The Weird Part 161

Afterweird: The Efficacy of a Worm-Eaten Dictionary.

China Mieville.

How should we conduct investigations? We need access to the innards of whatever we would understand, but if we take a scalpel to their skins we change them, and the only thing we end up investigating then is something open and bleeding as in very different grotesque ways both Heym's and Shea's dissection stories here make clear. Faced with objects whose terms and natures are not self-evident what we need is some variant of diaphanisation, that enzymatic process that makes transparent the flesh, makes the body a window. This is true of our heuristic terms and functions as much as of the objects they are intended to illumine. It's as true of our microscope-machines.

(those were not here a moment ago, were they?) as of the microbes we stare at through them. We should wish, in other words, not only to examine history cultural, literary, whatever through some filter, but to turn our gaze on that filter itself. This book you hold is a collection of 'The Weird'? Which is what, please? How to proceed?

Etymology as a making-transparent. Word-history is one of the most common little doors-in-the-tree(-or-wall) scholars start by opening. 'This is a study of "Blah" or "Blahist" study', a book announces. 'The dictionary tells us that the root of the word "Blah"...' Etc. So: the Weird. Running a rough plough through the archaeology.

of language brings up 'Wyrd', that Anglo-Saxonism of knotting cause and effect, as cats-cradle intricate and splendid as any Sutton Hoo buckle: Fate, Destiny. Sometimes even Doom. Personified in those women on that blasted heath, the implication is of a tug at some slub.

in the life-weft, the snarl of interweaving, the ineluctable. 'Wyrd', as the great Old English poem 'The Wanderer' insists, 'bi ful araed!' Fate is inexorable. Sometimes cruel, desserts wrought not always according to our own morality, but part of something utter and total. The Wyrd is perhaps not holy, but it is whole-y.

Thus Wyrd-armed we go back to the Weird, in this book in your hands, and in the world itself. We sensitise ourselves to certain moments. Those that we experience not merely as odd, or strange, or surprising, but as weird. We shove a fate-shaped key at the Weird keyhole (or pry at the Weird doorframe with a fate-shaped jimmy ). Beyond, testing our hypothesis, we find among other artefacts: the presences of Blackwood and Morrissette's 'Familiars', Krohn's insects, the family-monsters of Butler's 'Bloodchild', oneiric patchworks of biology and impossibility; the baleful spooks of modernity, in 'Smoke Ghost' that have, spuriously efficient as the industry they haunt, bypa.s.sed the necessity of dying or living in the first place; the uneasy almost-recognition of the punishments in Lanagan's 'Singing My Sister Down'; the fungal universe of Bernanos; the displacements of Leman's 'Window' and Jones' 'Little Lambs'; vividly present unplaces ('The Shadowy Street'; 'The Night Wire'); unclearly suggestive fables (Chapman and Bhely-Quenum); opaque punishments (Kafka and Sansom); lessons and items of all kinds. Bearing the meaning we've learnt, our weapon pilfered from the Anglo-Saxon wordh.o.a.rd, we go to war against incomprehension. 'Weird is Wyrd,' we say, and see how this clarifies.

And after a long time trying to apply that as insight we nod and stop and consider again and must finally ask: What if etymology is f.u.c.king useless?

What if it's worse than useless?

What if thinking through the prehistory of the term 'Weird' is utterly counterproductive? If the s.h.i.+ft that occurred some time in the 19th Century is not an evolution of meaning but a cleft, a repudiation, a revolution, a violence, a break? If Weird is the ungrateful feral child of Wyrd, raised by Modernity's wolves? And what if this semiotic abandonment means no Oedipal drama, no tedious lullaby of reconciliation or loss or mutual learning but instead an unexpectedly clear, debate-ending statement about the heritability of meme-content: that there is none at f.u.c.king all. That the Weird is not a new iteration of fatefulness, but its rebuke, a contingency, a newness that shreds the sealed totality its parental theme pretended existed. The fact of the Weird is the fact that the worldweave is ripped and unfinished. Moth-eaten, ill-made. And that through the little tears, from behind the ragged edges , things are looking at us.

The Weird is neither holy nor whole-y. It is hole-y.

Like flies in rot, frogs in the rich mud of the Nile, like mice in spoiled grain, the things that watch Outer Monstrosities, Great Old Ones, as Hodgson and Lovecraft had it were spontaneously generated. Larvae budding in the fruit of the world-loom. Modernity weaves a moth-eaten cloth, and it is the final instars of those bad eaters that watch us through rifts their maggoty baby selves made.

