Every morning, first thing, I flick on my phone for a dose of mass death. War-images and propaganda dance on the surface of my eyes, followed by videos of capybaras, recipes I won’t cook, events I will never go to. I step onto a train where a tinned voice demands I remain vigilant of terrorism. The sky through the cataracted window looks off. It’s too bright, or too dark. I can’t decide. My bank account is empty but I’ve not bought anything. The train is going in the wrong direction. I become sure I’ve missed my stop.
We live in weird times. No wonder, then, that weird fiction is poking its nose into the mainstream. In cinema, Marc Jenkin’s Enys Men, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse and Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth form a loose recent constellation. In print, there is a network of small and independent presses are pushing their own weird vibes. The republication of Joel Lane’s back catalogue by Influx Press stands out. Other notable contributors include Unsung Stories (now sadly closed) and Dead Ink Press.
The Weird has also been known to stalk the halls of the academy. China Mieville, and more recently Michael Cisco, are two weird fiction writers who have tried to give flesh and life to the genre in a more theoretical manner. Mieville understands the modernist weird as “abcanny.” It is invested in “radical monster-making” and the production of new oddities and strangenesses, as opposed to the hauntological focus of the traditionally un-canny Gothic story. Cisco uses Deleuzian theory to define the weird both in terms of formula and mood; it is a genre/approach/none of the above which deterritorializes itself, producing weird lines of flight such that it is always-already shifting, protean, avoidant of concretization. Mark Fisher similarly claims the weird is all about presenting things which are there but should not be, and troubling traditional binary distinctions such as self/other, inside/outside, sanity/madness. It’s all very postmodern.
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Here I should offer my own definition of the weird. An ur-weird model which clears away all the contradictions and cobwebs. But the weird is un-fix-downable. It is very much like postmodernism/ post-structuralism: any definition offered leaks, breaks down, contains its opposite already nestled in the negative spaces between the words. Postmodernism is against Marxism, of course (we’re not Petersonians), but it always works in Marx’s bloated spectre. It is a rejection of grand narratives only insofar as it has, itself, become the grand narrative of our time–though admittedly a sub-narrative, an infra- or ultra-narrative. Some slippery, wet-skinned thing you can’t grasp for too long.
These definitional slinkages, sinkholes, shadows, ghosts–they also plague the weird. As Jake Poller notes, hauntology is Gothic and the abcanny is weird except when they aren’t. Often, especially in contemporary works, they combine nostalgic hauntology and the production of novel, disruptive monstrosities, as in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. Cisco’s definition beginning with the Supernatural seems at first to hold, but doesn’t account for the way weird moods can infect an otherwise realistic work, as found in many of Gary Budden’s stories. Even Fisher’s definition of weird-as-what-should-not-be-there can be disrupted. Because what if the thing the weird presents to you was never there? What if it was just an impression left on the page, a sense that you interpreted the story wrong and there was nothing untoward going on at all–you’re the problem, actually?
Exegeses make faulty engines. This is perhaps why M. John Harrison’s particular elaboration of the weird operates so well. Not because it is the most exhaustive or precise or accurate definition; it’s hardly a definition at all. Harrison instead revels in syncretic imprecision:
A Weird text may not add up. It may not resolve. In fact it almost certainly won’t. Nevertheless there will be no signposts. The author is not on this tour to guide you… The way the picture is painted questions what’s being painted; the things that are painted question each other; the internal lighting questions everything; any episteme you can assemble to “understand” the weird should fail; or even better, almost succeed…
The Weird stands for the unwritten, the unwritable: that which, the reader must sense, lies behind the text.
Key to Harrison’s understanding is this notion of residuum, of excess. Something left over because all the pieces don’t add up and you weren’t meant to be counting in the first place. A sense of unresolution, almost-resolution, a lingering unease at the level of both form and content. Anti-catharsis. Ab-catharsis, in Mievellian terms. Finally, perhaps most importantly, there’s a sense of a Kantian limit to our understanding of the story, something which is presented as both beyond comprehension, as in Cthulhu’s impossible massity, and beneath comprehension, as in the voice that you thought you heard calling you to the bottom of the lake, but which was in fact little more than the lap of water on the banks.
