The Weird and the Eerie

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What they both have in common is they’ve been associated as sub-genres of horror, both are preoccupied with the strange, unsettling, as something being wrong. R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christoper Nolan. Okay, it's nice to be able to pigeonhole genres, or whatever, but surely there must be more to it than that? But Fisher leaves space for the lesser-known late works of Kneale in the 1970s, the effectively creepy haunted house tale The Stone Tape and the last, despairing Quatermass series from 1979, made on the cusp of the collapse of postwar Keynesian consensus and the death rattle of ’60s utopianism as Thatcher came to power. Along the way, the prose stays light and deft, throwing out insights on the unease of timeslip fictions, or the dread when Philip K.

In this essay, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes.The "time-shifts" that enable all this, it's hinted, originate in the traveler's present (the year 2020, which was Aldiss's future as the book was published in 1973), but near the end of the book, having followed the Creature into the far North (as Victor Frankenstein did in Shelley's novel), he encounters a setting that seems to negate a difference between past and future and that suggests the questions of "agency" and emptiness/presence that Fisher sees as intrinsic to "the eerie.

Mark Fisher is/was/will long be loved, missed and appreciated as a first genius of the 21st century. They are both “to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. This account of the eerie is not just an evocation of post-imperial melancholia, a haunted aftermath, but something with political energy and bite. Philosophers such as Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker have proposed a “weird realism” — a rival term to “object-oriented ontology” — that replaces Husserl or Heidegger with Horror. Marx, after all, reached for the language of the supernatural to grasp at the spectral substance of surplus value or commodity fetishism.

The core insight reveals the eerie as the trace of an impenetrable agency without, or some unnerving non-subjective drive that compels our behaviors incomprehensibly from within. However, it is a much more accessible book than some others in the field, and I highly recommend it. You have probably heard of “the weird” by now, but you may not quite know what it is, or why so many genre critics, cultural theorists, and philosophers are keen to engage with it.

As a long-time reader of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, I found Fisher's ideas and examples very, very interesting. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. As Fisher puts it “The unity and transparency which we ordinarily ascribe to our minds are illusory. LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. R. James’s obliquely menacing rural hauntings and the contemporary revival of “folk horror” in British fiction and film, such as Ben Wheatley’s film A Field in England (2013), the music of P.The ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’ are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties.