This is not to say that weird tales do not reflect the culture in which they were written – only that weird fiction is metaphysically rather than socially oriented. Weird authors do not share a single, dogmatic metaphysics, either. Their speculations are often contradictory, and a consistent ontological system cannot be neatly deduced from their texts: there is no single, coherent philosophy that weird in toto encodes. One of my central claims, however, is that weird fiction attempts to access a form of reality difficult to cognise, one radically distinct from the human mind and from an anthropocentric viewpoint. I also do not want to denigrate the gothic here, or to draw a completely immutable boundary between the gothic and the weird: obviously, there are works that traffic in both gothic and weird tropes and affects, including many that I discuss here. Rather than a rigid schema that simply deems a text ‘weird’ or ‘gothic’, I want to see the two modes as tendencies within a larger literary tradition, much as Radcliffe delineates differences between terror and horror. What I am calling ‘gothic’, as distinct from the weird, is a focus on the human past and the human mind – on the depths of the psyche, the weight of history, the hauntological, the human. This is not to disparage it, but rather to distinguish it from the weird, whose focus is instead on the non-human.
A brief survey of weird fiction may further clarify some of these competing tendencies within the horror tradition – the slow metastasis of the weird, so to speak. Works like William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), while solidly gothic, contain glimmers of the metaphysical vistas that weird fiction would later explore more thoroughly. It is Poe, however, who I suggest that truly inaugurates weird fiction avant la lettre, fixating, as this study suggests, on stories of mental metamorphoses, cosmic entropy and putrescence both physical and spiritual. During the middle of the nineteenth century, both the gothic and the weird went through what S. T. Joshi calls an ‘interregnum’, but in addition to Poe, various authors did produce a number of weird or proto-weird works.8 Some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s texts hover between the classically gothic and the weird, perhaps especially The House of Seven Gables (1851), as do some of the works of authors like Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the Brontë sisters. Weird fiction and the gothic underwent a significant revival towards the end of the nineteenth century, as exemplified by stories like those collected in Le Fanu’s In A Glass Darkly (1872) and Charlotte Riddell’s much-acclaimed Weird Stories (1882). The genre overlapped significantly with the imperial gothic emergent at the time, exemplified by texts like H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1886), as well as with decadent texts and the ghost story, which often seep from the gothic to the weird, notably in the stories of authors like Vernon Lee, M. R. James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Saki and Ambrose Bierce as well, of course, as those of Arthur Machen, one of the key figures in this book.
The early twentieth century saw an explosion of weird tales, buoyed by the proliferation of pulp magazines. Three of the authors considered at length in this study – Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson and H. P. Lovecraft – are now considered key figures of the early twentieth-century weird, alongside writers like M. P. Shiel, Lord Dunsany, May Sinclair and Clark Ashton Smith. While the works of modernist and pulp writers offer many strong contrasts – the former embodying a kind of ‘literariness’, the latter often dismissed as ‘merely’ popular fiction – in content there are surprising points of overlap, visible in the use of techniques such as stream of consciousness in the works of writers like Lovecraft on the one hand, and in the vivid, often grotesque, frequently bizarre images found in the stories of writers like Franz Kafka. The genre would continue to flourish into the middle of the twentieth century, as seen in many of the stories of Robert E. Howard, Daphne Du Maurier, Robert Bloch and Mary Elizabeth Counselman. August Derleth – a champion and friend of Lovecraft’s – and authors like Ramsay Campbell, Donald Wandrei and Frank Belknap Long produced various tales during this period that drew explicitly on Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, the loose shared universe he and other weird authors made reference to via fictitious texts, locations and alien entities. Mervyn Peake’s monumental Gormenghast trilogy (1946–59) is also a notable here – a resolutely anti-Tolkienian fantasy rendered in opulent prose, set in a gigantic and surreal castle of immemorial age. However, a certain remission – a break between the weird fiction of the early twentieth century and its later revival – can be discerned in the first decades of the second half of the century, even while its influence could still be felt in adjacent subgenres and literary movements like the new wave of science fiction during the 1960s and 1970s.
During the horror boom of the 1980s and into the 1990s, many works trafficked in the tropes of the weird, including those by authors such as T. E. D. Klein, Clive Barker, Stephen King (on occasion) and especially Thomas Ligotti, whose stories of puppets, manikins, marionettes, monstrous hypnosis and the stultifying horror of the corporate workplace are perhaps especially noteworthy in their evocation of a determinist, pessimistic world view similar to Lovecraft’s. The weird has undergone a recent and vibrant renaissance in the twenty-first century as the so-called New Weird, whose key figures include China Miéville (also cited in this work as a theorist of the weird), K. J. Bishop, Laird Barron, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tanith Lee and Jeff VanderMeer. While consciously in the tradition of the original weird, the New Weird frequently incorporates elements from science fiction, urban fantasy and secondary-world fantasy, often taking place in wholly invented universes, and inflecting the weird with a contemporary and politically radical sensibility.
While weird fiction is typically ‘supernatural’ or ‘preternatural’ in character, I argue that despite (or, indeed, through!) its supernatural elements, it is engaged in a form of unorthodox realism. Quite distinct from the social realism or literary naturalism of late Victorian novels striving to depict everyday life with faithfulness to social reality, weird fiction estranges readers from mundane existence while remaining faithful to a deeper, profoundly asocial reality. The curious realism of weird fiction thus finds its closest cognate not in the various literary realisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but in philosophical realism – and especially in the recent philosophical project that has come to be known as ‘speculative realism’.
The weird world-in-itself
A philosophical return to thinking about the world-in-itself, speculative realism originates with Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Ray Brassier; it now includes additional thinkers like Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant, Ben Woodard and Eugene Thacker. Positioning itself against both a naive realism presupposing we might have unmitigated access to the world-in-itself and against what Meillassoux terms ‘correlationism’, upholding the ban on metaphysics established by Immanuel Kant, under which ‘we only have access to the correlation between thinking and being’, speculative realism strives ‘to achieve what modern philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossibility itself: to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not’.9 In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant scathingly observes that
in metaphysics we have to retrace our path countless times, because we find that it does not lead where we want to go, and it