A quote from John Langan’s Gothic horror novel House of Windows fits well, describing the weird in terms of unseen forces determining our lives:
I became really interested in the word “weird.” Its roots are in the Anglo-Saxon “wyrd,” which most translators render as “fate,” and which isn’t completely accurate… what “wyrd” actually means is something like ‘the way things had to be because that’s the way they are.
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Neoliberalism—understood as a mode of late-modern, political-economic governance which valorises the market above all else—operates based on an assumed fatalism. We are all homo oeconomici, now. There is no such thing as sophistry. No lies, no deception, no glamour. The world outside your window is no different to the world of adverts, and you are nothing more than an individual making individual decisions, entombed by your own selfish wants. There are no other forces at play. Trying to dig beneath the veneer is pointless because it’s not a veneer. It’s just a pavement. See? Look what you’ve done now, with all that scratching. Your fingers are bleeding. Now get back to work.
Neoliberalism is weird in a double sense. It plays into the odd determinism of the Old-English wyrd, constructing a world that could only ever have been this way because that’s the way it is. “THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE,” it proclaims, desperately trying to fabricate the reality it describes. But as above, this kind of fatalism leaves a trace. It suggests something unseen, something we can’t perceive, some wyrding thing which overdetermines the cause-and-effect of the world and transforms consequences into fates.
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Weird fictions, with their attention to beyond-beneath forces, to things which remain un-written but which still affect us in inscrutable ways, don’t just metaphorise neoliberalism: they also provide avenues to decode it.
Gary Budden’s Greenteeth, in his debut collection Hollow Shores, follows Lisa, who has decided to reject the “rabbit hutches” of London’s rental economy and live with her partner, Tom, on the city’s canalways. Their new home is a boat, the Peg Powler, nestled amongst the “[s]unken veins just below the dirty city streets, pleasant remnants from an industrial past that helped ruin the world.”
Swampy, fetid imagery waterlogs the text, blurring the distinction between landscape and person; other boaters have “hair like duckweed,” coats “the colour of bilge, textured like algae.” Tom wears a “misshapen jumper the colour of the canal.” The hallmarks of urban development–which, particularly in London, occurs at a nauseating, breakneck speed–are rendered as eldritch farce, all “thrusting glass cocks” with hidden “malice” and “necropolis[es]” beneath “looming gas towers.”
Dread rises like bile in the back of the throat. Lisa tries to stay optimistic, but her piecemeal work as a substitute teacher keeps falling through. Her bank balance dwindles, trapping her on Peg. She grows disgusted with Tom, his frivolous spending and glib platitudes. Most of her time is spent reading the (itself fictional) CL Nolan collection Mucklebones and its stories of water-hags and strange creatures. Her grandfather drowned in the Thames; she imagines often what that must be like.
The story culminates with claustrophobia forcing Lisa off the boat. She traverses the towpath, coming to a stop near a lock-gate. A laugh sounds, “mirthless.” She half-remembers a quote from Mucklebones: “There is one choice in this city. Submersion.”
The reader is left to imagine the horrors which follow. Budden’s approach to the weird in Greenteeth, and across the Hollow Shores collection, is often like this. The supernatural, if it is there at all, is buried in innuendo.
I find myself wondering how a Randian Objectivist would read Greenteeth. Would they see a story of a monstrously lopsided economic system forcing Lisa to the margins, and then eventually into the canal? Would they see the market rendered as water-hag, the Peg Powler which lures the unwary to their doom? Maybe not. Maybe they’d see a story about a sad woman who becomes overwhelmed by her own personal choices and commits suicide, or doesn’t. This reading, though arguably surface-level, isn’t inaccurate. Nor is it something that needs to be rejected. Instead, using a weird lens, we can make it coexist with the more sinister latencies of the text.
As Poller notes, weird stories operate according to a dream-logic of both-and, where seemingly contradictory possibilities are presented as compatible. Greenteeth is both a story of a single relationship failing, a single woman succumbing to dark impulses and (from a certain vantage point) poor decision-making; and it is about economic forces squeezing an entire class of people, forcing them into increasingly desperate and untenable positions until they snap; and it is about Jenny Greenteeths and Peg Powlers and Kelpies and other predatory drowning-monsters.
