Weird Fiction

A splash of something huge resounds through the sea-fog. In the stillness of a dark room, some unspeakable evil is making its approach.

This new selection offers the most chilling and unsettling of Hodgson's short fiction, from encounters with abominations at sea to fireside tales of otherworldly forces from his inventive `occult detective' character Carnacki, the ghost finder.

A master of conjuring atmosphere, when the horror inevitably arrives it is delivered with breathtaking pace and the author's unique evocation of overwhelming panic.

The underground has always existed. There has always been information that was not popular with the establishment. Despite the efforts of those in power to hide certain knowledge from the people, certain advances in the creation and dissemination of media have allowed disparate views to enter the mainstream. From the Library of Alexandria (the first incarnation of the internet) to Gutenberg's creation of a system of disseminating information more quickly than scribes could dream of, with each increase in the speed and simplicity of freeing up information there has been a revolutionary change in science, the arts, philosophy and politics. The 20th century has witnessed several of these revolutionary advances in information sharing. With the advances in culture and the revolutions in the arts and sciences there has been a rise in the popularity of certain forms of underground literature. From the experimental and explosive literature of the Beatniks to the music of the hippies and beyond to the present day, underground art has been leaking into the mainstream collective unconscious at an exponentially increasing speed. The increasing popularity of independent and underground music, movies, zines and culture (or sub-culture) have created a separate world of information and ideas that are not part of the mainstream culture. Now with the internet anyone can make their ideas available to the world. This has created a new format for the spread of underground literature , news and art that would not be made available in the much less interactive mainstream media. The internet is a new medium not only for the spread of information and art but for networking these subcultures. It may be the tool that allows the subcultures to slowly spread to the mainstream, bridging the information gap created by the corporate free press and corporate advertainment. In Celtic society, the Bardic class, the poets and musicians, were assigned a place of great power Great rulers could be deposed by a properly phrased satiric verse, juvenal exposed the truth behind the myth in classical Roman society through poems that simply told it like it was. Since then, poets and artists have had an important effect upon the culture of the times. The artists are the critics of culture and the visionaries that open up possibilities for the future. In the past century, the underground literary tradition has taken up this vein in creating new possibilities for the future. As we enter the digital age, where information takes an even greater role in the formation of the present and future, the underground literary tradition will have an even more important role, and with the aid of the internet the ideas of the underground can be freely spread to the people. It was the age of the Red Scare. America was united in conformity and one of the major tools used to create this conformity was the new mass media. Hollywood and television served as powerful propaganda tools. The American way of life had been standardized. American values were uniform. Either you were American (a God-loving believer in free enterprise devoted to simple suburban life) or you were a commie pinko fag. The 50's was a frightening example of how easily America could become a fascist state. Blind patriotism and hatred of a common enemy were benchmarks of the age of Father Knows Best and McCarthy. Orson Welles and other thinkers ahead of their time were blacklisted and pushed to the fringes of the mainstream. Far below the mainstream, however, a group of revolutionary thinkers and artists were releasing information that would create an intellectual explosion and which influenced the underground of the following generations.

