This week's lost tale is "Ghosts I Have Met" by M. P. Dare, an obscure weird fiction writer and ghost hunter, whose sad life is almost more interesting than his fiction.
https://deepcuts.blog/2026/10/10/lost-tale-ghosts-i-have-met-1961-by-m-p-dare/
#weird-fiction — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #weird-fiction, aggregated by home.social.
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Magical Realism and How to Make the Impossible Feel Possible
Award-winning author Cynthia Pelayo breaks down magical realism and how to make the impossible feel possible for readers and characters.
The post Magical Realism and How to Make the Impossible Feel Possible appeared first on Writer's Digest.
https://www.writersdigest.com/magical-realism-and-how-to-make-the-impossible-feel-possible#WriteBetterFiction #WritingTechniques #magicalrealism #WeirdFiction #Wonder
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The Space Between (the Shelves): The Importance of Writing Weird Stories for the Un-weird Marketplace
Author Jonathan Edward Durham makes a case for the importance of writing weird stories, even if they're difficult to categorize and pitch.
The post The Space Between (the Shelves): The Importance of Writing Weird Stories for the Un-weird Marketplace appeared first on Writer's Digest.
https://www.writersdigest.com/the-space-between-the-shelves-the-importance-of-writing-weird-stories-for-the-un-weird-marketplace#BusinessofWriting #GetPublished #creativity #submissionadvice #WeirdFiction
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Hope everyone's enjoying spooky season so far!
I've got a new short story up on Ferenbrooke, an epistolary corporate horror tale. I'll aim to get something more traditionally halloween-y up there later in the month.
#smallweb: https://www.ferenbrooke.com/short-stories/strange-hands.html
#geminiprotocol: gemini://ferenbrooke.com/short-stories/strange-hands.gmi
#horror #HorrorFiction #weirdfiction #indiehorror #bookstodon
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#TrueDetective S1
wasn't a
Serial Killer of the Week thingw/c made it #ReallyGreatTV
it introduced #TheKingInYellow
to a lot of people
w/c is also Great
because I love #CosmicHorror
(& #WeirdFiction)
& now, more people do#Lanterns is a #CharacterStudy
of #JohnStewart & #HalJordan
#ReallyGreatTV -
Hanging out in Portland slinging books at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival this weekend.
Come say "Iä!" Between films!
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This week's Lost Tale is "Fiend of Fire" (1952) by Eando Binder.
Comic books used to include more fiction - and in looking at this ghost story from noted pulp and comic book writer Eando Binder, we try to find out why that was.
https://deepcuts.blog/2026/10/03/lost-tale-fiend-of-fire-1952-by-eando-binder/
#horror #weird #weirdlit #comicshistory #weirdfiction #ghost #ghoststory
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🎃 Spooky season goodness - Three free reads and a free listen! Four of my stories that fit spookily into this time of year are available for you to get into the October spirit! 🎃
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Submissions are now OPEN until Nov 30 for our Winter 2027 issue coming Jan 1.
We don't use themes, but if your story matches the issue's season, you may have a leg up over other, unseasonal yarns.🔗⏬ for submission guidelines and instructions.
https://perseidprophecies.ca/submissions/ -
In addition to radio randomness, software screeds, and Transformer thoughts, I occasionally moonlight as a weird fiction writer (and publisher).
My tale "Loading Screen" is included in the latest @weirdfictionquarterly issue focused on liminal spaces and beings.
It's a love letter to the NES era for those who wondered what their favorite 8-bit characters were doing between levels.
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Einfach so, eine kleine Feier auf das bisherige erzählende Prosawerk von #ChinaMiéville, 1998 bis 2026.
Derweil geht »The Rouse« bei mir mal stockend, dann wieder rauschartig voran. Ein sehr schöner, intensiver und deshalb für mich auch überdurchschnittlich fordernder Roman.
