eyes. Her headlegs quiver. She picked up half a tomato and gripped
it with her mandibles. She lowered her hands while her inner mouthparts
picked at the food her outer jaw held steady’ (p. 10). The disgust Isaac
feels, however, is outpaced by his interspecial—and, within the world of
the narrative, taboo—desire for her. Also prominent in New Crobuzon
are cactacae (humanoid cacti) and vodyanoi, the latter fat, aquatic, frog-
like creatures that possess the magical power temporarily to fashion solid
objects out of water. An important role within the novel is also played by
a Weaver, an enormous, interdimensional spider-like being.
Supplementing this panoply of natural species—and even more gro-
tesque—are the ‘Remade’: those convicted of crimes whose bodies have
been altered by ‘bio-thaumaturges’ in ‘punishment factories’ (p. 17) as a
perverse form of justice. The bio-engineered bodies of some of the Remade
are fused with technology to allow or require them to perform particular
tasks. For example, a lackey for a mob boss is described as follows:

Her face was still the same mournful, pretty human woman’s it had always
been, with dark skin and long plaited hair, but it supplanted a seven-foot
skeleton of black iron and pewter. She stood on a tripod of stiff telescoping
metal. Her body had been altered for heavy labour, with pistons and pulleys
giving her what looked like ineluctable strength. (p. 30)

Other Remade have had their bodies manipulated in various ways—

sometimes through the grafting on of a limb or organ, not always from
the same species—transforming them into freaks (even within the freak-
ish world of New Crobuzon). One sad individual, for example, having
been convicted of stealing a painting of a garuda, has had a beak, feath-
ers and non-functional wings surgically implanted. Some Remade survive
as prostitutes catering to fetishistic tastes; others turn their deformity to
their advantage, styling themselves ‘fReemade’, such as the renegade Jack
Half-a-Prayer, a man whose human right arm has been replaced with the
claw of a praying mantis.
Emblematic not just of the grotesque corporeal heterogeneity that
characterises Perdido Street Station but indeed of the novel’s larger philo-
sophical meditation on the peril and promise that exist at the moment
of transformation is Mr. Motley, an underworld mob boss. Motley is a
true monstrosity who has progressively and purposefully remade himself
to reflect his interests in transition and hybridity:
 THE NEW WEIRD 189

Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved; tiny limbs clutched;
eyes rolled from obscure niches; antlers and protrusions of bone jutted pre-
cariously; feelers twitched and mouths glistened. Many-coloured skeins of
skin collided. A cloven hood thumped gently against the wood floor. Tides
of flesh washed against each other in violent currents. Muscles tethered by
alien tendons to alien bones worked together in uneasy truce, in slow, tense
motion. Scales gleamed. Fins quivered. Wings fluttered brokenly. Insect
claws folded and unfolded. (p. 38)

Although Motley is both physically and morally repugnant, he neverthe-

less offers the clearest articulation within the narrative of the great interest
that Miéville takes in the energy and excitement of the moment of tran-
sition. His corporeal heterogeneity and underlying aesthetic philosophy
resonate with Miéville’s representation of the city of New Crobuzon and,
as we shall see, with the novel’s exploration of ‘crisis energy’.
While the immediate plot of Perdido Street Station concerns Isaac’s
twin tasks of restoring flight to Yagharek and capturing the slake-moth, in
a larger sense the subject of the novel is the city of New Crobuzon itself.
Preceding the narrative is a map of the city with the Perdido Street train
station at its centre; and as the narrative progresses, the characters traverse
its varied geography. Like Mr. Motley, New Crobuzon is a city of contact
zones, moments of transition where, for example, the khepri village of
Kinken rubs up against the cactacae enclave at Riverskin, or where the
‘polite houses’ of Vaudois Hill (p. 125) shade into the desperation of alien
and impoverished Spatters. Yagharek, in his meditations preceding each
of the novel’s eight parts, thinks of New Crobuzon as a ‘mongrel city’
(p. 441), a description that echoes the heterogeneity of its inhabitants.
VanderMeer regards Miéville’s Perdido Street Station as striking the
right balance between ‘old-fashioned pulp writing, new visionary, surreal
images, and experimental literary influences’ (2008, p. 20). Much of the
narrative’s New Weird energy, however—both figuratively and literally—
derives precisely from the ‘mongrel’ city and its inhabitants. ‘I believe
this to be the fundamental dynamic’, says Mr. Motley, but it may as well
be Miéville himself: ‘Transition. The point at which one thing becomes
another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. And that
is the theme I’m interested in. The zone where the disparate become part
of the whole. The hybrid zone’ (2000, p. 37). Echoing this fundamental
dynamic of hybridity, the answer to the question of how to restore flight
to Yagharek in the novel literally has to do with harnessing the energy of
190 J.A. WEINSTOCK

transition: ‘crisis energy’, the moment when potential energy transforms

into kinetic energy. It is the ‘nature of things’, according to Isaac, ‘to enter
crisis’ (p. 147), and his goal becomes to tap into that enormous reserve.
Mongrels, hybrids, remades and monsters. The narrative and aesthetic
strategy of Miéville’s New Weird in Perdido Street Station is to tap into the
‘crisis energy’ generated at and by such unstable contact zones and juxta-
positions. In this way, it is in keeping with his description of weird fiction in
general as the literature of crisis (2009, p. 514). For Miéville, however, that
crisis, while perilous, also possesses great promise for rethinking the world.
In order for change to take place, a system must pass through crisis.3
As I have noted, through both his fiction and his critical contribu-
tions—notably, the anthologies already referenced—Jeff VanderMeer
has been a champion of the New Weird. His City of Saints and Madmen
(2001) consists of four novella-length pieces that share Miéville’s interests
in world building, teratology and urban existence; for reasons of space, I
shall concentrate here on the first of the four pieces included in the volume,
‘Dradin, In Love’. In the same way that the main focus of Perdido Street
Station is arguably the city of New Crobuzon and its inhabitants, City
of Saints and Madmen focuses on the sprawling city of Ambergris, ‘that
oldest of cities named for the most valuable and secret part of the whale’
(VanderMeer 2002, p. 7). Dradin, an ‘out-of-work missionary’ (p. 8), has
arrived from the southern jungles, returning to this city in the midst of
its preparations for the ‘Festival of the Freshwater Squid’, where he falls
desperately in love with a woman he spies seated by a third-floor window
of Hoegbotton & Sons, Distributors. The first novella concerns the besot-
ted Dradin’s attempts to court this woman, a process allegedly facilitated
by the dwarf Dvorak Nibelung (his name referencing the Nibelung in
Wagner’s Ring cycle), who offers for a price to serve as an intermediary.
As the narrative progresses, the reader is also introduced to the denizens,
customs, history and geography of Ambergris. While Miéville’s world of
Bas-Lag is home to many strange and distinct species, VanderMeer distils
this somatic grotesquerie into Ambergris’s mysterious mushroom dwell-
ers, a species that pre-existed the founding of the city of Ambergris and
now co-exists awkwardly with its human inhabitants:

Mushroom dwellers smelled of old, rotted barns and spoiled milk, and
vegetables mixed with the moistness of dark crevices and the dryness of
day-dead dung beetles. Some folk said they whispered and plotted among
themselves in a secret language so old that no one else, even in the far, far
 THE NEW WEIRD 191

Occident, spoke it. Others said they came from the subterranean caves and
tunnels below Ambergris, that they were escaped convicts who had gathered
in the darkness and made their own singular religion and purpose, that they
shunned the light because they were blind from their many years under-
ground. And yet others, the poor and the under-educated, said that newts,
golliwogs, slugs, and salamanders followed in their wake by land, while
above bats, nighthawks, and whippoorwills flew, feasting on the insects that
crawled around mushroom and mushroom dweller alike. (p. 28)

These mushroom dwellers, the subject of much speculation and anxiety in

Ambergris, sleep on the streets by day, flying red flags to warn passersby to
avoid them, and at night they clean the streets of the city:

Sailors on the docks had told Dradin that the mushroom dwellers were
known to rob graves for compost, or even murder tourists and use the
flesh for their midnight crop. If no one questioned or policed them, it was
because during the night they tended to the garbage and carcasses that lit-
tered Ambergris. By dawn the streets had been picked clean and lay shining
and innocent under the sun. (p. 28)