Música que é tantas vezes destruída na selva e recordou o house doce e alguns clubes mudos em Ibiza, é aqui transformado em um instrumento musical, que proclamou a destruição de qualquer ser humano neste mundo. (Miéville 1998) Cyberpunk incendiar ficção em intensidade, que consiste de fluxo de caixa mutilado, technocompresado, a voz de diversos jargões e colocado tanto no futuro próximo para se conectar: selvada da comercialização hipertrófica, a morte de calor sócio-política, hibridismo cultural, feminização, sistemas programáveis, hipercrime, conectividade neural através de uma interface, inteligência artificial e espaço, o comércio com a memória, os transplantes de personalidade, modificações corporais, vírus soft-e wetware, processos dinâmicos não-lineares, engenharia molecular, drogas, armas, esquizofrenia. (Land 2007) O romance de China Miéville King Rat (1998) gira os mitos de fundação de o flautista de Hamelin. Diz a lenda particularizei seu jogo percepção auditiva de espécies individuais e estabeleceu a necessidade de distinção ou-ou (matar crianças ou exterminacao dos ratos), enquanto particularizei como seu lugar de enunciação, quando escreveu lugar Hamelin ou foi falado pela boca de seus pais quando eles essas crianças estão cantando uma canção de ninar. Assobiando de Mieville esta o êxtase apocalíptica da música, onde a intensificação máxima de elec-engenharia acelera até (Land 2007) "iminente extinção da humanidade torna-se acessível como um piso clube de dança." Universalizada univocalidade tal unanimidade que através Duns Scotus e Deleuze no plano de imanência se conectar com antiderrapante sinal de igual, carrapato, que é Deus, que é o banco, onde "uma só voz afirmou gritando para ser" ecoa através de técnicas de amostragem modernos. A ativação de faixas de áudio multitrilhado multiplicado melodias a tal ponto que o flautista de Hamelin não é mais apenas a lenda de partículas e sua execução propriamente dita, mas vestindo a coroa de toda a criação. (Beep torna-se inadmissível na sua totalidade.) DAT e os últimos tiros assobiando pelo DJ gira ao mesmo tempo, levar a meia-ratinho meia-hominídeo que um traço indivíduo não afetam, a lógica descritiva por alguns momentos não funciona mais. Há uma queda na cara, o que é mais do que isso. O rosto é singular-onde este é um ponto singular do excesso, uma rara e encadernação-plano de prazo para o tipo mais refinado, que é mais forte do que os outros sistemas de marcação. Ou "sem rosto esta nada." O rosto é a primeira e mais importante materialidade. Cristo pregado na cruz e sinal sonoro, que beep sob ele. Como Spinoza diz: Facius totius universi. (A face do mundo inteiro.) A face do sofrimento monitora duplicado aleijado artaudiano. No auge da luta, quando o Alarme apenas a poucos passos de distância de vitória total dentro de melodias contrapontísticos ocorrer dissonância, que para o momento suspenso de flautista e univocalidade e pulverizado até que seja meia-ratinho meia-hominídeo na corrida final não está superada, e desaparece de volta em sua particularidade: em Hamelin. Pode também: na não-espaço. Com a agricultura veio há mais padrões de assentamento permanente e mais estruturas de poder formal, bem como a crescente consolidação dos perímetros da cidade e círculos concêntricos em torno do não-espaço

Unlike nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted and the ghostly, early weird fiction probes the very boundaries of reality - the laws and limits of time, space and matter. Here, unimaginable terrors lurk in hitherto unknown mirror dimensions, calamities in ultra-space threaten to wipe clean all evidence of our universe and experiments in non-Euclidean geometry lead to sickening consequences.

In twelve speculative tales of our universe's mathematics and physics gone awry, this new anthology presents an abundance of curiosities - and terrors - with stories from Jorge Luis Borges, Miriam Allen deFord, Frank Belknap Long and Algernon Blackwood

This chapter, “Becoming-instrument: Thinking with Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects”, considers first-person narration and empathic enactment of fictional experience from posthumanist and enactivist perspectives. It introduces a new methodological device called “becoming-instrument”, which opens the reader’s experience to nonhuman influences. Building on Marco Caracciolo’s (2014) claims about empathic engagement with first-person narratives and Merja Polvinen’s (2012) notion of self-aware readerly engagement, the chapter’s author Kaisa Kortekallio argues that engagement with estranging first-person narratives, such as Annihilation and Hyperobjects, can work toward dissolving the certainty of the human subject and develop in its stead a model of subjectivity as “multiple and always-in-progress” (Sherryl Vint 2005).