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Continuing with the Lost Tales with an obscure Cthulhu Mythos story: "Why Abdul Al Hazred Went Mad" by D. R. Smith.
https://deepcuts.blog/2026/09/19/lost-tale-why-abdul-al-hazred-went-mad-1950-by-d-r-smith/
#cthulhumythos #cthulhu #lovecraftian #shakespeare #fanfiction #weirdfiction #weirdlit
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As someone who LOVES the "In Search of Darkness" long documentaries, I was pleased to find that someone did an almost 5-hour long (!!!) deep dive into the first season of "True Detective".
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Nicholas Russell’s Debut Novel Gets Weird In The Desert
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/nicholas-russells-debut-novel-gets-weird-in-the-desert
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Nicholas Russell’s Debut Novel Gets Weird In The Desert
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/nicholas-russells-debut-novel-gets-weird-in-the-desert
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in junges Paar findet ein unheimliches Wesen, aus dessen Körper dünne Kabel ragen wie Insektenbeine. Sie nennen es Flora. Der Weird-Fiction-Erfolg aus Tschechien. #sfcd #sciencefiction #weirdfiction
Der neueste Weird-Fiction-Erfo... -
Robert W. Chambers didn't stop writing weird fiction with THE KING IN YELLOW (1895) - dare you follow him into "The Silent Land" (1896)? Another Lost Tale, rarely reprinted and oft-forgotten.
https://deepcuts.blog/2026/09/12/lost-tale-the-silent-land-1906-by-robert-w-chambers/
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The Lost Tales stories continues with "Medusa" (1928) by Royal W. Jimserson - a story some contend may have inspired Lovecraft.
https://deepcuts.blog/2026/09/05/lost-tale-medusa-1928-by-royal-w-jimerson/
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Time for another Writing the Occult: Time & Place session debrief, and this time it's our own Chief Ink Slinger and the event series host and curator, aka MEEE.
Rooting your writing in time and place isn’t just for the SF authors: all of us, no matter what genre, need to think about how these things impact our work and our characters. That said... boy, there is SO MUCH that writers of the weird can pull on as inspiration. 🧵⬇️
#horror #weird #weirdfiction #fantasy #scifi #sciencefiction
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Every Friday, I meet a member of the British Fantasy Society and peer deep into their soul (or, at least, a form they filled out). Let's head to Northumberland for a weirdly cosmic cuppa with Steven Patchett, who names the writers of the "new renaissance of British folk horror" as his genre heroes.
https://britishfantasysociety.org/meet-steven-patchett/
#horror #weirdfiction #fantasy #sciencefiction #writers #writing #writingcommunity
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Submissions for our upcoming autumn issue have officially closed!
But we will be reopening submissions for our Winter 2027 issue on October 1st!Check our guidelines 🔗⏬
https://perseidprophecies.ca/submissions/ -
And yes, that means our time is fast approaching.
The place: Zoom.
The time: FOUR DAYS from now.
Get your ticket to ride >> writingtheoccult.carrd.co
#writers #writing #artist #filmmaker #film #books #tv #fiction #shortstories #novel #novella #sciencefiction #timetravel #horror #gothic #fantasy #darkfantasy #writingevents #writingtheoccult #occult #fortean #weirdfiction #weird
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Continuing the Lost Tales series with "The Lust Horror" (1964) by S.G., a Cthulhu Mythos spoof.
https://deepcuts.blog/2026/08/29/the-lust-horror-1964-by-s-g/
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The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror – edited by Stephen Jones
My daughter foisted this collection upon me—it not being my usual thing. I don’t tend to watch or read horror, not because it affects me emotionally, but because it doesn’t. Very few things give me the proper chills, and that’s what I’d expect from this genre. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I shouldn’t be expecting that, but that’s how I feel.
