The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  Since then, The Weird has again fragmented, perhaps in preparation for a future coalescing of a Next Weird or perhaps not. Late period examples by Stephen Graham Jones, Reza Negarestani, Micaela Morrissette, Brian Evenson, and K. J. Bishop demonstrate an intimate knowledge of both the Kafka and Lovecraft strands of weird fiction, but recombined in strange and exciting new ways. Others, like the work of Laird Barron, seem more traditional but through their unique style and vision still manage to surprise.

  What The Weird holds next for readers is unclear, but given the past manifestations, we can be sure it will adaptable, idiosyncratic, and involve some of our best stylists. It will also continue to be at times discredited, misunderstood, and denigrated for being unapologetically transgressive, imaginative, and strange. Nonetheless, The Weird will endure.

  Organizing Principles and Enhancements

  A compendium like this one is neither as complete as an encyclopedia nor as loosely organized as a treasury. Our purpose is to showcase the wealth, depth, and breadth of The Weird over the past 100 years while also mapping certain tendencies and preoccupations. We have arranged the book chronologically from earliest story to latest story as the best way to show the evolution of and diversity of The Weird. Translated fiction is ordered in the anthology by when it first appeared in print, not by date of first translation into English. This preserves the ‘chain of evidence’ while pointing out the possibilities of initial influence across non-Anglo writings.

  Among the interwoven threads in The Weird you will find a dedication to showcasing what one might call traditional weird, mainstream (or commercial) weird, weird science fiction, weird ritual, surreal weird, feminist weird, and avant-garde weird. ‘International weird’ is a meaningless term given the longstanding and complex literary traditions of the countries represented in this volume. However, we have tried to chronicle a clear tradition of Japanese surrealism and horror that feeds into The Weird, strong examples of Eastern European weird, evidence of weird fiction from India, African-nation weird, and those samples from Latin America that fall somewhere beyond magic realism. A few stories were unavailable to us because of rights issues, but we see them as an extension of this anthology as well: Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Preserving Machine’ (weird science fiction), J. G. Ballard’s ‘The Drowned Giant’ (New Wave weird), Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ (Latin American weird), Otsuichi’s ‘The White House in the Cold Forest’ (Japanese weird). Because this anthology is so vast (over 750,000 words), we were able to include novellas and even short novels, including these important works: Michel Bernanos’ The Other Side of the Mountain, Eric Basso’s ‘The Beak Doctor’, Leena Krohn’s Tainaron, and Brian Evenson’s The Brotherhood of Mutilation.

  In pursuit of certain stories, we were also able to commission original translations. These translations include such major stories as Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s ‘The Hell Screen’, Michel Bernanos’ The Other Side of the Mountain,Julio Cortázar’s ‘Axolotl’, and Georg Heym’s ‘The Dissection’.

  The Other Side

  Alfred Kubin

  An Excerpt – Translated into English by Mike Mitchell

  Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) was a visionary Austrian writer and artist who illustrated works by such notable early purveyors of weird fiction as Edgar Allan Poe and ETA Hoffman. While living in Germany, Kubin was mentored for a time by the writer Franz Blei, a friend of Franz Kafka. Kubin’s masterpiece was the novel Die Andere Seite (The Other Side), first published in 1908. The Other Side is a dystopic fantasy set in the strange and oppressive city of Pearl. In its synergy of symbolism, decadent-era literature, and the weird, the novel suggested an early twentieth-century break with supernatural traditions of the past. In this excerpt, the narrator describes a strange sleeping sickness and the beginning of the ruination of the city.

  An irresistible sleeping sickness had Pearl in its grip. It broke out in the Archive and from there spread across the whole of the Realm. It was an epidemic and no one could resist. One minute a man would be boasting how wide awake he was, the next he had succumbed to the germ.

