#weirdfiction — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #weirdfiction, aggregated by home.social.
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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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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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““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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Happy birthday to the incomparable British writer #MJohnHarrison, born #OTD in 1945. His books are in almost constant rotation here, and it’s no exaggeration to say I’d probably see the world in a very different way were it not for his work.
Yes, I have multiple editions of The Course of the Heart. Can you ever have *too many* editions of one of the greatest novels ever written?
Many happy returns, Mike!
#SpeculativeFiction #WeirdFiction #ScienceFiction #LiteraryFiction #Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon
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Wonderment Within Weirdness Is Weirdly an Anti-War Novel
Sometimes you write a book and only later realize what it was actually about. That might sound strange, but it happens more often than people think. Stories have a way of revealing their deeper meanings after the fact, sometimes months or even years after they are written. When I first wrote my debut novel, Wonderment Within Weirdness, I was not sitting there thinking, “I am going to write an anti-war novel.” That was not the plan. The goal was much simpler and honestly much more chaotic. […] -
Reworked the landing page text on my horror fiction site a bit. I still need to pretty up the header, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.
#geminiprotocol - gemini://ferenbrooke.com/index.gmi
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I Can’t Leave: A Greenland Diaries Flash Fiction
Rob had memorized the pattern of abandoned cars in the parking lot outside the building. A red van, a blue truck, a few white sedans, silent and sun faded, lay scattered across the velvet sheet of greenery in the basin around the office tower he’d been hiding in. He’d been fixing a boiler in the basement when the Drum began. Most of the building was empty that first night. Everyone had already left for the day. Only a handful were torn apart beneath the Unnamed’s obscene claws.
And then the office was empty.
Except for Rob.
He had always imagined himself different at the end of the world. At six foot five, all elbows and height, with an unkempt beard dropping to his chest and a perpetually worn Minnesota Twins cap, he’d figured he’d look the part. He had thought of himself as stereotypically male, chew, flannels, and a quiet, lumbering confidence. But when the monsters arrived and stalked the hallways, he learned quickly how fragile that image was. Back on his grandfather’s farm, he and his friends in their local anti government militia had joked that if the world ever collapsed, they’d be ready.
But once the Unnamed descended and began mutilating and resurrecting their victims, the only thing Rob grew adept at was hiding.
For someone so tall and broad, sneaking through the office should have been impossible, yet he’d shaped himself to its shadows. He learned to bend beneath desks, wedge between bookshelves, flatten against cubicles. Even when the Reanimated drifted through, he found ways to slip past them, though other survivors told him not to fear them. Those survivors were nothing like him. They weren’t afraid of the shadows. They fought them day and night. He’d heard their skirmishes echoing through the Drum. Even now, with it finally over, the night outside carried only wind, insects, and the soft groan of the building settling.
How were they so brave?
A few survivors had passed through recently and told him he could go home, or even find work with the Reestablishment. But he couldn’t force himself to leave the gray block of the office. Every time he packed his few supplies, slung the rifle he’d taken off a dead soldier, and started toward home, he barely made it a few blocks. A shadow, a rattle of debris, a shift in the wind, anything could spook him, and he’d sprint back to the familiar corners of the office floor.
Day or night didn’t matter.
He just couldn’t leave.
Thank you for reading my flash fiction from the Greenland Diaries. In this story, I wanted to show a character you might expect to be strong because of how they postured their identity, but when the apocalypse appeared they realized it was all an image without integrity. They weren’t actually built for the conflict they thought they were seeking. Monsters are an excellent mirror.
#author #blogging #bodyHorror #books #cosmicHorror #darkFantasy #darkFiction #decay #fantasy #fiction #flashFiction #grief #hauntedLandscapes #horror #horrorWriting #identity #isolation #liminalSpaces #literaryHorror #machines #memory #monsters #obsession #patrickWMarsh #poeticProse #prosePoetry #psychologicalHorror #shortStories #speculativeFiction #survival #theGreenlandDiaries #transformation #trauma #weirdFiction #writing
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This week's #NewBooks at the library:
- A second-hand copy of The Desert Bones: The #Paleontology and Paleoecology of Mid-Cretaceous North Africa by Jamale Ijouiher from Indiana University Press
- The just-published H. P. #Lovecraft Collected Fiction Volume 3, the final of three annotated collections by S. T. Joshi from Chiroptera Press
- Following on from my review of Lechuguilla Cave, I found the earlier photographic book Lechuguilla: Jewel of the Underground by Urs Widmer from Speleo Projects for a very reasonable price on eBay.#Dinosaurs #Palaeontology #Horror #WeirdFiction #Caves #Speleology #Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon @bookstodon
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It's my birthday today. Buy my book please. Hope to see you soon.
https://cliffjonesjr.com/dreck
#IThinkYouShouldLeave #ITYSL #books #indieBooks #sf #sff #sffh #scifi #scienceFiction #speculativeFiction #weirdFiction #cyberpunk #dreampunk #fiction #writingCommunity #writersLife #indieAuthors #indieAuthor
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The Table of Contents for our imminent King in Yellow issue is now available. 60 500-word flash fiction pieces and poems about Chambers, Carcosa, and everyone's favorite ocher liege.
We're joined by some new voices this time, and are honored to be able to share two unpublished poems by Joe Pulver.
https://weirdfictionquarterly.com/table-of-contents-the-king-in-yellow/
#KingInYellow #WeirdFictionQuarterly #FlashFiction #WeirdFiction #RobertWChambers #Carcosa #YellowSign
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This week on Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein we turn back to SHE WALKS IN SHADOWS to review "Violet is the Color of Your Energy" (2015) by Nadia Bulkin, a feminist revisit of "The Colour Out of Space."
https://deepcuts.blog/2024/06/22/violet-is-the-color-of-your-energy-2015-by-nadia-bulkin/
#horror #weirdlit #cthulhumythos #weirdfiction #feminism #TheColourOutofSpace #Lovecraftian
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#bookishadvent day 18, #smallpress edition is “Seventeen Names for Skin” by Roland Blackburn! This short horror novel darkly satirizes the stereotypical illness narrative with a strong dose of body horror to match!
#bookrec #bookrecomendation #bookstodon @bookstodon
#litodon #LiteraryCommunity #literarymastodon #weirdfiction