The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [2]
The second stimulus came from the unsettling grotesquery of such seminal 1980s work as Clive Barker's Books of Blood. In this kind of fiction, body transformations and dislocations create a visceral, contemporary take on the kind of visionary horror best exemplified by the work of Lovecraft ― while moving past Lovecraft's coyness in recounting events in which the monster or horror can never fully be revealed or explained. In many of Barker's best tales, the starting point is the acceptance of a monster or a transformation and the story is what comes after. Transgressive horror, then, repurposed to focus on the monsters and grotesquery but not the "scare," forms the beating heart of the New Weird.
In a sense, the simultaneous understanding of and rejection of Old Weird, hardwired to the stimuli of the New Wave and New Horror, gave many of the writers identified as New Weird the signs and symbols needed to both forge ahead into the unknown and create their own unique re-combinations of familiar elements.
THE SHIFT
Nameless for a time, a type of New Weird or proto-New Weird entered the literary world in the gap between the end of the miniature horror renaissance engendered by Barker and his peers and the publication of Perdido Street Station in 2000.
In the 1990s, "New Weird" began to manifest itself in the form of cult writers like Jeffrey Thomas and his cross-genre urban Punktown stories. It continued to find a voice in the work of Thomas Ligotti, who straddled a space between the traditional and the avant garde. It coalesced in the David Lynchean approach of Michael Cisco to Eastern European mysticism in works like The Divinity Student. It entered real-world settings through unsettling novels by Kathe Koja, such as The Cipher and Skin, with their horrific interrogations of the body and mind. It entered into disturbing dialogue about sex and gender in Richard Calder's novels, with their mix of phantasmagoria and pseudo-cyberpunk. It could also be found in Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City trilogy, my own Ambergris stories (Dradin, In Love, etc.), and the early short work of K. J. Bishop and Alastair Reynolds, among others.
Magazines like Andy Cox's The Third Alternative, my wife Ann's The Silver Web, and, to a lesser extent, David Pringle's Interzone and Chris Reed/Manda Thomson's Back Brain Recluse ― along with anthologies like my Leviathan series ― provided support for this kind of work, which generally did not interest commercial publishers. Ironically, despite most New Weird fiction of the 1990s being skewed heavily toward the grotesque end of the New Wave/New Horror spectrum, many horror publications and reviewers dismissed the more confrontational or surreal examples of the form. It represented a definite threat to the Lovecraft clones and Twilight Zone doppelgangers that dominated the horror field by the mid-1990s.
FLASH POINT
The publication of Miéville's Perdido Street Station in 2000 represented what might be termed the first commercially acceptable version of the New Weird, one that both coarsened and broadened the New Weird approach through techniques more common to writers like Charles Dickens, while adding a progressive political slant. Miéville also displayed a fascination with permutations of the body, much like Barker, and incorporated, albeit in a more direct way, ideas like odd plagues (M. John Harrison) and something akin to a Multiverse (Michael Moorcock).
Miéville's fiction wasn't inherently superior to what had come before, but it was epic, and it wedded a "surrender to the weird" ― literally, the writer's surrender to the material, without ironic distance ― to rough-hewn but effective plots featuring earnest, proactive characters. This approach made Perdido Street Station much more accessible to readers than such formative influences on Miéville as Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels or M. John Harrison's Viriconium cycle.