Towards the end of ‘Dradin, In Love’, betrayed by Dvorak and delivered

to the mushroom dwellers—who apparently ‘pay well for the blood of
priests’ (p. 83)—Dradin experiences just how dangerous they can be.
Equally striking, and echoing the overlap between somatic grotesque-
rie and geographical heterogeneity in Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, is
Dvorak Nibelung. Tattooed on the dwarf’s body ‘from a point on his
head, and extending downward’ (p.  18) is a detailed map of the River
Moth, a map that Dradin sees as marking his own geographical and tem-
poral progression: ‘[I]t had occurred to him that the dwarf’s body served
as a time line. Did it not show Dradin’s birthplace and early years in the
north as well as his slow descent into the south, the jungles, and now,
more southern still, Ambergris?’ (p. 19). Corresponding in some respects
to Miéville’s grotesque and villainous Mr. Motley, the tattooed dwarf is
an object correlative for the strangeness of the world of which the city of
Ambergris is a part and for the twisted course of Dradin’s own destiny.
Functioning as a sort of mise en abyme, Dvorak’s body is also a map drawn
in ink of VanderMeer’s invented world and Dradin, in surveying the map,
reads the book of himself.
The strangeness of Ambergris, literally embodied in the mushroom dwell-
ers and the dwarf Dvorak, is then developed in VanderMeer’s novel through
192 J.A. WEINSTOCK

its attention to the city’s history and customs. As Dradin moves through
Ambergris, the reader is introduced to its religious sects; its most famous
composer, Voss Bender (likely a concise allusion both to German cinematog-
rapher Max Fassbender and German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder);
and, centrally, its Festival of the Freshwater Squid, which marks the beginning
of a period of fishing for the sea creatures, a central industry of Ambergris.
Initial descriptions of the festival suggest Mardi Gras–like revelry: along the
avenues to be visited by a parade, ‘candles wrapped in boxes of crepe paper
would appear, so that the light would be like the dancing of the squid, great
and small, upon the midnight salt water where it met the mouth of the Moth’
(p. 36).4 The festival, however, descends into lawlessness and violence, with
Dradin, having escaped from the mushroom dwellers, making his way back
towards the city centre through a surreal scene of mutilated bodies, burning
buildings and various acts of violence and atrocity (pp. 88–89). ‘Dradin, In
Love’ culminates in a nod towards E.T.A. Hoffman’s famous uncanny tale,
‘The Sandman’ (1816), with Dradin’s shocked realisation that he has mis-
taken a mannequin for a real woman.
Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and VanderMeer’s novella both bear
out Malcolm-Clarke’s characterisation of New Weird writing as detailed
exercises in world building with an emphasis on grotesque corporeality.
As she points out, this is not the weirdness of Lovecraftian cosmic fear in
which conventional understandings of the world are shaken through viola-
tions of supposed scientific laws or in which human hubris is chastened by
the revelation of human impotence. Rather, it is a weirdness that inheres
in the aesthetic of these secondary worlds as a whole (Malcolm-Clarke
2008, p. 338). These are grotesque worlds full of strange citizenry. Their
engagement with real-world issues such as economic disparity and sexism
therefore functions implicitly by way of juxtaposition, the weirdness of the
imagined worlds calling into question accepted ideas of normalcy.

GHOSTS AND FAIRY TALES: CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN’S THE

DROWNING GIRL AND LAIRD BARRON’S THE CRONING
Set in a world at least initially recognisable as our own, and closer to the
Lovecraftian model of the weird tale, are Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Drowning
Girl: A Memoir (2012) and Laird Barron’s The Croning (2012). Among
the most talented of the New Weird authors, Kiernan won both the Bram
Stoker Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for The Drowning Girl,
 THE NEW WEIRD 193

a rich and challenging ghost story of sorts told from the point of view
of schizophrenic protagonist India Morgan Phelps or Imp. Built around
Imp’s recollections of her involvement with Eva Canning, a woman—or
wolf, or siren, or ghost—whom she finds naked by the side of the road
one evening, The Drowning Girl ultimately becomes a meditation on the
nature of knowledge itself, with the narrative repeatedly foregrounding
the precarious role of memory.
Utilising devices associated with literary postmodernism, The Drowning
Girl meta-textually foregrounds the act of constructing narrative and
intertwines myth, folklore and fairy tale with references to both real and
invented novels and works of art. Indeed, any presumption of a conven-
tional narrative point of view is undone by the novel’s first three sentences,
which confusingly complicate assumptions about singular identity: ‘“I’m
going to write a ghost story now,” she typed. “A ghost story with a mermaid
and a wolf,” she also typed. I also typed’ (2012, p. 1). Imp is both singular
and plural, the (fictional) author of a narrative in which she is the protago-
nist; and her story (which is also plural, as Imp provides two variants on
it) is the story both of her experience and of the experience of composing
a story—in which, as Imp explains, every word may not be factual but all
of which will nevertheless be true (p. 6). The question that Imp attempts
to resolve, without ever resolving it fully (for herself or for the reader), is:
who or what is Eva? It is in the attempt to make sense of Eva—a figure
who may have been a ghost but who most certainly haunts Imp—that
Imp has recourse to other narratives, both real and invented. Among the
real authors explicitly referenced are Lovecraft, Herman Melville, Lewis
Carroll, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson and Shirley Jackson. These authors
bump shoulders with fictional artists Phillip George Saltonstall—painter
of the picture The Drowning Girl, from which the novel takes its name—
and Albert Perrault. Two stories by Imp herself, ‘The Mermaid of the
Concrete Jungle’ and ‘Werewolf Smile’, are incorporated into her narra-
tive, and these resonate with the fairy tales of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’
and ‘The Little Mermaid’ that are referenced throughout the novel. Imp’s
narrative(s) make(s) clear the ways in which the stories we tell—of and to
ourselves and others—are shaped by the stories we have been told. Our
experiences are ours, but our strategies for making sense of them and the
language and narrative conventions we use to give them shape come to us
from elsewhere. What haunts here are the other paths not followed, the
other stories, the other possible interpretations necessarily dismissed in the
effort to arrive at conclusions.
194 J.A. WEINSTOCK

