Book Thoughts: The Weird
Hungry for more audiobook short stories I came upon a monstrous collection of strange fiction curated by the Vandermeers: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.
Going into the 70-something hour collection I knew there would be many stories not to my taste -- cosmic horror and ghost stories, while appealing on a conceptual level, have never held much for me -- however with other names like China Mieville, Borges, and Kafka listed in the long directory of authors and over 100 strange stories to dig through, I was confident I'd discover some gems.
Here are said gems:
The Man in the Bottle by Gustav Meyrink was the first of the stories to actually catch my attention. A revenge story that actually felt a little out of place compared to the stories preceding it. It was colourful and cruel.
In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka was mesmerizing. I have only previously read Metamorphosis by Kafka, and this was simply something else (though the ending honestly felt a little cheap)
The Town of Cats by Hagiwara Sakutoro wasn't a particularly gripping story, but it explores a phenomenon I think is interesting, where the narrator gets turned around and believes himself in a completely different place when he's simply seeing his normal surroundings from a new angle (this gets explored more deeply when the cats get involved.) I found myself wondering if Ghibli's "The Cat's Return" took anything from this.
Mimic by Donald Wollheim is very much a cosmic-horror / cryptid story like several others within this collection, but for some reason -- perhaps the small scale? -- the implication horror actually hit home for me on this one.
The Long Sheet by William Sansom was probably my favourite story in the collection. An allegorical story involving prisoners who need to dry a wet sheet -- it's a little overdone writing-wise, but I really enjoyed it.
The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges, I must include, even though it wouldn't make my list of favourite Borges shorts -- the narrator recounts a tiny pinpoint universe, "the Aleph" which a friend of his is obsessed with.
It's a Good Life by Jerome Bixby surprised me as I had previously experienced a version of it via Johnny Bravo as a child. In it a godlike child has complete control over his small town, to the terror of his parents and everyone else.
The Autopsy by Michael Shea was amazing body-horror that had me cringing as I walked and listened, involving a doctor forced to operate on himself and some other weird stuff.
Bloodchild by Octavia Butler caught my attention. Another scifi body horror with alient, which I swear I'm not usually into but Butler made it compelling.
Details by China Mieville -- as usual, Mieville's writing didn't do much for me, but I always love his concepts. In this one the concept of creatures or gods or whatever existing in the noise of visual patterns was awesome and made me slightly apprehensive to look at Magic-Eye stereograms.
Singing My Sister Down by Margo Lanagan was an unexpected and disturbing one that was presented wonderfully. A family watches their sister's execution via tarpit.
Ultimately the rest I could take or leave. I know there was a lot of atmospheric writing in there, but as my audiobook listening often happens while driving (in daylight) or walking my dogs, flowery prose and eerie atmospheres tend to lose out to more straightforward stories aiming to provoke thought. I consistently enjoyed getting lost in the short stories which provided little diorama universes to explore a concept.
I didn't get as much as I had hoped out of this collection of the weird, but I'm coming away with at least a handfull of authors' names to explore in the future.