“We Shall Dwell Amidst Wonder and Glory For Ever”: On Weird Fiction - Cleveland Review of Books
“We Shall Dwell Amidst Wonder and Glory For Ever”: On Weird Fiction
Robert Baskin·July 28, 2026
Various | Weird Fiction: An Anthology | Penguin | September 2024 | 208 pages
William Hope Hodgson | The House on the Borderland | Penguin | September 2024 | 208 pages
Algernon Blackwood | Ancient Sorceries | Penguin | September 2024 | 208 pages
Gertrude Barrows Bennett | Claimed! | Penguin | September 2024 | 144 pages
Robert Chambers | The King in Yellow | Penguin | September 2024 | 112 pages
On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, the British science fiction and fantasy writer M. John Harrison asked a question on Third Alternative magazine’s messageboard: “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?” This incited a taxonomic fury, as writers, fans, and amateur scholars attempted to define this new subgenre. Harrison eventually offered his own definition; the New Weird, like stories published in the namesake early twentieth-century pulp magazine Weird Tales, is a mix of “horror, sf, and fantasy,” with an emphasis on the horror.
Harrison and some of the other British writers he suggested as New Weird writers—China Miéville, Justina Robson, Steph Swainston—soon grew tired of the term, but stateside it took off. The American author couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer adopted “New Weird” for their work and put together The New Weird anthology in 2008. Of course, defining the New Weird required an understanding of the Old Weird, and in October 2011, the VanderMeers put out The Weird, a massive anthology with over 100 stories dating from 1909–2010. China Miéville wrote the afterword (or, to use his term, “Afterweird”).
While this was going on, a group of philosophers and theorists associated with speculative realism—including speculative materialism and object-oriented ontology—began writing articles and books about speculative realism in the work of H.P. Lovecraft and others; books like Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet (2011), Graham Harman’s Weird Realism (2012), and Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2016).
The Weird kept coming. Since 2015, the academy has seen the publication of a special issue of the journal Genre titled “The Old and New Weird” (2016), James Machin’s Weird Fiction in Britain: 1880–1939, Jonathan Newell’s A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937 (2020), Michael Cisco’s Weird Fiction: A Genre Study (2022), and Kate Marshall’s Novels by Aliens, Weird Tales and the 21st Century (2023), among many, many others. For general readers, NYRB Classics published Shadow of Carcosa, a collection of early twentieth-century Weird stories, in 2015. The British Library has released over sixty-five volumes on its Tales of the Weird imprint since 2018. And in 2024, Penguin UK released five books in its own Weird Fiction series, all of which are now available in the U.S. and Canada.
Let’s back up. What is Weird fiction? Weird fiction is a fictional mode, related to but not wholly contained within the horror genre. The primary affects are fear, disgust, and wonder. Standard Weird motifs include tentacles, eldritch horrors beyond the capacity of language, scientists discovering that which should not be discovered, and strange artifacts with world-altering auras. In The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher says that the Weird “involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here.” Weird Fiction as a genre comes into focus in retrospect as the type of stories published in Weird Tales’ heyday (1923–1939), specifically the work by or resembling H.P. Lovecraft. In his genre-defining essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft says:
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
Historically, the Weird emerged from the Gothic, the literature of “secret murder, bloody bones, and clanking chains.” From its birth in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic was powered by a particular fear: the fear of the return of the repressed. Rational, industrious, Protestant England was not always so. At the margins, in its poetry and folk ballads, in towns outside the centers of commerce, are glimpses of the Merrie Olde England of yore, of faerie and magick and *gulp* Catholicism. What if these malicious forces were not in fact destroyed by modernity? What if they remained?
In narratives set in...