Imp writes, ‘A lot of my most interesting memories seem never to

have taken place’ (p.  11), a remark that provocatively encapsulates the
uncanny—weird—provocation that finally constitutes The Drowning Girl:
are memories real even if the events they recall never actually took place?
What is the difference between fact and truth? How do we know what we
know and on what knowledge can we rely? What is the nature of reality
itself? And what, finally, if anything, is ours alone? Reflecting on what she
has done, Imp admits:

Last night, I lay here awake, thinking about what I’ve been writing, how
there’s a story here, but how I’ve taken very little care to fashion a coherent
narrative. Or, if there is a coherent narrative, how it might be getting lost
between other things: exposition, memories, ruminations, digressions, and
what have you. (p. 87)

Yet these digressions are the story, as she later points out: ‘Lives do not
unfold in tidy plots, and it’s the worst sort of artifice to insist that the tales we
tell—to ourselves and to one another—must be forced to conform to plot’
(p. 171). In struggling to find her own voice and to tell her story, Imp—and
the reader through her—is forced to confront the fundamental weirdness of
the fact that our voices and our stories are only ever partially ours and that
the stories we tell may be truthful without being factual. The weirdness of
The Drowning Girl is in its pointing out that we are always haunted by nar-
ratives inevitably left unfinished and untold. In an online interview on her
writing and weird fiction more generally, Kiernan suggested that answering
the question of ‘“What happened?” is absolute anathema to weird fiction’
(VanderMeer 2012). As Miéville had emphasised about weird fiction in gen-
eral, its goal is not to domesticate strangeness or to resolve unanswered
questions, but rather to highlight the fact that any conclusion about what
has occurred is only ever one possibility among many others.
Laird Barron also stresses the contingent nature of storytelling as a
shaper of meaning. In his introduction to the inaugural 2014 edition of
Year’s Best Weird Fiction, ‘We Are For the Weird’, he explains that ‘we tell
stories to give shape to the black chaos that surrounds our specks of light,
our tiny islands of stability’, but adds that his own tastes gravitate towards
the Lovecraftian notion ‘that sentient life is fragile, impermanent, and pos-
sessed of a fragmentary piece of the big picture at best’ (2014, p. 12). In
the stories that he both enjoys and composes, ‘Quietly, relentlessly, and
inevitably the façade of normalcy is stripped to reveal a sliver of the raw
 THE NEW WEIRD 195

