The Weird and the Eerie

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Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy of books ( Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, all of which appeared in 2014), so far the major achievement of the American translation of the New Weird, will hit mainstream cinemas with Alex Garland’s film adaptation in 2017. He makes the links between these seemingly disparate sources into something surprisingly coherent and creative, and nails the kind of free-floating, off-kilter angst and emotional background radiation that we encounter glancingly in life. P. Lovecraft, but it has long slithered free of those confines, and now leaves a trail not just straight across the internet, but on the page and in mainstream TV shows and movie screens.

Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here.You have probably heard of “the weird” by now, but you may not quite know what it is, or why so many genre critics, cultural theorists, and philosophers are keen to engage with it. Fisher’s sensitive, sustained reading of Alan Garner’s opaque and mysterious novel, Red Shift (1973), shows that he can practice literary criticism too.

The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. However, it is a much more accessible book than some others in the field, and I highly recommend it. The weird and the eerie work at this from the other direction, Fisher suggests: “they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside.Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. It makes sense of these quieter emotional ranges of creeping dread or inevitable doom which Gothic criticism, screaming about body horror and torture porn, has largely failed to address. Numerous times as I read, I remembered Brian Aldiss's novel "Frankenstein Unbound" as an example of various parts of Fisher's thesis.

In this extended assay, author Mark Fisher argues that the Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. This idea characterizes that specific moment of folk horror in 1970s British culture as something much more complex than a retreat from the overtly political avant-gardism of the 1960s, inflecting that impulse subversively into the very bucolic landscapes so often used as the basis for retrenchments of Englishness in conservative thought. Gothic criticism, of which there is a vast boiling vat these days, has been rendering down the ectoplasmic energy of “spectrality” into sound bites for 25 years, while critics seem to arrive pre-loaded with cookie-cutter cribs from Freud’s “The Uncanny,” in which they laboriously explain yet again that the term unheimlich means rather more literally the unhomely in German, but that the “homely” is housed inside the “unhomely,” the outside in the inside, the strange in the familiar.Some of the other reviews here cover the book as a whole, and I won't try to comment or add to them. Because it rises up from the outside, and remains there, it resists simple hermeneutic interpretation.