Weird is anti-Wyrd. A subtraction of the D (always a weak letter, p.r.o.ne to replacement), and its usurpation by M. Weird? Wyrd. Weird = Wyrm. This is the vermiformalist fact of the matter.

The dwellers in holes are not punishments. That they watch us is as random as a rip, the shape of threadbareness. That is the Weird: that we are watched from holes.

You feel eyes on you. Weird is an affect. We know it when we feel it. It's constrained neither by 'level' of culture there is pulp here, and there is 'haute' literature, by Bruno Schulz, Tagore, Leonora Carrington nor by nationality, nor subject matter. Certainly there are monsters but there is emotion and character and monsterless places too. Supernature is strong, but by no means the only transmitter of that alien unease.

It is not uncanny we might post-facto decode whatever metaphor we make of it, but its interior is less repressed than unrecognised. The Weird is not the un-but the abcanny.

This canon changes. Its edges are as protean, its membranes as permeable and oozing as the breaching biology of Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror. We interpret it, of course: our minds are meaning-factories. But the ground below them is hole-y. There are cracks and chaos, meaningquakes. The metaphors we walk on are scree .

In this book is a Weird Canon. It is not exactly yours how could it be? We don't fray the world quite the same, and different things watch each of us. Nor is it quite mine. But we recognize it, and recognize the ways we don't recognize it. The same book, read twice, in different frames of mind, might be once quotidian, unthreatening, and the next time was it our own urgent fingers that snagged those threads? frayed. Weird.

Weird travels with us, each reader a Typhoid Mary in every library. It pa.s.ses from us into pages, infects healthy fiction (pretend for a moment there might be any such thing). A virus of holes, a burrowing infestation, an infestation of burrowingness itself, that births its own pestilential hole-dweller.

There's a slip again.

Pick ourselves up, try to regain footing. Where are we? The world is a many-shelved library. The shovel-handed Things of Johnson's 'Far Below', dholes, conqueror worms, cloth-maggots, bookworms. Burrowers have various names. They chew through books, and leave their exudations, that spoor of anxiety. We have all felt that tacky residue.

We're tempted to hunt Patient Zero . Is there a culprit in this library? Which book was first sick? (Of course they're all in terrible health.) Turn to Margaret Irwin's 'The Book'. Ultimately it alleges malevolent orders, a struggle not to succ.u.mb, a heroic a.s.sertion of familial piety. Such nostrums are resilient, and do no real harm. But that is far the least, the weakest weird of this most weird Weird Tale. An extensive postscript. The story's pinnacle is its magnificent vision of the viral Weird, a bad sensibility breaching the cover-membranes of books, spreading the disease dis-ease. So that, slowly, the shelf of ab.u.t.ting volumes become nasty stories.

Like the proto-postmodern rewriting of Don Quixote brilliantly formulated by Borges's Pierre Menard, which changes Cervantes' pa.s.sages solely by considering them in new contexts, Irwin's Book alters no specific 'words' of the texts it abuts. But it corrupts them. The protagonist, reading them after they have sat too near the Book, finds in d.i.c.kens 'revolting pleasure in cruelty', in Stevenson 'sickly attraction to brutality', in Charlotte Bronte 'a raving, craving maenad'.

All books alter the books that are (read) near them. Here, it is the unease, the strange, the alien malevolent, in its alterity, its Weird, that spreads. That contingent and unwyrdly, that wyrms its way throughout the library.

Thus the canon grows like mould, mildew-damp, eldritch, its vectors vermiform, gnaw-claiming even works that we had thought sedate, a subterranean countertradition, an abcanny that has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with the unsuspected. Burrowers cause the scree slippage of solid ground.

This collection is not (just) an act of canon. It does not, nor could it, enshrine one set of texts. Without motion of crawling and wriggling kind there is no Weird. All canons are tombs, yes, but this collection is a post-elegy, wearing an eaten shroud a long-dead rag for the dead. But this is Weird, and as Lovecraft insisted, 'That is not dead which can eternal lie / and with strange aeons even death may die'. The answer to that riddle is simple. What can be the vector of the hole-y unholy post-life life but the worm?

