The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in comparative literature, fantasy, cultural studies, philosophy, gender studies, and related subjects.
Weird Fiction: A Genre Study is by Associate Professor Michael Cisco, who teaches English at Hostos Community College, the City University of New York (CUNY).
The TU Library collection includes a number of books about different aspects of weird fiction.
Weird fiction is generally seen as using aspects of fantasy, horror, and supernatural fiction, while often featuring nontraditional alien monsters.
Well-known weird fiction authors include H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, and Edgar Allan Poe, most of whom are represented in the TU Library collection.
H.P. Lovecraft once defined weird fiction as a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.
The adjective weird derives from an Old English term meaning having power to control fate.
In mythology, weird was used to mean uncanny or supernatural from Middle English, in which weird sisters or goddesses who control human destiny appear in the tragedy Macbeth by William Shakespeare.
Around two hundred years ago, weird also began to mean strange-looking or disturbingly different.
Here are some quotes from examples of weird fiction, some of which are in the TU Library collection:
It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
- Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams
A vision of the Shining One swirling into our world, a monstrous, glorious flaming pillar of incarnate, eternal Evil–of people passing through its radiant embrace into that hideous, unearthly life-in-death which I had seen enfold the sacrifices–of armies trembling into dancing atoms of diamond dust beneath the green ray’s rhythmic death–of cities rushing out into space upon the wings of that other demoniac force which Olaf had watched at work–of a haunted world through which the assassins of the Dweller’s court stole invisible, carrying with them every passion of hell–of the rallying to the Thing of every sinister soul and of the weak and the unbalanced, mystics and carnivores of humanity alike; for well I knew that, once loosed, not any nation could hold the devil-god for long and that swiftly its blight would spread!
- Merritt, The Moon Pool
It is a common trick of Nature – and a profoundly significant one – that, just when despair is deepest, she waves a wand before the weary eyes and does her best to waken an impossible hope.
- Algernon Blackwood, The Listener And Other Stories
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 knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
- H.P. Lovecraft, The Call Of Cthulhu
While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest. […] Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing. Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion – imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail which express shadings of mood and build up a vague illusion of the strange reality of the unreal. Avoid bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism.
- H.P. Lovecraft, Notes On Writing Weird Fiction
The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.
- H.P. Lovecraft
His briefcase, now very worn though not particularly old, continued to direct his endless outgoings and incomings, from the four legs of his bed to the four legs of his office desk and back again. His key went from lock to pocket, and back to the lock. Then one day there yawned before the key not a lock and not a pocket but, shall we say, an abyss. One might, of course, having slipped one’s key into the abyss, turn it twice from left to right. The resident did just that, but… we mustn’t violate the logic of chronos or, as it’s generally known, chronological order.
- Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future
I can fancy what you saw. Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens. We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish, silly tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?
- Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan (1894)
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)