  The infectious character of the disease was quickly recognised, but the doctors could find no cure. The American’s proclamations were ineffective because as soon as people started to read them they began to yawn. Anybody who could stayed at home, so as not to be struck down by the malady in the middle of the street. They just retired to a cosy nook and contentedly accepted this latest turn of events. After all, it didn’t hurt. The first sign was usually a feeling of profound lethargy, then patients were seized with a yawning fit, their eyes seemed to fill with sand, their eyelids grew heavy, their thoughts went fuzzy and they would sink wearily to the ground where they stood. Sufferers could be brought round now and then with strong smelling salts – sal ammoniac, for example – but they just mumbled a few words and relapsed into torpor. With individuals of a strong constitution a brisk rub-down with a towel would put back the onset by several hours, but then it was just the same. In many cases the out-break of the illness was very rapid. One speaker was delivering a tirade on the political situation when he suddenly bent down over the table, lowered his head and started to snore rhythmically.

  Anton in the coffee house, on the other hand, could scarcely keep his eyes open, and yet was still serving. But, heavens, the things we had to do to keep him moving! We literally had to bombard him with sugar lumps and coffee spoons. He was exceedingly forgetful and when he did finally bring the order, the impatient customer had often fallen asleep himself. We had to keep a sharp lookout to make sure the cigars of comatose patrons were properly extinguished.

  On the parade ground the military were busy training to prepare them for the threatened revolution. But it was no use the sergeants bellowing at them, one soldier after another just lay down on the ground.

  There were strange and amusing incidents.

  Thieves slept the sleep of the just, their fingers still in someone else’s till. Melitta spent four days stretched out in Brendel’s apartment, while her husband was dreaming, bent over the table, his nose in the mayonnaise.

  Castringius was struck down while playing cards. He was leaning back comfortably in his chair in a low dive, the jack of diamonds in his paw. I very quickly withdrew to my room and that was where the illness hit me. I had just turned back the covers and gone over to draw the curtains. The last thing I saw was banknotes fluttering, one after the other, out of the window of the princess’s apartment across the road; a gentle autumn breeze was wafting them like withered leaves down the street towards the river. I just had time to get to my bed.

  During the first two days after the outbreak of the epidemic the trains still arrived, though with huge delays, since new staff had to be brought on at every station. After that the service stopped entirely. The last number of the Voice was printed on one side alone, and even then it was riddled with incomplete sentences and scores of typographical errors. The entire last page, which usually contained a round-up of silly miscellaneous items, was missing.

  There was no point in fighting it. Pearl slept. This state of complete unconsciousness probably lasted six days. At least that was the time calculated by the barber who based his estimate on the length of his customers’ stubble.

  During that time there was only one person in the whole of the city who, it was said, did not sleep at all, or only very briefly: the American. On one of the days, when he was walking down Long Street like a latter-day prince from Sleeping Beauty, he claimed he saw, through the coffee house window, one of the chess players make a move. From that he concluded that they, too, had escaped the illness. Otherwise you fell over sleeping bodies everywhere. Not only on all the benches in the public parks, even staircases and entrances were covered with well-dressed men and women, lying higgledy-piggledy, just like the homeless, contented smiles on their faces, despite their bizarre situation.

  As people gradually came to, many simply continued their interrupted activities. This was a bl
essed relief, not only for Brendel, but for the poor old nag at the knacker’s yard which had spent days tied up, waiting for the coup de grâce. Now it received it. For the strange thing was that animals remained impervious to the sleeping sickness.

  For most people nothing had changed, at least not immediately. When I woke up and, in need of sustenance, went to the café, the barber was there already, ravenous but also in a very bad mood. A fourpenny piece had gone missing, which had led to a permanent rift between the barber and his assistant who of course, like all animals, had remained awake.

  The Dream city woke up and found itself in a kind of animal paradise. During our long sleep another world – the animal kingdom – had spread to such an extent that we were in danger of being swept aside. I have to say, though, that even in the time prior to the sleep it had been noticeable what a good year it seemed to be for rats and mice. There had also been complaints about the depredations of birds of prey and four-legged chicken-thieves. The gardener had even seen wolf tracks in Alfred Blumenstich’s park. They laughed at him, but no one laughed any more when, the following day, a pair of horns was all that was left of Frau Blumenstich’s pet, a snow-white Angora goat.

  But how can one describe the astonishment of all those who had gone to sleep alone and undisturbed and woke to find themselves in unwelcome company? There might be a large green parrot sitting at the window or weasels and squirrels peeking out from under the beds. It was only gradually that we realised what was going on.

  When they woke up, the butchers had to drive a large pack of jackals away from the slaughterhouse. Attacks by wolves, wild cats and lynxes increased frighteningly and even our pets suddenly turned disobedient and vicious. Almost all the cats and dogs left their masters and hunted for their own food. The newspapers, that had started to appear again, reported a horrifying case: a bear had climbed into the ground-floor apartment of Apollonia Six, a pork butcher’s widow, and completely devoured the poor lady while she was fast asleep.

  Hunters and fishermen came into the town bringing fantastic-sounding reports of gigantic, shambling animals they claimed to have seen. But being regarded as professional exaggerators anyway, no one believed them. Then suddenly peasants and other Dreamlanders living in the country started to arrive in droves, thundering up on their massive horses, together with carts jampacked with women, children and the more valuable of their household goods. They were very unhappy and demonstrated outside the Palace and the Archive, complaining that no soldiers had been sent to protect them. Herds of buffaloes, they said, had devastated their farms, and they had only managed to escape the attacks of hordes of large apes by the skin of their teeth. The beasts were fiends and spared neither women nor children. Soon afterwards the tracks of colossal bipeds were identified in the clay soil of the Tomassevic Fields on the edge of the city. That gave cause for concern.

  The plague of insects was horrendous. Clouds of greedy locusts descended from the hills and wherever they went they left not one blade of grass. A swarm destroyed the castle garden in one single night. Bugs, earwigs and lice made our lives a misery. All of these species, from the largest to the smallest, seemed to be in the grip of an elemental procreative urge. Despite the fact that they were all eating each other up, quadrupeds and hexapods were multiplying in uncanny fashion. Even the official issue of guns and poison and the promulgation of strict orders to keep windows and doors closed had little effect, the fertility was just too great. Squads of volunteer hunters were organised to support the military and the police. Many buildings had embrasures made in the outside walls to shoot through.

  One morning the wife of the coffee-house owner woke to find fourteen rabbits in her bed. Since her bedroom was only separated from mine by a thin partition, I could hear the baby rabbits squeaking.

  But the most terrifying of all were the snakes. No house was safe from them, the vile beasts got everywhere, into drawers, wardrobes, coat-pockets, water-jugs, everywhere. And these insidious reptiles displayed a horrifying fecundity. If you went to your room in the dark you would tread on the eggs lying around and they would burst with a squelch. Castringius devised an ‘egg dance’, which he performed to perfection.

  People in the French Quarter could scarcely put up with the vermin any longer. However, even during the beastly invasion, most kept their heads. It became the done thing to shoot your stag from your window and invite your friends straight round to share the game pie. From the skylight of the house where I used to live you could see a long way out over fields and meadows. Now the area had been transformed into a monstrous zoo. Even the river had its share: crocodiles, which after years of strenuous effort had been banished downstream, reappeared. The baths had to be closed because of the deadly electric eels which had taken up residence in the cabins.

  One of the few good things about those difficult days was the fact that it was easy to come by a tasty roast and other rare titbits.

  During this time old Professor Korntheuer enjoyed great respect. He gave public lectures in which he taught the Dreamlanders to distinguish dangerous bugs from harmless ones. Armed with a triple-barrelled shotgun, he was up and about at first light, wandering through the herds of gazelles, wild boar and marmots, stalking game. But the animals soon got used to the eccentric bespectacled huntsman and came to love the old gentleman. Our windows, on the other hand, suffered so much damage from his gun that it had to be taken away from him.

  At night we could only go out if armed with a lantern and a gun, and even then we had to take great care. Traps, snares, pitfalls and spring-guns made the city even more dangerous than it already was. But to allow something like that to put them off the pursuit of pleasure was the one thing that never occurred to the Dreamers.

  II

  The depths to which public morality had sunk presented a great opportunity to my fellow artist Castringius. His porno-graphica were sought after, he was the fashion. Drawings such as The Lascivious Orchid Inseminating the Embryo were much admired. Hector von Brendel bought a complete series from him because Melitta thought them ‘fun’. At first she was very much taken with them and had them nicely framed and hung in her boudoir. But it turned out to be merely a caprice and after a few days they had to go. An occasional beau of hers, an officer of dragoons, was allowed to take them; in return he presented her with a pair of antique emerald earrings. That very same evening the officer took the drawings to the café where they happened to be holding a raffle. The proceeds were to go towards helping those who were suffering the consequences of their dissolute ways; until then there had been no ward for them in our hospital. Quite a lot of money was collected, Blumenstich – not the junk dealer – made up the deficit and soon afterwards the first patients were being admitted to the ward next to the children’s hospital in the monastery.

  As irony would have it, I was the one who won the drawings and now they were hanging in my room. One day I met Castringius in the street. He was looking for a new apartment, he told me. His studio window and skylight were broken and there were bats hanging like smoked hams from his curtain rail. While he was telling me all this he kept having to ward off the attentions of an importunate ibex with his walking stick. I invited him up, and there were the pictures. His jaw dropped in amazement.

  ‘How did you come by these pictures?’

  I explained.

  ‘They’re very good. The White-striped Whip is my most mature work. It represents a synthesis of future morality. There’s not a woman alive today capable of understanding the implications. It has a real tang to it.’

  I agreed with him entirely. I was the only person in the Dream Realm capable of appreciating his artistic achievement. He was an oddball, but I liked him. And why not? He that feels pure, let him cast the first stone.

  Suddenly there was noise in the street. We went over to the window. A lot of people were standing round laughing. And there was something to laugh at. Just imagine, the monkey had downed tools and gone on strike! The previous day already Giovanni had left on
e customer half shaved when his attention was drawn by a horde of macaques rushing past. A beautiful long-tailed guenon had waved at him and the temptation had been too much for our barber’s assistant. That time his philosophical master had managed to restrain him with a combination of the cane and the argument that time was divisible into tiny eternities. Now, however, no amount of reasoning could hold him back. He gracefully climbed up the drainpipe, grasped the princess’s coffee flask with his prehensile tail, made himself comfortable on the window-ledge of my former apartment, now in a ruinous state and empty, and played on a Jew’s harp he had concealed in his cheek pouch. The old princess gave a shriek of horror and tried to hit the coffee-thief with a broom, but he immediately threw the flask away and grabbed the broom. You should have seen the speed with which the lady disappeared, to reappear on the second floor. We had a perfect view of the duel from my window. Giovanni Battista was having a high old time. First of all he wrested her main weapon – an old pair of fire-tongs – from her and let her have the broom back; in the course of this he almost became a flying monkey! I had left a number of bottles of Indian ink behind and he used these as missiles. And an excellent shot he was, too; we all cheered him on while the princess swore like a fish wife.

  Suddenly he reappeared, wearing the old woman’s filthy bonnet, swung out of the window and slid back down the drainpipe, grimacing grotesquely. At the window upstairs the princess was calling for the police, while at the bottom the barber was waiting with his cane. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself’, he shouted at the monkey.

  Alfred Blumenstich, a smug smile on his face, was just emerging from the apartment of his nine little darlings, where he had once more been dispensing his own particular brand of charity. His carriage was waiting. With a tremendous leap the monkey sprang onto the head of the stallion and off they went. The onlookers went wild and cheered until the vehicle and its bizarre rider had vanished into the distance.