Weird #66: “In the Hills, The Cities” by Clive Barker (1984)
Two cities construct a giant formed of the coordinated bodies of thousands of men, women, and children the likes of which has never been seen on this earth (outside Renaissance paintings of hell and the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan).
Keep readingWeird #65: “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler (1984)
Octavia Butler’s weird science fiction masterpiece “Bloodchild” (1984) is set in a world where bot flies are sentient and lay eggs in human beings as incubators to propagate their species. It was difficult for me to to tell, at first, whether the narrator, Gan, was human or an oversized fly, since the worldbuilding details are presented in such a masterful…
Keep reading
Weird #64: “Soft” by E. Paul Wilson (1984)
Why the ending of E. Paul Wilson’;s “Soft” anticipates The Last of Us and the aftermath of COVID-19.
Keep reading
Weird #63: “The Discovery of Telenapota” by Premendra Mitra (1984)
A weird emanation of energy straight out of Blue Man Group, the “blue bodies” are doubles that haunt the narrator of “The New Rays.”
Keep reading
Weird #62: “The New Rays” by M. John Harrison (1982)
A weird emanation of energy straight out of Blue Man Group, the “blue bodies” are doubles that haunt the narrator of “The New Rays.”
Keep readingWeird #61: “The Little Dirty Girl” by Joanna Russ (1981)
Joanna Russ, author of How to Suppress Woman’s Writing, was part of the feminist science fiction movement, which ran parallel to second wave feminism. Ursula K. L Guin, Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, and Octavia Butler were each a part of this renaissance in women’s science fiction writing. Women’s writing has been suppressed in one way or another since the dawn…
Keep reading
Weird #60: “Egnaro” by M. John Harrison (1981)
M. John Harrison was part of the New Wave, a literary movement that, according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, introduced Mainstream fiction techniques into the “straightjacket” of mass produced science fiction. The literary values of the movement, which increasingly drew from the soft sciences rather than hard sciences, can be identified with the kind of stories coming out of…
Keep reading
Weird #59: “The Belonging Kind” by William Gibson and John Shirley (1981)
Antoinette walks from bar to bar around town, everywhere from clubs to discos, and never wears the same body twice.
Keep reading
Weird #58: “The Autopsy” by Michael Shea (1980)
In which a doctor, examining a corpse in anatomically precise detail, discovers a parasite from outer space animating a human corpse.
Keep reading
Weird #57: “The Brood” by Ramsay Campbell (1980)
A man looks out his window after a tough day at work and notices something he shouldn’t.
Keep readingLoading…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
About Me
I’m Matthew Rettino, a speculative fiction writer from Montreal, Canada. In my Archaeologies of Weird Fiction project, I am reviewing all 110 stories contained in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s massive anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.
Visit the Medium.com publication. (The back posts will be added soon.)
Matthew Rettino 