Annihilation (2014) and Hyperobjects (2013) both invite the reader to enact the affective experientiality of their first-person narrators, but they also foreground the fictionality of those narrators. The chapter argues that affective experientiality and awareness of fictionality can intertwine in the readerly experience, and that the combination of affectivity and self-referentiality is characteristic of the “dark” or “weird” ecology VanderMeer and Morton advance in their texts. Finally, Kortekallio suggests that the dynamic of enactment applies not only to explicitly fictional narrative techniques but also to the rhetorical devices employed in non-fiction texts – such as the rhetorical “I” in Hyperobjects.

This essay on “planetary ecohorror” turns to the question of scale raised by Anthropocene discourse. Rather than situating the human as a figure opposed to that of nature, the term planetary ecohorror thinks of the human-nonhuman milieu as an inextricably intertwined ecology that contains within it, paradoxically, an “outside” of planetary or cosmic indifference. Through a reading of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, 2014), the author shows how horror in the weird tradition allows for a simultaneous articulation of seemingly incongruous political scales ranging from the body to the planet and deep time.

While Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy has been read through the uncanny human traumas and tropes of “contamination” in its first novel, Annihilation, the trilogy’s radical ecological thought emerges more clearly through cosmic and transformative trauma in the final novel, Acceptance. Rather than some contaminated space, Area X is restoring Earth’s ecosystems to a “pristine” state, but in a process of guided succession that traumatizes human life as lived under ecologically destructive neoliberal economies of extraction. Reading the twinned falls of Saul and Control, this article shows how Acceptance reimagines uncanny trauma for a new form that is painful but also familiar, human but also posthuman, and utterly necessary for planetary survival.

In this article I seek to explore the dark, twisted world of Iain Banks' masterpiece of speculative weird fiction, The Wasp Factory. Specifically, I attempt to grasp the aesthetic function of the Wasp Factory, a bizarre contraption utilized by the narrator to ritually murder wasps. What meaning, if any, does this construct convey? More generally, what is the purpose of this bizarre, gloomy novel? And what implications does it have for literary theory in general? So as to diversify scholarly reception of Banks' extraordinary work, I seek to utilize two concepts of aesthetic theory that may be of help in this regard. The first is Ortega y Gasset's notion of " dehumanization " , expounded in a little-cited 1925 essay, entitled " The Dehumanization of Art " (La deshumanización del arte). The second key concept I seek to utilize is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the " literary machine. " Through the posthumanist merging of these two very different, albeit analogous philosophical ideas, I hope to shed new light on Banks' literary method and the radical anti-vitalist potential of his novel.

This talk, delivered as part of Dr Sam Hirst's Romancing the Gothic project, aimed to explore how M.R. James' ghosts can be considered 'queer' in comparison with the 19th Century 'normative' ghost. It is based on a chapter of my MLitt dissertation and will be part of my upcoming PhD research.

Widely recognised for their uncompromising mechanical difficulty and obscure plot delivery, the ‘Souls’ series (2009-current) represents an alternate paradigm of video game narrative presentation. Encouraging the player to discover the back-story, or lore, often through received item or object description, the game’s full story may only be experienced by those that delve into its depths and uncover the secrets. In this paper, I will argue this technique is akin to ‘narrative archaeology’: where the player has to sift through the unearthed objects and construct their own version of past, present and future events.

Bloodborne (2015) differs from iterations in the series as the player’s ‘narrative archaeology’ is mirrored in the diegetic terror of exhuming the Lovecraftian ‘Great Ones’. Opening with the most minimalistic introductory cutscene within the series to date, the player is left to wander the dark streets of Yharnam, cutting their way through fanatics and beasts to discover the eldritch truth at the centre. Commenting upon the opening scene, object descriptions and labyrinthine ruins, this paper states Bloodborne incorporates the Weird’s cosmic horror propensities to entice the player to uncover the horrific truths themselves. By contrasting the utilisation and appeal of items in relation to survival horror games, I will argue that Bloodborne challenges both narratological and mechanical conventions.

