The Weird: A Companion

by Simon Bacon (Editor), Carl H. Sederholm (Editor), Kristopher Woofter (Editor)

Overview

Weird works unsettle, decentering humanity on a cosmic scale and, at other times, breaking down the human barriers erected around race, class, gender, and sexuality. Featuring a comprehensive editors’ introduction to the Weird as a mode engaging with forms of knowledge, transcendence, and resistance, this collection offers a broad-reaching discussion of Weird fiction, film, art, and thought. Its 31 essays explore theoretical and philosophical applications of the Weird, such as Black Metal Theory, and key Weird themes and tropes such as cosmic horror, radical embodiment and sensation, dark ecological speculation, and forms of alterity. Essays are highly varied in period focus and subject matter, ranging from early Weird works by William Hope Hodgson and Conan creator Robert E. Howard, to the surrealist paintings of Leonora Carrington, to more recent works by David Lynch, Octavia Butler, and Yorgos Lanthimos.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781803741383
Publisher:	Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Series:	Genre Fiction and Film Companions , #14
Pages:	418
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x (d)

About the Author

Carl H. Sederholm is Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University. He is the editor of The Journal of American Culture, the co-author of Poe, the "House of Usher", and the American Gothic, and the co-editor of several volumes, including Adapting Poe, The Age of Lovecraft, Lovecraft in the 21^st Century, and Forgotten Disney. He is also the author of multiple essays on authors such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Shirley Jackson.

Kristopher Woofter teaches in the English Department at Dawson College, Montréal. He is the editor of the journal Monstrum and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated volume Shirley Jackson: A Companion. He is co-editor of American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition, and Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema. Other publications include essays on F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and the documentaries The Hellstrom Chronicle and Into Eternity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments - Carl H. Sederholm and Kristopher Woofter: Introduction: The Weird and Others - Part I Weird Theory and History - Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock: Seven Weird Axioms - Thomas Ligotti: “In the Night, in the Dark”: A Note on the Appreciation of Weird Fiction - Eugene Thacker: Weird, Eerie, and Monstrous: On Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie - Emily Alder: “Waked, and Unquiet”: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land - Todd S. Garth: Realist Technique, Empirical Discourse, and Monstrous Possibility: Horacio Quiroga - Timothy J. Jarvis and Helen Marshall: “Jewel-bright, hallucinatory, carefully described”: M. John Harrison’s Radical Vision of the New Weird - Brian Johnson: From Qweird to Queered Weird and Back: Notes on Reading Lovecraft in the Closet - Ross Hagen: Not Not Black Metal: Black Metal Theory and the Weird - Roger Luckhurst: The Greek Weird Wave - Melissa Edmundson: Women and the Weird - Part II Weird Tropes - Nina K. Martin: Liminal Places: Cinematic Encounters with the Urban Weird - Greg Polakoff: Philip K. Dick’s Weird Shade of Pink: VALIS - Dru Jeffries: David Lynch’s Lost Highway: Free Will and Predestination - Antonio Alcala Gonzalez: R’lyeh and Palmer Atoll: The Nautical Weird of Lovecraft and D. T. Neal - Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare: At the Gates of Hell: The Baroque Weird in Lucio Fulci’s Demonia - Mike Thorn: Weirding Body Horror in Darkest Hours - Michael Wood Conan the Uncanny: Weird Elements in Robert E. Howard’s Conan Stories - David Simmons: “It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came”: Depicting the Artist in Caitlin Kiernan’s The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl - Brian Hauser: Tilting the Floor beneath Our Feet: Weird Theory in/as Practice - Part III Weird Crisis - Alison Sperling: Weird Queer Ecologies - William Taylor: Deviant Ruins: Xenophilic Masochism, Alien Grammar, and Decaying Futurity in David Roden’s Snuff Memories - Karen Herland: Weird Fallout: HBO’s Chernobyl - Jonathan Newell: Weird Waste: Hyperabjection and Survival Horror - Ralph Beliveau: The Weird Folk Horror of Science: Specters of Nigel Kneale - Selma A. Purac: “Things in the mist!”: Stephen King’s Cosmic Horror and the Disruption of Consumerism - Part IV Weird Resistance - Kali Simmons: What White Men Want with Indian Magic: Indigeneity, Deep Time, Weird Fiction - Sohni Chakrabarti: The “Weird” as a Metaphor of Chicana Feminist Resistance: Ana Castillo and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Re-mythicization of La Llorona, or the Wailing Woman - Will Dodson: Weird Whiteness in Octavia E. Butler’s Fiction - Neil C. Hartlen: Uncovering Racism in Red Hook: Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom - Melanie Ashe: The Weird and the Gothic as Postcolonial Critique in Australian Experimental Film - Mikaela Bobiy: Hysterical Alchemies: The Weird Worlds of Leonora Carrington - Part V Appendix - Camille McCutcheon: Weird Studies: A Selective, Representative Bibliography - Notes on Contributors - Index