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A review by rodneywilhite
The New Weird by
4.0
I'm going to read this, Interfictions, and Feeling Very Strange back-to-back and write a longer review for all three, but I will say about this one that it seems to focus on genre stories that have eccentricities that tilt them into the literary realm. Yes, the characters and plots are very odd, often with no connection to any human reality, but the prose itself is very pulpy, intentionally and self-consciously so. Most of these are not much more capital-w Weird than the stories I grew up with in Dozois's and Datlow's anthologies. For instance, one of my old favorites "A Hypothetical Lizard" by Alan Moore would seamlessly fit right in here.
My biggest gripe about this book is that 300 pages of it are short stories and about 120 pages of it are hand-wringing about what does or doesn't constitute "New Weird." I really couldn't care less, and I think the importance of this book was that it inspired a new generation of speculative authors (Sofia Samatar for instance) going forward, rather than--as the content seems to have been intended--to define something that had already happened.
My biggest gripe about this book is that 300 pages of it are short stories and about 120 pages of it are hand-wringing about what does or doesn't constitute "New Weird." I really couldn't care less, and I think the importance of this book was that it inspired a new generation of speculative authors (Sofia Samatar for instance) going forward, rather than--as the content seems to have been intended--to define something that had already happened.