Concluding by focusing on Bloodborne’s inclusion of Weird, or Lovecraftian, elements, this paper will discuss how the series’ thematic shift equally reflects current cultural interests in New Weird media. As the game’s lore is often constructed through supposition, as even the director refuses to provide definitive answers, the punishing gameplay, fragmented narrative and crucially open-ended interpretation reflects the Weird’s deconstruction of epistemological certainty. Hence, I will argue Bloodborne’s ‘narrative archaeology’ fuses the atmosphere of horror games and indefinite nature of the Weird to entice the player to uncover their own reading.

Haunted houses constitute a widespread narrative theme. We often encounter ghostinfested habitations in folk tales and literary works the world over and throughout the centuries. An etho-biological background might perhaps be responsible for his frequency and universality. The first part of this paper is dedicated to studying how this theme unfolds in Roman-Ellenistic culture, where it is treated both as a comical motive and as a topic for serious philosophical investigation. In the second part, I turn to modern literature and explore H.P. Lovecraft's multifarious and up until now underestimate variations on the theme.

Questo studio indaga la natura della weird fiction, con l'intento di contestualizzarla e darne una definizione. A partire da un inquadramento storico della letteratura del soprannaturale e delle sue tendenze evolutive, l'analisi punta a superare la concezione di weird come termine legato esclusivamente ai pulp magazines statunitensi dei primi anni del Novecento. L'obiettivo è dimostrare che il weird è un modo narrativo a sé stante, adoperato anche al di fuori della ristretta categoria dei pulp, e derivato da alcuni assunti della letteratura più comunemente nota come "fantastica". Il lavoro è diviso in due parti: la prima, teorica, approfondisce l'esistenza e le ragioni del weird come modo letterario; la seconda applica quest'ottica modale ad alcuni testi selezionati tra le opere di tre autori di primo Novecento: Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Stefan Grabin'ski e Jean Ray.

This article posits Thomas Ligotti's weird novella, "My Work is Not Yet Done," as an ideal site for interrogating the malicious effects of the neoliberal project. Neoliberalism, namely the depoliticization of economies and privatisation of state apparatus, has developed unevenly across the globe since the 1980s. Though ostensibly promoting freedom and prosperity, this socioeconomic framework has contributed to widespread financial inequalities, exacerbated global climate crises and, during the COVID-19 lockdown, endangered countless lives for the sake of economic progress. Corroborating Mark Fisher's conceptualisation of 'capitalist realism', proponents of neoliberalism have normalised its principles by maintaining the illusion that there are no alternatives to them. Weird fiction is therefore uniquely positioned to depict the impacts of neoliberal dogma, based, as it is, around granting an outside perspective on presumed epistemological structures. Thomas Ligotti is one of the most celebrated writers of weird fiction in the last thirty years. This article will console his definition of the weird with Fisher’s own in order to demonstrate that Ligotti uses a sense of ‘real externality’ to critique neoliberalism’s profit-driven individualism. While being a self-proclaimed socialist himself, Ligotti states that “My Work is Not Yet Done” uses the corporate world to depict his own pessimistic philosophy. But by analogising the metaphysics of pessimism through an archetypical corporation, Ligotti simultaneously reveals the inhumanity of neoliberalism itself. As such, this article argues, Ligotti’s novella represents a timely critique of the neoliberal project and evidence that weird fiction is uniquely positioned to repudiate the value of unjust hegemonies.

The whole paper is basically an essay about Lovecraft and the concept of Cosmic Horror. There is no abstract since it was part of a series of essays to complete the Master course in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow. I will just update the first paragraphs here below to give an idea of what the paper is about to anybody who would like to read it.