I will begin by emphasising that I enjoyed these stories. I thought it was a strong collection of weird tales—not all successful, but that’s the nature of short fiction. It’s a hefty tome: 500 trade paperback pages. And it contains weird writing from many different writers, some of whom even I had heard of. More on that below. But I also have to point out that out of 19 stories here, just four (4) were written by women. I’m ready to stand corrected on that (a guess based on names and a quick google), but that is disappointing for a book published in 2021.
So we’ll bear that criticism in mind as we go forward to other criticisms.
What is folk horror? The thing about this book is that, before I read it, I had a vague idea in my head as to what I thought folk horror was. By the time I’d finished it, however, I had begun to doubt whether the sub-genre even exists. Turning to Wikipedia (and the Folk Horror page is active and frequently edited), it offers the following definition:
Folk horror is a subgenre of horror film and horror fiction that uses elements of folklore to invoke fear and foreboding. Typical elements include a rural setting, isolation, and themes of superstition, folk religion, paganism, sacrifice and the dark aspects of nature.
Now, you will note that this definition (which is fairly close to what was in my mind before I started reading this book) relies on other definitions. In particular, what do we mean by folklore? Wikipedia again (and, again, an actively edited page):
Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, culture or subculture.[1] This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs, poems, and jokes.[2][3] This also includes material culture, such as traditional building styles common to the group. Folklore also encompasses customary lore, taking actions for folk beliefs, including folk religion, and the forms and rituals of celebrations such as festivals, weddings, folk dances, and initiation rites.[2]
Festivals, dances, rites, legends, local tales, beliefs, superstitions.
That’s what you’d expect, right? And then, on top of that, some kind of horror element. Which leads us to a third layer of definition:
Horror is a genre of speculative fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten, or scare an audience. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as “a piece of fiction in prose of variable length … which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing”.[1]Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. The threats present in horror fiction often reflect broader cultural anxieties
Disturb, frighten, or scare. Shock, frighten, or induce a feeling of repulsion. An eerie and frightening atmosphere. Threat. Anxiety.
I’ll take you back to my opening paragraph. The reason I don’t tend to watch or read horror is that I so rarely react in that way that it seems like a waste of time. I mean, take away the emotional response, and what is horror? Round and round in circles.
In his famous 1919 essay, Freud argued that the uncanny is “that class of things which leads us back to what is known and familiar”. Uncanny is an old Scottish word which has been used to translate Freud’s Unheimliche, which literally means “unhomely”. Freud argued that feelings of unease and fear result when the familiar is rendered unfamiliar—or when we are reminded of an earlier psychic stage, or an earlier stage of human development.
When I used to teach this concept, I used horror tropes as examples, and leaned heavily on Freud’s concept of the “homely” and “unhomely”. There are two ways of seeing the home in horror. To the insider, your home is your safe place, your familiar place, the location you ken or know best. It’s where you run to to get away from the scary thing, when the threat is coming from outside. But then, horror texts will twist the trope so that the call is coming from inside the house, and so on. But there are also homes and houses in horror which are, to the outsider, the unfamiliar and scary thing. A traveller breaks down in the woods and approaches a lone house for help. A group of people knock on the door of a house in Texas, seeking help. To those outside the house, the strange building is the site of the unfamiliar and unhomely. The haunted house, the abandoned manor in the woods.
Think of The Haunting: a group of strangers gather in an old house with a reputation. But the opposite scenario also works: a stranger knocks at your door.
What you might expect, then, in an anthology of folk horror, are stories in which an outsider encounters the unfamilar; or in which the unfamiliar comes calling. This latter is perfectly illustrated by Ramsey Campbell’s “The Fourth Call”, which is a story about a weird family who enact an odd Christmas tradition known only to themselves, and which freaks the rest of the village out. So, sure, we have tradition and ritual tied to a group of people, and you might indeed decide that “The Fourth Call” is folk horror.
But also, given that it exactly fits Freud’s 1919 definition of the Uncanny, just horror.