Neoliberalism, like the crassest variants of Marxism, doesn’t deal in both-ands. It wants exclusive absolutes, either-ors: absolute individuality, absolute freedom-from, absolute independence. Everyone an island, floating or sinking by their own merits. It wants us to read the script of our lives at one level–of individuals making choices and suffering consequences, in full denial of our inter-connectedness. But though it rejects both-and dreamlogic, it has built for us a both-and dreamworld where we are always both free and constrained, where we manage to be rugged secular individuals who remain hopelessly tossed about by the gales of the market gods.
A weird roadmap allows us to explore this dreamworld–how it manifests phenomenologically in our heads, how our perception and choices seem often ruled by entities coming from some interstitial space that is not quite out-there but also, surely, not purely in-here. In weird fictions, we are always both isolated individuals and interconnected, both agential and enthralled. We sleepwalk towards doom and we actively choose it. Who hasn’t felt this, trudging the mires of late modernity?
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Joel Lane’s The Sunken City, in his collection of weird noir short stories Where Furnaces Burn, follows the police officer narrator investigating a murder by asphyxiation. The officer searches a decaying city caught in a developmental limbo. A far cry from the rapacious creative destruction of London’s topography, Birmingham is a world of “shops closing down,” “veils crumpl[ing] softly over the ruins of 1960s social housing,” “crusts of scaffolding over boarded windows.” The killer, they discover, is Corin Ward, a tile cutter who has previously tried to choke a woman to death in a sexual assault because the feeling of stealing breath “is better than sex.” He is a failed writer who refers to other people as “rats, living in filth, fighting over scraps of food” and believes himself to be distinguished by his “vision.”
When the narrator arrests Ward in his abandoned former workplace, Ward is “desperately short of breath” and in the later stages of pneumonia. Ward is processed in a prison hospital and the narrator, curious, retrieves one of Ward’s notebooks from evidence to understand his motives. The narrator is “not sure” what he reads; he may have “fell asleep and dreamed [he] was reading.” All he is left with are disturbed images of “canals rising, the city under water… houses changing, becoming the ruins that their occupiers had always dreamed of. The dreams themselves rotting… a morass of toxic desire.” The text “infec[ts]” the narrator. Driven by “some insane notion [Ward] could show me the truth of the city,” the narrator goes to visit Ward in the prison hospital, but Ward is unable to help. The pneumonia has taken hold. As Ward dies before him, the narrator thinks he can see “blurred, misty figures pressing around him… their faces… joined to his.”
In the Sunken City, urban alienation is shown as ineluctably class-based. Ward, like most characters in the text, is disenfranchised by the early 1990s economic downturn. The landscapes are interstitial ruins, byproducts shat out by the stagnating development machine. In the final scene, the city becomes a horde of spectres, sucking out Ward’s breath. This is urban violence made almost-corporeal, an embodiment of the city’s weight on your chest, how it winds you with its pressures. The city, moreover, does not crush everyone equally, but instead drowns the unlucky and excluded, transforming susceptible people like Ward (and his victims) into vectors of its violence.
As with Greenteeth, despite the grim fatalism of the forces presented, The Sunken City’s characters are never folded totally into a deterministic schema. The both-and dream-logic persists. The city controls Ward, yes, drowning him with the weight of itself and eventually leeching him of life for reasons unknown. But his individuality, and sense of individual responsibility, remain intact. He is depraved and arrogant and violent, his desire to asphyxiate arising as much from a psychosexual knot in his mind as from his physical breathlessness and social deprivation. He is both a depraved criminal, and a man driven to madness and illness by marginalisation, and someone possessed and taunted by the city’s vicious spirits. The weird, though perhaps more explicitly supernatural here, remains a subtle process which dredges submerged collective malaises to the surface of the narrative.