Howard Phillips Lovecraft is one of the most important authors of horror fiction: he, together with Edgar Allan Poe, inspired some of the greatest authors of the genre, including the supreme master of horror: Stephen King . During his life, he mainly owed his fame to his literary activity for the American magazine Weird Tales, and as time went by his writings ended up outlining a real fictional genre with well established features: the weird tale, as he himself defined it.
Weird Tales is one of the many pulp magazines which spread over in America in the early twenties: cheap magazines  which contained stories of various kind, but generally grotesque, fantastic, western and horror. Being a second class magazine, writing for Weird Tales was not regarded as important as writing for other magazines of the time, as for example the tradition-al “slicks”: Smart Set, Atlantic Monthly or Saturday Evening Post (Joshi 1990: 4-5). It was surely more accessible, a place where budding writers could be published more easily. And yet it gave fame to a lot of authors whose works have generated hundreds of adaptations –films, role-play games, board games and videogames– becoming a real mass phenomenon. Not only H. P. Love-craft, then, but also other more fantasy authors, like Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Ervin Howard and Fritz Leiber, who are still today associated with the concept of weird fiction.
The first time Lovecraft mentions the weird tale as a genre is in his essay ‘Supernatural Hor-ror in Literature’ (1927).

El presente trabajo busca analizar el cuento “Habitaciones”, parte del libro de cuentos
Causas naturales (2013) de Claudia Hernández (San Salvador, 1975). Primeramente se hará un
breve estado de la cuestión en cuanto al análisis de la producción de Hernández. Además, se
pondrá a dialogar el texto de Hernández desde lo que Mark Fisher denominó ‘lo raro’ en su
libro The Weird and the Eerie (2016), junto con el concepto de ‘lo lynchiano’, término creado por
David Foster Wallace en su ensayo David Lynch Keeps His Head (1997) para referirse al universo
del cineasta David Lynch. Este espacio de ‘lo raro’ y ‘lo lynchiano’ servirá como coyuntura entre
la literatura fantástica latinoamericana y lo que será definido posteriormente como el nonsense
ocampiano (Biancotto, 2015).

This dissertation seeks to address the notion of queerness within the Gothic- specifically, within the works of M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Robert Aickman- by redefining and expanding the definition of the term to move beyond sexuality. It is not the authors themselves that are queer, it argues, but the representations of the ghostly figures and the identities of their protagonists that are queer through non-normativity and comparison with contemporary examples. Using work by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on ‘queerness’ in combination with Mark Fisher’s theory of the weird and the eerie, it will show how queer identities are both constitutive and fracturing within the texts, as well as exploring how this is connected with both the presences and absences found within them.
It will first explore the context and history of ghosts and ghostly literature throughout the nineteenth century, as well as offering a survey of the linguistic and theoretical history of the term ‘queer’ and queer theory in general, before using this outline to analyse James, Machen and Aickman in turn. The argument will focus on moving beyond extant criticism on the authors, particularly psychoanalytical analyses, to show how authorial intent and personal biography is not always an essential component of literary criticism. A key component of the argument will be to show how fractured identities- of ghosts that manifest in unfamiliar ways, humans that move between states of being and tensions between past and present, society and nature- work to displace and threaten constitutive identities, introducing weirdness of eeriness into normative spaces. It will conclude with a comparison of the three authors to outline their similarities as well as fundamental differences but showing how, in their contemporaneously different representations of ghosts and ghostly beings and the fractured identities of their protagonists, their ‘weird’ and ‘eerie’ ghost stories are queer in their own way.

This paper explores three transgressive models of subjectivity. The first emerges out of a psychoanalytic examination of the matrix, a regressive technology of wish-fulfilling omnipotence which is central to the world of William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer.  The second subjectivity is expressed through the reactionary credo of self-sacrifice developed by Georges Bataille’s secret society of Acéphale  – headless. The third subjectivity calls to us from the dehumanizing gods that populate the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.  Each of these transgressions share a common element. They depict a method or practice that seeks to dominate the rational, human subject by way of turning it into the raw material of cultural production. For this purpose, technology (Gibson), religion (Bataille), and ontological systems of knowledge (Lovecraft) are twisted into their antitheses.
Each transgressive model of subjectivity implements a tool of enlightenment in order to subjugate and regressively re-orient the course of reason, elucidating the dark inhumanity which is tangled around the deepest roots of the human subject. These transgressions, and their resultant power to transform the human into something wholly other, something inhuman, are the precise points at which the rational subject of the Enlightenment “abrogates itself,”  to quote Adorno and Horkheimer, revealing its ever-present potential for reversion back to a repressive, mythic, and irrational antithesis.

