The Weird and the Eerie

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Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). Most Marxist critics are profoundly allergic to fantasy, with its tendency toward mythic underpinning and archetypal fixity — witness the comical contortions of Fredric Jameson to bracket off the entire genre in his book on science fiction, Archaeologies of the Future, essentially because he has decided that all hobbits are anti-historical bourgeois counter-revolutionaries. In several essays, Mark Fisher argues that a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of transitory concepts such as the weird and the eerie. On TV, True Detective was pretty weird, with its echoes of Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow and dark nihilistic mutterings lifted from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet: The Horror of Philosophy Volume 1.

For Fisher, the weird points towards ‘wrongness’, carefully pointing out that it is not the thing itself that is wrong, but rather our conception of the world. Perhaps Fisher wasn't familiar with Aldiss's book, or for some reason didn't wish to refer to it in "The Weird and the Eerie," but I can't help thinking that readers who find that book and its subjects interesting might also be interested in reading "Frankenstein Unbound.Dick’s cardboard pulp worlds glitch and judder, revealing to their terrified narrators the ramshackle structure of reality. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie. The uncanny, Fisher says, puts the “strange within the familiar” and “operates by always processing the outside through the gaps and impasses of the inside.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. However, of the familiar things, I was given a bit more to chew on with how I think about and consider them.Fisher’s sensitive, sustained reading of Alan Garner’s opaque and mysterious novel, Red Shift (1973), shows that he can practice literary criticism too. This account of the eerie is not just an evocation of post-imperial melancholia, a haunted aftermath, but something with political energy and bite. Along the way, the prose stays light and deft, throwing out insights on the unease of timeslip fictions, or the dread when Philip K.