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Greenteeth and The Sunken City might be viewed as mirrored horrors of the same processes. In Greenteeth, urban development and commodification occurs so rapidly that Lisa and Tom are cast out of orbit into a “London in-between.” In The Sunken City, development occurs so sluggishly that Ward falls through the cracks into a nightmarish “true… city.” In both, weird entities are deployed through metaphors of submersion, drowning, choking, in order to breathe life into the political-economic ravages of late capitalism. Most of us will understand the connection intimately. That feeling of an anchor on your chest, ribcage boughing under its weight. The damp hand reaching past your lips and into your stomach, squeezing as the bills pile up and the bank account dwindles and your throat tightens against the rotstench of the city’s financial effluvium.
Of course, all good fiction contains layers of interpretation, the suggestion of forces operating beyond the level of individual characters. What makes the weird unique is how it inserts an in-between, monstrous layer–the suggestion of outsider forces, eldritch else-things which may haunt us, but which are far more inhuman and far less knowable than ghosts. They influence and entrance from beyond, behind and beneath the text. These interstices form a mythic membrane which, through the use of both-and logic, blends the difference between individual characters and the structures which individuate them. Rendered as squirming entities rather than mere institutions or ideas, the political-economic forces often left implicit in realistic (and indeed even more straightforwardly fantastical) fictional texts become a little more visceral, and so visible, and noticeable, and open to critique.
Weirding also changes how we view these forces. In Greenteeth, the cold, rational cruelty of London’s urban development becomes a malicious trickster with inscrutable intentions. In The Sunken City, Birmingham is not a disinterested monster: it is full of sordid vitality, invested in making more monsters in its own image. It drowns and crushes Ward until he becomes, like the city itself, a self-abusing purveyor of violence. Inequality, urban development, social stratification: all are rendered not simply as unfortunate byproducts of urbanisation, but the cruel and incomprehensible core of its logic.
Marx’s comments on capitalism-as-vampire (and subsequently, capitalism-as-zombie) have been seized upon for decades by horror-inclined theorists. They provide powerful organising metaphors for the monstrous venality of our current mode of production. Perhaps it’s time to supplement them by viewing capitalism–and neoliberal capitalism specifically–as not only undead, or bloodthirsty, but a weirding entity. Something which infests our very perception, which has no interest in drinking our blood or eating our brains. Why would it? It’s already inside us.
References
Baldick, C. 1990. Karl Marx’s Vampire and Grave-Diggers. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth Century Writing. Oxford University Press.
Budden, G. 2016. Greenteeth. In Hollow Shores. Dead Ink Press.
Cisco, M. 2022. Weird Fiction: A Genre Study. Palgrave MacMillan.
Eggers, R. 2019. The Lighthouse. A24.
Foucault, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Palgrave MacMillan.
Fisher, M. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater.
Harrison, M. J. 2023. Wish I Was Here. Serpent’s Tail.
Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Jenkins, M. 2022. Enys Men. Film4.
Lane, J. 2023. The Sunken City. In Where Furnaces Burn. Influx Press.
Langan, J. 2008. House of Windows. Diversion Publishing.
Mieville, C. 2011. MR James and the Quantum Vampire. Collapse IV. Reprinted at Weird Fiction Review. Available at: https://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/m-r-james-and-the-quantum-vampire-by-china-mieville/.
Mirowski, P. 2014. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Verso.
Poller, J. 2022. New Weird Fiction and the Oneirologic of both-and. Textual Practice 37(8). Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2022.2111701.
VanderMeer, J. 2012. China Mieville and Monsters: “Unsatisfy Me, Frustrate Me, I Beg You.” Weird Fiction Review, 20th March. Available at: https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/china-mieville-and-monsters-unsatisfy-me-frustrate-me-i-beg-you/.
VanderMeer, J. 2017. The Southern Reach Trilogy. Fourth Estate.
Wheatley, B. 2021. In the Earth. Universal.
Tom Maguire is a writer and DJ based in Birmingham, UK. His weird/horror short fiction appears in Digbeth Stories, published by Floodgate Press. Recently, he has provided music for a Symposium on Joel Lane’s work, “The Witnesses Are Here”, hosted by Voce Books & Influx Press. He is currently writing a novel about an eldritch ocean flooding Birmingham.
Blue Labyrinths 