These are strange aeons. These texts, dead and/or not, burrow, and we cannot predict everything they will infect or eat their path through. But certainly your brain, and they will eat the books you read from today on, too. That is how the Weird recruits.

This is a worm farm. These stories are worms.

Acknowledgments.

Any project this ambitious and with this wide a scope depends on the help of many people. For key translations, advice and negotiations we must profusely thank Gio Clairval; without her efforts this anthology would be much the poorer. Thanks, too, for largesse and special ops, to Edward Duff, Jonathan K. Stephens, Armando Corridore and Konrad Walewski.

In addition to advice from our editor, Nicolas Cheetham, we had access to invaluable resources in the form of prior anthologies that helped shape The Weird. Our thanks in particular to the following editors, many of whom also provided advice, resources, or other valuable information: David Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer, Ellen Datlow, Marvin Kaye, Kirby McCauley, S.T. Jos.h.i.+, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Ramsey Campbell, J.N. Williamson, Leonard Wolf, Peter Crowther, William J. Tyler, Robert Weinberg, John Betancourt, Dennis Etchison, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, Richard Dalby, Jonathan Strahan, Peter Straub, Bradford Morrow and Alberto Manguel. Special thanks to Ray Russell at Tartarus Press for ma.s.sive amounts of help well beyond the call of duty, Jerad Walters at Centipede Press for access to rare materials, and to William Schafer at Subterranean Press for several key story suggestions all of you are cla.s.s acts. Thanks to Dedalus and Atlas Press for access to the most decadent permutations of the weird. Thanks also to Anil Menon, Jaya Bhattacharji, Alan Swirsky, Nick Wood, Matthew Cheney, Eric Schaller, and Larry Nolen for various contributions to the effort.

Our appreciation for recommendations from many dozens of other people, too many to list individually, but thank you for your help. Further thanks to all of the publishers, estates, agents and writers who made this book possible. Heart-felt thanks to Becci Sharpe at Corvus for tracking down certain permissions, and to the Corvus team: Nicolas Cheetham, Mathilda Imlah, Nicole Muir and Sachna Hanspal.

Thanks to Bruegger's Bagels, Hopkins Eatery and Monks for keeping us fed and sane. Finally, thanks to our families and friends for putting up with us while we worked on this project (and neglected them) it devoured our lives for several months.

For more information on weird fiction, especially the works in this anthology, visit www.theweirdcompendium.com.

Extended Copyrights.

Daniel Abraham: 'Flat Diane' by Daniel Abraham, copyright 2004 by Daniel Abraham. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October/November 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Robert Aickman: 'The Hospice' by Robert Aickman, copyright 1975 The Estate of Robert Aickman. Originally published in Cold Hand In Mine: Eight Strange Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate.

Michal Ajvaz: 'The End of the Garden' by Michal Ajvaz, copyright 1991. Originally published in Navrat Stareho Varana. Translation by James Naughton copyright 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author and translator.

Rynosuke Akutagawa: 'The h.e.l.l Screen' by Rynosuke Akutagawa. Originally published in Osaka Mainichi (1918). Translation by Morinaka Akira, copyright 2011. Published by permission of the translator.

H. F. Arnold: 'The Night Wire' by H. F. Arnold. Originally published in the Sept. 1926 issue of Weird Tales.

Clive Barker: 'In the Hills, The Cities' by Clive Barker, copyright 1984, 1988, 1998 by Clive Barker. Originally published in 1984 in The First Books Of Blood. Reprinted by permission of the author and Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.

Laird Barron: 'The Forest' by Laird Barron, copyright 2007. Originally published in Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, 2007, edited by Ellen Datlow. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Eric Ba.s.so: 'The Beak Doctor' by Eric Ba.s.so, copyright 1976. Originally published in The Chicago Review, 1977. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Charles Beaumont: 'The Howling Man' by Charles Beaumont, copyright 1959 by the Greenleaf Publis.h.i.+ng Company, renewed 1987 by Christopher Beaumont. Originally published in Rogue Magazine, November 1959. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon a.s.sociates.

Michel Bernanos: 'The Other Side of the Mountain' by Michel Bernanos, copyright 1967. Originally published in book form in French by Jean-Jacques Pauvert under the t.i.tle La Montagne Morte de la Vie in 1967. This new translation by Gio Clairval, copyright 2011. Published by permission of the translator and the author's estate.