In recent years critics such as S.T. Joshi et al have made
much of the fiction of Lovecraft as a kind of scripture or mythology of atheism. Whereas the writer himself clearly professes this philosophy in his personal correspondence it is my contention that these ideas are not so apparent in the fictional works themselves and in fact on closer examination a somewhat different worldview emerges.

In this essay, I read Jeff VanderMeer’s acclaimed The SouThern reach Trilogy (2014) as a dramatic reimagining of the body and health in the context of the global ecological crisis. I propose that a particularly “weird” ecology is one explicitly linked to modes of embodiment specific to the environmental conditions of the twenty-first century; the novels stage environmental crisis not only in the marshes and coastlines of a strange fictional ecosystem but in the body itself. As a primary organizing theme of the series, sickness inhabits human and nonhuman bodies, imbricating them in complex relations that reveal their co-constitution. In this essay, I examine the intersection of eco-criticism, feminist science studies, and disability studies, which together illuminate in the Trilogy the ways in which the body is embroiled in climate change as a set of relations imagined as a form of ecosickness.

'Reading Mutant Narratives' explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-thanhuman modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of 'mutant narratives.' Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction
that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction.
The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied.
As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also
estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of 'embodied estrangement.'
Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, 'performative enactivism,' that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-thanhuman aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.

""UEA Thesis (2011)

In this thesis I draw upon recent formulations of fantasy theory, from Rosemary Jackson’s psychoanalytic analysis to the socio-historical approaches of José Monleon and Mark Bould, and the poetics of fantasy literature of Farah Mendlesohn, to illuminate the interlocking political debates about fantasy fiction which are important to literary theory: whether fantasy is a minor sub-set of literature or the basis of all fiction; whether fantasy functions primarily as a satirical or utopian idiom, or as sheer escapism; and whether fantasy is a liberating expression of the imagination or a limiting and commodified form. ""

The full thesis can be downloaded via the UEA Digital Repository: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/19302.

A review of Jonathan Newell's monograph A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror.  The book focuses on the Weird tale's use of disgust as an affective mode to explore questions of ontology.  Newell's charts a trajectory of such explorations over the course of a century, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and ending with H.P. Lovecraft.

La III Escuela Doctoral de Verano IberLab se celebrará del 20 al 24 de junio de 2022 en la Universidad de Granada. Las actividades están destinadas a estudiantes nacionales e internacionales de máster, doctorado y posdoctorado interesados en el estudio de la cultura iberoamericana, desde los ámbitos de la crítica, la lengua, la filosofía y la literatura.

Las actividades tendrán lugar en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras en Granada y se contará con la presencia de Franco Bifo Berardi, Roland Breeur, Mariano Siskind y Ursula Heise.

Esta tercera edición de la Escuela de Verano Iber-Lab está articulada en un módulo común ´Metodologías de la investigación y estrategias curriculares´ y dos itinerarios a elegir por los asistentes. El itinerario de Literatura y Filosofía se titula "Futuro desde los Sures: distopía, ecología y fin del mundo" y cuenta con los siguientes ejes de reflexión:
    Futurabilidad, crisis y fines del mundo.
    Políticas y poéticas de la distopía y la ciencia ficción
    Estéticas weird, góticas y del terror
    Antropoceno, ecocrítica y literatura

Seminarios, conferencias, talleres y presentaciones de proyectos de doctorado en los que participarán otros profesores invitados: Pablo Brescia, Ana Boccuti, Juan Manuel Marrero, Donald Tuten, Guillermo Rojo, Ignacio Palacio, Mario Barcala; y profesores de IberLab: Ana Gallego Cuiñas, José Antonio Pérez Tapias, Luis Sáez, Pedro Ruiz Pérez, Azucena González Blanco, Óscar Barroso, Mayte García Godoy, Miguel Calderón Campos, Cristóbal Lozano e Ignacio López Sako.