And that’s my issue here. Tell me this is The Mammoth Book of Horror, and it would have made no difference to me. It didn’t feel, as I was reading, that there was anything particular about these stories. And for the most part, even the horror element was absent, so it felt more like reading fantasy. Above, I used the term Weird Fiction, and that for me is a better fit. Here are stories of the weird and strange, a Mammoth Book of Weird Fiction, but only very rarely is there a horror element. The final entry, for example, “The Gypsies in the Wood” by Kim Newman: it’s a piece of Victoriana loosely based on something from Conan Doyle. There are supernatural elements, characters encountering the weird, but nothing that struck me as particularly horrific.
You might argue that I’m missing the point, or failing as a reader. There are kidnappings, there is a horrible gory death, there are people fighting their way out of the earth, there are uncanny changelings. But the thing is, not only am I unaffected by all this, but so, it seems to me, are the protagonists. The experience of fear and disturbance is not transmitted to the reader. A lot of the time, I think the impact fails because the stories end too abruptly. The nature of short fiction might be to blame for this. The author might do a good job of creating an eerie atmosphere, but then when the denouement comes, it’s over too quickly, and you move on to the next tale, unmoved.
The only story where the transfer of experience happens, I think, is the first one in the collection: “The White People” by Arthur Machen, because it is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that leaves you on the edge of understanding something that is forever out of reach. It follows Freud’s formula closely, inasmuch as it features a “realistic frame story” that then takes us into the realm of the weird. And it’s the vague, just-beyond-reach, sense that there is something there that is transmitted to the reader.
I’d heard of Machen, and also Storm Constantine (one of the four women contributors), M R James, H P Lovecraft, Kim Newman, and Algernon Blackwood. But the best stories here are mostly from people I’d not heard of, like Ramsey Campbell, Michael Marshall Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, Jan Edwards, and Reggie Oliver.
So for me, it’s hardly horror, and it’s hardly folk, but it certainly qualifies as weird. It’s genre fiction, with the genre left vague. It severely lacks women contributors, but it’s an entertaining collection nevertheless. Some of the stories are too short – the endings too abrupt to have impact – but others are intriguing and even eerie. Definitely worth a look if you like this sort of thing.
#bookReview #bookReviews #Books #fiction #folkHorror #genre #horror #shortFiction #weirdFiction -
🎧 Adam and Pooka discuss Blackwood’s fiction, his occult interests, his fascination with nature, and what his stories can teach Mage: The Ascension Storytellers about the sublime, supernatural uncertainty, spirits, Correspondence, Awakening, and psychological horror. Listen https://magethepodcast.com/reality-deviants-book-club-algernon-blackwood/ #magetheascension #weirdfiction #horror #algernonblackwood
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This week's lost tale is "Hell in the Village" (1942) by Hugh Raymond - a rare appearance of von Junzt outside of the writings of Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft.
https://deepcuts.blog/2026/08/22/hell-in-the-village-1942-by-hugh-raymond/
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Une nouvelle maison d'édition d'imaginaire : Hécate !
On vous donne les premières infos sur Actusf...
Et ils ont un premier appel à textes !
#sciencefiction #dystopie #Horreur #gothique #weirdfiction #Darkfantasy #Romancegothique
https://www.actusf.com/detail-d-un-article/une-nouvelle-maison-d%C3%A9dition-dimaginaire-h%C3%A9cate
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RE: https://bookstodon.com/@astral/117107301808942645
Our sibling magazine @astral is starting up again after a lengthy hiatus. Fans of alien-oriented science-fiction should check them out!
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This week on Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein we continue our Lost Tales series with "Blackie" (1916) by Edwin Baird, the first editor of WEIRD TALES, and literary cousin to Lovecraft's cat in "The Rats in the Walls."
https://deepcuts.blog/2026/08/15/lost-tale-blackie-1916-by-edwin-baird/
#1916 #fiction #weirdtales #weirdlit #weirdfiction #lovecraft
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Panels I went to at #NecronomiconPVD:
The Daphne du Maurier panel discussed The Birds as you'd expect, but I didn't realize that she also wrote Don't Look Now. Panelists also discussed a bunch of her stories that were weird fiction, such as The Blue Lenses (a woman regains sight after an eye operation and now sees people as having animal heads) or The Pool (a small child finds a pool in the forest that seems to lead to another world).
