The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Fictions
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A ‘weird tale’, as defined by H. P. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est. 1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale,
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As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale ‘has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains’. Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane – a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread’ or ‘malign and particular suspension or defeat of… fixed laws of Nature’ – through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition.
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The Weird can be transformative – sometimes literally – entertaining monsters while not always seeing them as monstrous. It strives for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledges failure as sign and symbol of our limitations. Usually, the characters in weird fiction have either entered into a place unfamiliar to most of us, or have received such hints of the unusual that they become obsessed with the weird.
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They remain universal because they entertain while also expressing our own dissatisfaction with, and uncertainty about, reality.
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When common objects in this way become charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance;