Queer Trauma in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree

Despite winning numerous literary awards, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work has received little critical attention. Scholars have focused on Kiernan’s reworking of H. P. Lovecraft’s influential weird fiction and have discussed Kiernan’s pioneering work in New Weird fiction and short fiction. As astute as much of the critical work is, none of it addresses the cornerstone of Kiernan’s fiction: trauma. This essay considers Kiernan’s novel The Red Tree as a queer American gothic novel dealing with trauma and its lingering effects on its witnesses. Through its complex, fragmentary form and its use of dream sequences and unconsciously produced narratives, the novel invites readers to witness and consume Sarah Crowe’s trauma while loosely theorizing the relationship between trauma and queer temporality and spatiality.

Dead is not better: The multiple resurrections of Stephen King’s Revival

Stephen King’s 2014 novel, Revival, plays with its title in several respects. It is first a familiar Frankenstein-esque narrative about a mad scientist who seeks to revive the dead. It is also, however, about religious revivals, both in the specific sense of the religious gatherings held by minister and main antagonist Charles Jacobs, and in the more general sense of attempting to find something in which to place one’s faith in a world where accidents can claim the lives of loved ones. Beyond this, Revival plays with its title in two more senses. First, it elaborates on the recurring theme in King of existentialist angst precipitated by the death of a child or loved one, which King uses to question God’s benevolence or existence. In order to ask these questions, King also resurrects the spirit of Mary Shelley, taking from Frankenstein the theme of reanimation of the dead. The narrative’s conclusion, however, offers yet another revival as it transitions us from the horror of Shelley to the weird fiction of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft. Thus, through these various revivals, King’s novel charts the evolution of twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror from Shelley to Lovecraft and our contemporary ‘weird’ moment.

„Praca widma w epoce mechanicznej reprodukcji”. China Miéville: koncepcje „haute weird” i „abcanny”

The aim of the paper is presentation and discussion of China Miéville’s theoretic approach to the issue of horror’s subgenres, including classical Victorian ghost story and Lovecraftian weird fiction. “The abcanny” — in a way a subversive, theoretical category, that Miéville coins in his critical writings — is crucial for both his own speculations and the problems considered here. As it is decisively opposite to Freudian “uncanny” and Kristevian “abject”, it constitutes a relatively new approach to the question of distinction among the aforementioned horror literary genres. The Victorian ghost story, as Miéville sees it, is deeply rooted in the experience of the uncanny, and so it presupposes the “return of the repressed” from the individual or collective/cultural unconsciousness. Hence ghost stories are — just for example — susceptible to hauntological interpretations. Weird fiction — on the contrary — implies the experience of something radically new, something so far non-existent and therefore unacceptable and dreadful. If a classical ghost story can be perceived as an expression of the nineteenth–century fear of the irrationality returning from the past preceding the revolution of the Enlightenment, haute weird narrative embodies modernistic anxiety of the upcoming future, its uncertain nature, cognitive and moral relativism, and — what is most important here — the dubious status of man facing a boundless chasm of time and space.

'Bacurau': ficção 'weird' e estética aceleracionista de expurgo colonial | 'Bacurau': weird fiction and accelerationist aesthetics of colonial purge

ResumoNeste artigo, são analisados filme e roteiro de Bacurau (2019), dirigido por Kléber Mendonça Filho e Juliano Dornelles. Compreende-se a obra sob a perspectiva da ficção weird pela conjunção entre os elementos de futuridade da narrativa e os conflitos sociais do interior do Brasil, circunscritos a uma realidade histórica. Misturando gêneros cinematográficos em um filme que vai do cangaço ao gore, Bacurau nos coloca frente a uma distopia sobre a proliferação de tecnologias de vigilância e controle e, sobretudo, sobre a proliferação de sistemas políticos de morte.Palavras-chave: Bacurau. Ficção weird. Aceleracionismo. Desterritorialidade. Necropolítica. Estudos decoloniais. AbstractIn this article I analyze the film and the script of Bacurau (2019), directed by Kléber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. The work is understood from the perspective of weird fiction for the conjunction between the elements of futurity of the narrative and the social conflicts of Brazil’s countryside, anchored in a historical reality. Mixing cinematographic genres in a film that goes from Cangaço Cinema to Gore, Bacurau confronts us with a dystopia about the proliferation of surveillance and control technologies and, specially, about the proliferation of political systems of death.Keywords: Bacurau. Weird Fiction. Accelerationism. Deterritorialization. Necropolitics. Decolonial Studies.

Just like Henry James (Except with Cannibalism): The International Weird in H. P. Lovecraft's ‘The Rats in the Walls’

The early short story ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1924) is recognized as the best of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction prior to ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, but this story is also non-cosmic and therefore (for some) not truly ‘Lovecraftian’. In conjunction with dense prose and seemingly throwaway references, this view has made ‘Rats’ arguably the most inadequately read of Lovecraft's major works. This article proposes that we read ‘Rats’, Lovecraft's first tale within an unofficial ‘witch cult’ trilogy, as a story of the path not taken in modern weird fiction. Using Henry James's ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908) as a companion piece, I argue that the international weird forms a major component of Lovecraft's text. Far from portraying horrors merely personal in scope, Lovecraft uses the Delapore family and their geographical dislocations between two distinct nation-states, America and England, to signal what he sees as the historical rise and fall – or evolution and de-evolution – of culture itself.

The Absolute as the Meeting Point Between Speculation and Fiction

The article investigates Meillassoux’s notion of the absolute in relationship with the Kantian and Hegelian philosophical systems. The absolute, as independent of subjective consciousness, is showcased as the meeting point of speculation and fiction. By looking into Meillassoux’s notions of speculation and some works of weird fiction, it is argued that the significant role of imagination as well as a deferred temporality is what facilitates the discussion of both speculation and fiction as faculties able to transcend the limitations that are projected by the correlationist mind. Through a reading of Lovecraftian fiction, both the strong and weak points of Meillassoux’s argumentation in After Finitude and Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction are identified, proving the latter to be a less successful way of grasping the chaotic real.