The Arthur Machen panel gave a well-organized account of his long life and career, focusing on the well-known books (The Great God Pan; The White People) but also the flap over his story The Bowmen and his late-career work.
(1/3)
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Getting ready to release my carnival barker book publisher personality tomorrow. Getting Stripe set up tonight.
In all seriousness, I'm very proud of this project and I look forward to promoting our stories and authors this weekend.
#NecronomiConProvidence #GrandEmporiumOfTheWeird #WeirdFiction
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:rn26xtpfaqsj4kikmzxxniem/post/3msyyhk72es22 -
I'm in Providence, Rhode Island, for the Necronomicon weird fiction / horror convention. The bulk of the programming starts tomorrow, but there was some fun stuff today.
My plane was delayed so I couldn't catch the live reading of The Call of Cthulhu.
But I did catch Robert Lloyd Party's performance of Casting the Runes, by M.R. James, which really brought out the dry humour of it, especially in front of a live audience. But it ends on a suitably sinister note. You can buy his reading on Bandcamp:
https://nunkie.bandcamp.com/album/casting-the-runesIf you're not interested in this, you may want to mute me until Monday. 🧟
#NecronomiconPVD #MRJames #WeirdFiction -
”Perhaps if I had only thought about mermaids in the abstract it would not have had the same powerful effect, but I was thinking about one in particular, with whom I was personally acquainted.”
—from «Morbid Tales» by Quentin S. Crisp -
Unsure what all this cosmic horror stuff I keep talking about is?
Well, I've got a little bit of a primer here.
The TL;DR is that it's a mashup of scifi, horror, fantasy, and weird fiction...But that description barely scratches the surface of the reality.
https://esraye.com/2026/08/11/subgenre-defined-cosmic-horror/
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Next in the Lost Tales series is "The Opal Arrow-Head" (1920) by Lord Dunsany, a sequel to one of his earlier fantasies which has been rarely reprinted, and never with its mate.
https://deepcuts.blog/2026/08/08/lost-tale-the-opal-arrow-head-1920-by-lord-dunsany/
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Wtem! Nowa notka na blogu, choć tak naprawdę to nie taka nowa, bo była praktycznie gotowa już w marcu i nie pamiętam, czemu jej wtedy nie wrzuciłem (a potem Działy Się Rzeczy).
W każdym razie, piszę o zbiorze opowiadań "The Other Shore" Rebekki Campbell (wyd. @StelliformPress ) o którym dowiedziałem się z Mastodona (choć autorkę znam z "Nowej Fantastyki"). Ogólnie bardzo dobra rzecz, nie tylko dla tych zainteresowanych ekologią i klimatem (bo też nie wszystkie opowiadania skupiają się na tych tematach) - to po prostu dobra fantastyka (SF, weird fiction, odrobina horroru, może nawet i fantasy czy rzeczy które ciężko zaklasyfikować).
https://wordsmith.social/ekofikcje/jak-to-jest-byc-ekosystemem
#fantastyka #ClimateFiction #CliFi #ScienceFiction #SciFi #WeirdFiction #książki #ekofikcje @ksiazki
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Italian SFF in translation!