universe’ (p. 13). Noting the generic messiness associated with categoris-

ing weird fiction, Barron offers his own description: ‘My sense of the weird
tale is that it contravenes reality in some essential manner; that it possesses
at least a hint of the alien; and that it emanates disquiet or disorientation’
(p.  14). Channelling Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature, he
proposes that the weird allures and compels contemporary readers because
‘[t]he unreasoning fear of the dark and the unknown, of the other and of
othering effects, remains lodged in the heart of modern Homo sapiens’;
the weird, he writes, ‘speaks to that deeper part of us’ (p. 13).
This philosophy of the weird undergirds Barron’s The Croning, a novel
that is explicitly Lovecraftian in its evocation of cosmic fear. While less
experimental than Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl, The Croning shares with
that work a non-linear plot and the integration of fairy tale. Indeed, The
Croning begins with a curious retelling of the story of Rumpelstiltskin in
which the Spy, a miller’s son and half-brother to the Queen, ventures forth
in the quest to uncover Rumpelstiltkin’s name and save the Queen’s first-
born child from this ‘creepy Dwarf’ (2012, p. 3). In the process, he visits
a distant and depressed land, meets the priestess of the cult of ‘Old Leech’
(p.  11) and, leaving the tenuous safety of his lodging with an aristocrat
named Count Mock, observes a horrific ceremony—a type of croning—in
which a woman seems to be flayed alive. The Spy learns the Dwarf’s name,
but ‘legends of the Queen’s fateful showdown with the Dwarf notwith-
standing…knowing his name didn’t save the Queen or anyone else’ (p. 22).
Following this decidedly strange opening chapter, the novel then
shifts to a world recognisably our own in which Don Miller, husband
to Michelle Miller née Mock, slowly arrives at a series of traumatic reali-
sations about his wife and, indeed, about the place of humanity in the
universe. These revelations are slow to come for Don because he suffers
from memory loss—and for the reader too, because the events of the story
are artistically revealed through non-chronological flashbacks that prevent
conclusions being arrived at prematurely. When they do come, however,
Don and the reader realise together that an alien species—a destroyer of
worlds—controls and derives horrific sustenance from humanity, and that
female members of the Mock line, including Don’s wife, have for genera-
tions served these dark overlords. In a moment of distinctly Lovecraftian
realisation, Don suspects that for him to comprehend fully what has been
partially unveiled ‘was to have one’s humanity snuffed. Only the inhu-
man thrived…out there in deep black’ (p. 233). The monster that Don
encounters in the end is, at least in one of its forms, the ‘creepy dwarf’
196 J.A. WEINSTOCK

from the Rumpelstiltskin tale. Fairy tale and myth thus find their basis in
truth; they are stories that humans tell themselves to give shape to fear.
New Weird fiction in the twenty-first century might very well constitute
what one participant in the 2003 The 3rd Alternative electronic discussion
board conversation considers to be ‘[a]n argument between a bunch of writ-
ers who read each other, who sometimes influence each other, sometimes
struggle against that influence’ (‘New Weird Discussions’, 2008, p. 325).
This is certainly the case with Miéville, VanderMeer, Kiernan and Barron,
who, as critics as well as authors, write about and comment extensively on
the work of other New Weird writers. However, this view also extends to
the intergenerational arguments that go on among New Weird authors,
since Miéville, VanderMeer, Kiernan, Barron—and a host of other authors
of the New Weird, such as Stephanie Swainston, K.J. Bishop, Michael Cisco,
Kathe Koja, Michael Chabon and Thomas Ligotti—discuss the influences
of Old Weird fiction on their writing even as they seek to distinguish their
own voices. Here is Kiernan, for example, speaking in her interview with
Jeff VanderMeer about the influence of Lovecraft, in particular

his appreciation of what paleontologists and geologists call deep time. Deep
time is critical to his cosmicism, the existential shock a reader brings away
from his stories. Our smallness and insignificance in the universe at large….
No one and nothing cares for us. No one’s watching out for us. To me,
that’s Lovecraft. (VanderMeer 2012)

These remarks also tell us that both Old and New Weird fiction can be
construed as an argument with the world itself, one that adopts the point
of view that normalcy is inevitably only a flimsy façade obscuring a much
weirder, and darker, universe. Weird insistently leads back to wyrd and
asks us to reconsider and, finally, to reconceive our interrelated senses of
human importance and autonomy.

NOTES
1. Harrison mentions in the transcript of the discussion board conver-
sation that the idea of the New Weird was something he had heard
used by China Miéville; Harrison had in fact used it in the title of his
preface to Miéville’s 2002 fantasy novella, The Tain.
2. Garudas are large bird-like creatures that appear in both Hindu and
Buddhist texts, including the Mahabharata.
 THE NEW WEIRD 197

3. William J.  Burling develops this idea most fully in his article
‘Periodizing the Postmodern: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station
and the Dynamics of Radical Fantasy’, which argues that works like
Miéville’s depict the ‘mechanisms and effects of economic exploita-
tion and ideological mystification under industrial capitalism’,
addressing these crises through ‘collective class action among previ-
ously unaligned subaltern segments of society’ (Burling 2009,
pp. 331–32).
4. The emphasis on squid in City of Saints and Madmen could be taken
as a kind of homage to Lovecraft’s tentacled Cthulhu and the legacy
of weird fiction that followed in his wake. In his essay ‘M. R. James
and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and
and/or or?’, China Miéville makes the case that the modern shift to ‘a
Weird culture’ is marked by the ascendancy of the tentacle: ‘a limb-
type with no Gothic or traditional precedents’ (Miéville 2011).

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