Volume 69, Issue 2 - Special Issue: The Short and the Weird – Perspectives on the New Weird Short Story; Guest Editor: Raphael Zähringer

The short story is commonly – and very productively – treated in the spirit of critical terms such as marginality and liminality. Quite surprisingly, though, New Weird Fiction, which postulates similar interests in, e.g., formal and aesthetic innovation as well as literary ambition, is primarily associated with the novel. The underlying lack of interest in the New Weird Short Story in both popular culture and academic work is scrutinised in this article. In a first step, it will survey the short story as a liminal form, both formally and aesthetically, and contextualize it by drawing upon the state of the literary market in the twenty-first century. The contribution’s main argument is that the short story has always either been considered to be too ‘popular’ or too ‘literary’ in order to contest the novel as the prevalent literary form. Step two will perform a similar move regarding Weird Fiction, thus highlighting the parallels between the short and the Weird, and the need for more academic attention dedicated to the New Weird short story.

How can the genre of the short story accommodate the ‘inflationary tendency’ of weird fiction (Carl Freedman)? This article will trace how a very long and a very short story by China Miéville establish their respective weird elements in order to function as ‘placeholders for the unrepresentable’ (China Miéville). As will be shown, “The Tain” frames the weird in an elaborate and intricate narrative construction which is clearly literary while “The Condition of New Death” is basically expository and partly relies on the non-literary genre conventions of the academic report and the manifesto. In both instances, however, there is a reflexive turn which insists on the text itself not only in its representational but also in its performative (telling stories, writing) and material (print, paper, screen) dimensions as a constitutive part of what makes reality real for human beings. The article concludes with a brief placing of the New Weird short story in the wider field of (post-)modern(ist) literature and fiction and in the conceptual shift from deconstruction to more recent theoretical approaches like Actor-Network-Theory and the New Materialisms.

This article investigates the forms and functions of description in New Weird fiction, using texts by China Miéville as examples. It contrasts the expansive descriptive routines of his novel Perdido Street Station (2000) with the compact forms of descriptivity found in the short story “The Condition of New Death,” focussing on the role of metaphoric condensation and the blending of description with narrative and explanatory modes. Occasionally drawing on other stories contained in Miéville’s 2015 collection Three Moments of an Explosion , it formulates a model of the descriptive economy of short fiction.

Miéville’s short story stands out for its perhaps experimental, perhaps old-fashioned form: the story’s first-person narrator adopts, in nineteenth-century fashion, the persona of an editor and presents both his own view on the ‘events’ in question and a number of mock documents he has allegedly been sent. Readers are encouraged to piece together the story elements – events and characters – from postcards, minutes of a meeting, memos, personal letters, and tables. Typographically distinct and juxtaposed rather than narratively linked, these text fragments suggest internal conflicts in a group of people who track rogue streets – streets that change their location spontaneously and wreak havoc on the geographical and the political order of cities. It is no coincidence that a mix-up of names and addresses is the starting point of the story; the story’s ending hints at the consequences of having or not having a fixed address. My contribution examines Miéville’s use of the short story form in the context of fantastic literature. Following suggestions of Miéville’s “The Conspiracy of Architecture” (1998), the foregrounding of formal and quasi-material aspects of organising and mediating knowledge is read as an engagement with the power/knowledge dispositives made up of discursive ordering principles as well as city planning and city geography.

Despite their overt focus on inexplicable alien forces, cosmic horror stories are also determined by their human cast. Far from being merely fodder for horror, the characters significantly contribute to the generation of meaning, including that of the supernatural entity or phenomenon itself. The same holds for the narrators’ (implicitly) political perspectives on the world of which they are part. Much of the perspective propounded in Lovecraft’s cosmic horror stories partakes of myth, adopting in particular the latter’s universal view and pronounced sidelining of humanity as a whole, which it intensifies to the point of horror. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this universal perspective is consistent with the racism permeating and structuring Lovecraft’s writing. Though eschewing racism and universalism, the cosmic horror of Kiernan’s “Tidal Forces” negotiates literary reflections of colonialism from an unreflective white perspective.