#scifi #sciencefiction #books #weirdfiction -
““The strangenesses are multiplying… though the world before they began was already a strange place, so often it’s difficult to know if an event falls into the category of the old, ordinary strangenesses or the new, extraordinary variety.”*…
In a review of five recent books, Robert Baskin considers the genre of “weird fiction”…
On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, the British science fiction and fantasy writer M. John Harrison [accomplished author, Booker judge, and long-list nominee this year] asked a question on Third Alternative magazine’s messageboard: “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?” This incited a taxonomic fury, as writers, fans, and amateur scholars attempted to define this new subgenre. Harrison eventually offered his own definition; the New Weird, like stories published in the namesake early twentieth-century pulp magazine Weird Tales, is a mix of “horror, sf, and fantasy,” with an emphasis on the horror…
[Baskin usess the books in question to review the genre’s history (Poe, Lovecraft, Edith Wharton [!]) and its current state (Miéville, VanderMeer, et al.); he concludes…]
… So why read this shit? Why reissue it?
Weird fiction is a literature of crisis. The main narrative move of every important Weird fiction story is the Weird intrusion, the appearance of the new and wrong object or sensation or practice that does not belong. These intrusions challenge and endanger the protagonist’s sense of metaphysical stability. In the King in Yellow, the Weird intruder is the titular play—the madness of the text refuses to remain on the page. China Miéville argues that this awareness of crisis makes Weird Fiction uniquely open to interpretation: a “leeway for readings against the ideological grain is part of what makes Weird Fiction such an ongoingly fascinating field.” The Weird is not just a literature of fear and repulsion; it also always includes wonder and attraction. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” – Lovecraft’s contribution to the Weird Mount Rushmore – depicts the state’s extermination of a group of racially ambiguous New Englanders who made the mistake of breeding with fishy foreigners. Despite this, the story ends in sublime ambiguity [spoiler for a nearly century-old story to follow]. The protagonist, who has spent the rest of the story in hateful terror of the Innsmouth locals, discovers that he is one of them, and in my favorite passage in all of Lovecraft, decides to go to the sea with his cousin and embrace The Weird: “We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’hanthlei, and in that layer of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.” What was once feared is now cause for exultation. The move between terror and wonder recurs throughout the Weird corpus—if you’re attuned to its Weird frequencies…
A literature for our times: “‘We Shall Dwell Amidst Wonder and Glory For Ever’: On Weird Fiction,” from @clereviewbooks.bsky.social.
* Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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As we engage extremity, we might recall that i was on this date in 1946 that Santa Claus Land, the world’s first themed amusement park, opened in Santa Claus, Indiana…
Ronald Reagan visiting Santa Claus Land in 1955 #amusementPark #culture #EdgarAllanPoe #fiction #history #HPLovecraft #literature #Lovecraft #MJohnHarrison #SantaClausLand #themePark #weirdFictionIn 1941, Louis J. Koch visited the town of Santa Claus in Indiana. He found it sad that some children would visit this town eager to meet Santa only to find that he was not there. This fueled his desire to create a Santa Claus Land park where kids could see Santa any time of the year. Due to World War II, construction didn’t begin until August 1945.
The park opened on this day in 1946 with free admission, a toy shop, toy displays, a restaurant, a few rides and of course the jolly old elf himself. Later, a deer farm was added.
In 1955, a new section, Pleasureland (now known as Rudolph’s Reindeer Ranch) was added. As the park grew, the focus of the park grew as well focusing on families rather than just children.
By 1984, the park added a Halloween and a Fourth of July section to the park and changed its name to Holiday World. In 1993, the Koch family added the Splashin’ Safari Water Park. In 2006, during the park’s 60th anniversary, Holiday World added a Thanksgiving section.
– source
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ICYMI: an exclusive interview with author of THE WETWORKS MIRACLE, Caleb Sierra. Find out more about Sierra's truly wild worldbuilding in this weird horror novella and what the author is working on next.
Read the full interview here: paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-the-wetworks-miracle-author-caleb-sierra
#TheWetworksMiracle #CalebSierra #EcoHorror #WeirdFiction #ClimateFiction #Biopunk #SpeculativeFiction #HorrorBooks #Novella #AuthorInterview #SmallPress #IndiePublishing #Bookstodon