Olympe Bhely-Quenum: 'A Child in the Bush of Ghosts' by Olympe Bhely-Quenum, copyright 1949. Originally published in Liaison d'un ete. Reprinted by permission of the author.

K. J. Bishop: 'Saving the Gleeful Horse' by K.J. Bishop, copyright 2009. Originally published in Fantasy Magazine, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Jerome Bixby: 'It's a Good Life' by Jerome Bixby. Originally published in Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2, 1953.

Algernon Blackwood: 'The Willows' by Algernon Blackwood. Originally published in The Listener and Other Stories (1907).

Robert Bloch: 'The Hungry House' by Robert Bloch, copyright 1951. Originally published in Imagination. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate.

Jorge Luis Borges: 'The Aleph' by Jorge Luis Borges, copyright 1945. From Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, copyright 1998 by Maria Kodama; translation copyright 1998 by Penguin Putnam Inc. Originally published in the Argentine journal Sur, 1945. Reprinted by permission of Andrew Hurley, Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc and The Wylie Agency LLC.

Ray Bradbury: 'The Crowd' by Ray Bradbury, copyright 1943, renewed 1970 by Ray Bradbury. Originally published in Weird Tales, March 1943. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon a.s.sociates.

Poppy Z. Brite: 'His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood' by Poppy Z. Brite, copyright 1990. Originally published in Borderlands 1, 1990, edited by Tom Monteleone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Octavia Butler: 'Bloodchild' by Octavia Butler, copyright 1984, 1995 by Octavia Butler. Originally published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 1984. Reprinted in Bloodchild And Other Stories, 1995. Reprinted by permission of Seven Stories Press.

Ramsey Campbell: 'The Brood' by Ramsey Campbell, copyright 1980. Originally published in Dark Forces, 1980, edited by Kirby McCauley. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Leonora Carrington: 'White Rabbits' by Leonora Carrington, copyright 1941. Originally published in View no. 910, New York 19411942. First published in book form in The Seventh Horse by Leonora Carrington, 1988. Reprinted by permission of Flammarion, Paris.

Angela Carter: 'The Snow Pavilion' by Angela Carter, copyright 1995 Angela Carter. Originally published in Burning Your Boats. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate, c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd.

Michael Chabon: 'The G.o.d of Dark Laughter' by Michael Chabon, copyright 2001. Originally published in the New Yorker, April 2001. Reprinted by arrangement with Mary Evans Inc.

Stepan Chapman: 'The Stiff and the Stile' by Stepan Chapman, copyright 1997. Originally published in Xero Magazine no. 14, 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Michael Cisco: 'The Genius of a.s.sa.s.sins' by Michael Cisco, copyright 2002. Originally published in Leviathan 3, 2002, edited by Forrest Aguirre and Jeff VanderMeer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Julio Cortazar: 'Axolotl' by Julio Cortazar, copyright 1956. Originally published in Final del juego by Los Presentes, Mexico. This new translation by Gio Clairval, copyright 2011. Published by permission of the translator and the author's estate.

F. Marion Crawford: 'The Screaming Skull' by F. Marion Crawford. Originally published in Collier's Magazine, July 1908. First collected in Uncanny Tales (UK) and Wandering Ghosts (US) 1911.

Daphne du Maurier: 'Don't Look Now' by Daphne du Maurier, copyright 1971. Originally published in Not After Midnight, Gollancz, (UK) and Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Doubleday, (US). Reprinted by permission of the author's estate.

Steve Duffy: 'The Lion's Den' by Steve Duffy, copyright 2009. Originally published in Cern Zoo: Nemonymous 9, 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Lord Dunsany: 'How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art' by Lord Dunsany. Originally published in The Book of Wonder, 1912.

Harlan Ellison: 'The Function of Dream Sleep' by Harlan Ellison, copyright 1988 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the Author and the Author's agent, Richard Curtis a.s.sociates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Harlan Ellison is a registered trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

Dennis Etchison: 'It Only Comes Out at Night' by Dennis Etchison, copyright 1976 by Kirby McCauley, 1982 by Dennis Etchison. Originally published in Frights, edited by Kirby McCauley. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Brian Evenson: 'The Brotherhood of Mutilation' by Brian Evenson, copyright 2003. Originally published as a chapbook by Earthling Press, 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Hanns Heinz Ewers: 'The Spider' by Hanns Heinz Ewers. Originally published in 1915.

Jeffrey Ford: 'The Delicate' by Jeffrey Ford, copyright 1994, 2002. Revised from its original publication in s.p.a.ce and Time, no. 83, 1994 and reprinted in The Fantasy Writer's a.s.sistant and Other Stories, Golden Gryphon, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Jeffrey Ford: 'The Beautiful Gelreesh' by Jeffrey Ford, copyright 2003. Originally published in Alb.u.m Zutique #1, edited by Jeff VanderMeer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Karen Joy Fowler: 'The Dark' by Karen Joy Fowler, copyright 1991. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Neil Gaiman: 'Feeders and Eaters' by Neil Gaiman, copyright 1990, 2002. Originally published as a comic book in Revolver Horror Special. First published in this form in Keep Out the Night, edited by Stephen Jones. Reprinted by permission of the author.

William Gibson & John s.h.i.+rley: 'The Belonging Kind' by William Gibson & John s.h.i.+rley, copyright 1981. Originally published in Shadows 4, 1981, edited by Charles L. Grant. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

Stefan Grabinski: 'The White Weyrak' by Stefan Grabinski, translated by Miroslaw Lipinski, copyright 1994. Originally published in Slowo Polskie, 1921. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

Elizabeth Hand: 'The Boy in the Tree' by Elizabeth Hand, copyright 1989. Originally published in Full Spectrum 2, edited by Lou Aronica, Patrick LoBrutto, Shawna McCarthy, and Amy Stout. Reprinted by permission of the author.

M. John Harrison: 'Engaro' by M. John Harrison, copyright 1981. Originally published in Winter Tales 27. Reprinted by permission of the author.

M. John Harrison: 'The New Rays' by M. John Harrison, copyright 1982. Originally published in Interzone 1. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Georg Heym: 'The Dissection' by Georg Heym. Originally published in Der Dieb. Ein Novellenbuch, 1913. This new translation by Gio Clairval, copyright 2011. Published by permission of the translator.

Margaret Irwin: 'The Book' by Margaret Irwin, copyright 1930. Originally published in The London Mercury. Reprinted by permission of PFD (www.pfd.co.co.uk) on behalf of the Estate of Margaret Irwin.

s.h.i.+rley Jackson: 'The Summer People' by s.h.i.+rley Jackson, copyright 1948, 1952, 1960 by s.h.i.+rley Jackson. Originally published in Come Along With Me. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate and Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.

M.R. James: 'Casting the Runes' by M.R. James. Originally published in More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1911.

Robert Barbour Johnson: 'Far Below' by Robert Barbour Johnson. Originally published in Weird Tales, 1939.

Stephen Graham Jones: 'Little Lambs' by Stephen Graham Jones, copyright 2009. Originally published in Iron Horse Literary Review. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Franz Kafka: 'In the Penal Colony' by Franz Kafka. Originally published in German in 1919 as 'In der Strafkolonie' by Kurt Wolff Verlag. Translation by Ian Johnston, copyright 2007 Reprinted by permission of the translator.

Caitlin R. Kiernan: 'A Redress for Andromeda' by Caitlin Kiernan, copyright 2000. Originally published in October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween, edited by Richard Chizmar and Robert Morrish. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Garry Kilworth: 'Hogfoot Right and Bird-Hands' by Garry Kilworth, copyright 1987. Originally published in Other Edens, edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Jamaica Kincaid: 'My Mother' by Jamaica Kincaid, copyright 1978 by Jamaica Kincaid. Originally published in At The Bottom Of The River by Jamaica Kincaid. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and The Wylie Agency.

Stephen King: 'The Man in the Black Suit' by Stephen King 2002. Originally published in The New Yorker, December 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author and by Hodder and Stoughton Limited.

Kathe Koja: 'Angels in Love' by Kathe Koja, copyright 1991. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Leena Krohn: 'Tainaron: Mail From Another City' by Leena Krohn, copyright 1985. Originally published in Finland by SanomaWSOY. First published in English by Prime Books, 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Alfred Kubin: Excerpt from The Other Side by Alfred Kubin, copyright 1908. Originally published in German as Die Andere Seite by Christa Spangenberg, Munich. Translation by Mike Mitch.e.l.l, copyright 1988. Excerpt reprinted by permission of Dedalus.

Marc Laidlaw: 'The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio' by Marc Laidlaw, copyright 1993. Originally published in OMNI, May 1993. Reprinted by permission of the author.