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July 29, 2018 - August 1, 2020
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.
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. Whether It exists or not, they have fallen into dialogue with It; they may pull back from the abyss, they may decide to unsee what they saw, but still they saw it. Such stories can be terrifying, but do not always rely upon the scare central to horror fiction, nor the twist ending common to, for example, classic Twilight Zone episodes. They remain universal because they entertain while also expressing our own
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(William Hope Hodgson’s novel The House on the Borderland
Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Preserving Machine’ (weird science fiction), J. G. Ballard’s ‘The Drowned Giant’ (New Wave weird), Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ (Latin American weird), Otsuichi’s ‘The White House in the Cold Forest’ (Japanese weird).
‘I will obey you. You are my god,’ he said. ‘You have supreme power over man and his animals and his machines. You rule this city and all others. I recognize that.’
‘The world is yours to do with as you will, save or tear to pieces.’
‘I recognize that. I will praise, I will sacrifice. In smoke and soot and flame I will worship you for ever.’
at the back of Spallner’s brain a small watch ticked, a watch that never needed winding.
They arrived at the long sheet punctually, and with consciences thus satisfied they put insufficient effort into the actual work.
Such was the force of his emphasis on obedience to the letter that he was convinced the law would not suffer.
They had enough. They had their breeding and their food. The state of life held no interest for them. Vaguely, they would have preferred better conditions. But at the cost of toil and thought – no.
It is not the production that counts, but the life lived in the spirit during production.
Give the long sheet its rightful place – and concentrate on a better understanding of the freedom that is our real object.’
‘Freedom lies in an attitude of the spirit. There is no other freedom.’
A solid, traditional upbringing among the corseted ruins of Boston had succeeded, as such upbringings generally do, in honing the urge to a keen edge.
Maybe somewhere there is a reservoir of pain, he muses. Waiting to be filled. When it is full, will something rise from it? Something created and summoned by torment? Inhuman, an alien superthing …
Spittle and piss have corroded the lamppost bases:
You could go to sleep tonight in your bed and never wake again, without realizing that the rest of your life is a dream.
The thing confronting him, with each least movement that it made, destroyed the very frame of sanity in which words might have meaning, reduced the world itself around him to a waste of dark and silence, a starlit ruin where already, everywhere, the alien and unimaginable was awakening to its new dominion.
Scientists give us many explanations to choose from. Are we really to believe that reality is built from tiny motes whirling invisibly about one another?
They knew this was a sight they could never hope to see again; this was the apex – after this there was only common experience.
seeing it and seeing it and eating it with his eyes until he died of sheer gluttony.
an empty space which he had once filled with breath and opinions.
‘So you want everyone to be someone. You want what someone is at the beginning to be what he is at the end.’
His outline, which I had once drawn around him, in order to be able to show him and name him, had now disappeared. It liberated the great stranger who was a much realer Longhorn than the person I once knew, small and separate.
Then I tasted your taste, the taste of your thirst, and I answered, and answered, and moaned.
A man is what he does with his attention. John Ciardi
What if in your dream you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you woke you had the flower in your hand? – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
it caught at your throat like a great bird’s talons, taking your breath away.
‘its soul bounded by its skull and its destiny no more problematic than the thin tubes that connect its mouth and its anus. Who are we to judge!’
intoxicating as the perfume of the swamp or a girl’s most intimate sweat.
The boy started to howl, an unpleasant, inhuman sound that started in his throat and ended in yours.
And I knew that to get back to the entrance, I had to go into the water. I sat and thought that through, and when I finished, I wasn’t the same man I’d been when I began the thought.
In one entry in his father’s journal, the old man describes his love affair with a woman who lives at the bottom of a lake. Her skin is blue and her hair so long it turns into sea grass and trailing vines. He descends from his mountain perch every night to meet her on the shore of her lake. They sit beneath a tall dune, the wind blowing around them. Above, stars smash into stars. He tells her how fifteen years earlier he left home to search for his son who had become a hunter in the wilderness. As he kisses her, he hears the immensity of paradise singing across the water to him.
‘The gun is a magic instrument, converting children to numbers.’
‘I know I am now able to will myself out of existence.
De Quincey once wrote “Holy was the grave. Saintly its darkness. Pure its corruption.”
