The Weird and the Eerie

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In this case, his final book, The Weird and the Eerie, discusses at length what is weird and eerie, this philosophy of aesthetics. But this book feels like part of its treatise is to encourage an appreciation and the value of perhaps never quite being resolved, at least in our minds, and to appreciate the sensation that is the essence of the weird and the eerie. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

This kind of symptomatic cultural criticism can sometimes feel instrumental — how many times have you heard a version of the complaint that Žižek is simply incapable of grasping the basic syntax of a film, mangling it to rip out its political organs? Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. It is an important critical intervention, because it intends to carefully delineate a spectrum of sensibilities, the nuances of feeling that span the uneasy or unnerving: that feeling of being off-kilter, of wrongness or free-floating angst.Okay, it's nice to be able to pigeonhole genres, or whatever, but surely there must be more to it than that? In film, David Lynch was always “wild at heart and weird on top,” from his early animated short films up to Inland Empire. Only Fisher can enthuse about old Quatermass TV shows in terms of their “cosmic Spinozism” and still (mostly) make sense. We are left in the wake of a vanishing, sensing an eerie present absence, a hooded figure watching from somewhere else.

Garner’s fiction implies a kind of compulsive repetition under British history, with sections based in Roman Britain, during the English Civil War, and in the present day. LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. He wrote beautifully, of course, but the act of writing is secondary to his observation of the world, the ability to see the world aslant, to make of the the ordinary something extraordinary. Lovecraft’s fictions, at their evocative best, are about a steady dethronement of anthropocentric models. What inaccessible amnesiac other hides inside the self in Christopher Priest’s fractured, eerie novels?John Harrison and China Miéville, briefly rallied to this banner in 2003 before morphing into something else (although the critics still lumber around with the term). Some of the other reviews here cover the book as a whole, and I won't try to comment or add to them. You have probably heard of “the weird” by now, but you may not quite know what it is, or why so many genre critics, cultural theorists, and philosophers are keen to engage with it. He makes the links between these seemingly disparate sources into something surprisingly coherent and creative, and nails the kind of free-floating, off-kilter angst and emotional background radiation that we encounter glancingly in life.