El programa académico se complementa con un atractivo programa cultural y de ocio para los asistentes en el inigualable entorno de la histórica ciudad de Granada.

Hay dos modalidades de participación: presencial y virtual.
*Primera fecha de inscripción: hasta el 15 de mayo del 2022.
*Segunda fecha de inscripción: hasta el 15 de junio del 2022.
Web: http://iberlabsummerschool.ugr.es/
Contacto: iberlabsummerschool@ugr.es

This article deals with the generally underestimated importance of horror fiction for eco-critical thinking about place. It looks at three major horror writers, Poe, Lovecraft, and VanderMeer, exploring the ways that each plays with and deepens our understanding of what it means to be in a place. Contrary to popular opinion, which would claim that horror writers both use stock backgrounds, and in any case deal only with fictions, I argue that horror fiction is in many ways more realist than other forms of writing, and as such deserving of far more critical attention that it has thus far been accorded by eco-critics.

Blog entry for Anthropological theory commons
Jeff VanderMeer’s (2014) Southern Reach trilogy of weird fiction evokes a creeping relation between the weird territory called Area X and vertigo, a set of visceral, bodily affects involving dizziness, nausea, and a sense of hovering at the edge of the abyss, just about to take the final step. But vertigo also has a complementary conceptual dimension. It can be understood as embodying an experimental disposition (Jensen 2019) to make one available to ‘ontological openings’ (Taguchi with de la Cadena, 2017). At least that is the speculative proposition we explore in this short visit to Bangkok

A paper presented at the Stirling Arts and Humanties Postgraduate Conference 2020: Heritage and Future(s) on 22/5/2020, adapted from a presentation written in collaboration with Mrs Kristy Strange as part of my MLitt: The Gothic Imagination.

The presentation explored how the locations of Aickman's stories are monstrous, using both hauntology and Jeffery Jerome Cohen's 'Monster Theses' as a critical lens through with to offer a reading of Aickman.

This article approaches the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, an exotic, wandering, homeless “ghost of no place” (Nabae 2014), born in Greece, raised in Ireland, who became a fiction writer famous for turning both New Orleans and Japan into weird, haunted, literary landscapes. Hearn always insisted his writings should be examined in their own terms as a transnational, transmedia and trans-species aesthetics of “weird” contact between worlds. There are three kinds of contact between worlds: transnational, a traffic in spirits across spaces in an orientalist imaginative geography; transmedia, as the monstrous qualities of ghosts, goblins and fairies bleed into and across media forms; and trans-species, as monstrous qualities moves across species, between humans, goblins and insects. The forms of representation of monsters take on the properties of the monsters they are most associated with, ghostly photographs and colorful fairylands, that I will call monstrous media. At the same time, this transnational and transmedia aesthetics of the weird moves from images on Japanese fans to the wings of insects, from Japanese cemeteries to insect ecologies and Buddhist cosmologies in which humans are reborn as goblins, insects, or hybrid goblin-insects

and Jeff, mid-morning, at his Tallahassee, Florida home. Our conversation speaks to the concepts raised in the essays collected here in Surreal Entanglements, especially in the context of his book Dead Astronauts (published in December 2019). 1 We've edited the text slightly for readability and points of clarification, but have otherwise left it conversational. Thanks to Jeff VanderMeer for his time and thoughts, and to the editors Laura Shackelford and Louise Economides for inviting us to contribute in this way to the book.