New To Weird Fiction - Recommendations?

[Liam Barden]

Everything by Mark Samuels and James Champagne.

I'll make this easy for you:

Amazon.com: James Champagne: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

 

Amazon.com: James Champagne: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

Amazon.com: Mark Samuels: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

 

Amazon.com: Mark Samuels: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

Enjoy.

[Mr. Veech]

If you're looking for contemporary traditionalist pieces, you can't go wrong with either Mark Samuels or Reggie Oliver.

[Masonwire]

No matter whether you agree with all the authors chosen or the story choice, I think that Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's massive anthology can give you quite a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weird

[Kevin]

Quote Originally Posted by The Alchemist

Mark Valentine and John Howard. The former, in my estimation, has created some fine and mystic jewels that ameliorate literature and our prosy world as a whole. And we must not forget authors such as Kafka, Machen, Sarban, Lafcadio Hearn, M. John Harrison, Gustav Meyrink, Shirley Jackson, Dunsany, Walter de la Mare, Joel Lane, Bruno Schulz, E.F. Benson, M.P. Shiel, Borges, L.A. Lewis, Philip K. Dick, and Bitter Bierce. One novel I can heartily recommend is Timothy J. Jarvis's Mephistophelian paean to the wyrd, The Wanderer. And while you are at it, expand your idea of wyrd fiction to include Decadent and Symbolist and Beat Generation and surrealist and generally odd and imaginative literature, as well as visual art ( Austin Osman Spare, Blake, Beksinski), cinema ( Tarkovsky, Jodorowsky, Lynch), and music (Current 93, Coil, and some folk music such as Shirley Collins). Even non-fiction, on ghosts and occultism and ancient rituals, can yield interesting things. The wyrd, in my eyes, is akin to a worldview, and defies genre conventions and limitations; like an otherworldly flower, the wyrd blooms in the most unexpected of places. And like an infectious disease, anyone can catch it.

Sounds like a well-rounded library. But first, I'd rob a bank.

[Speaking Mute]

On the cheap, both Mark Valentine and John Howard's individual and collaborative works are offered by Tartarus Press in $6 ebook editions. The University of Adelaide has a great collection of classic Weird Fiction that's well formatted on my Nook at least:

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/literature/weird/

[Michael]

Quote Originally Posted by Masonwire

No matter whether you agree with all the authors chosen or the story choice, I think that Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's massive anthology can give you quite a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weird

Hi craigobau. I second the more extensive recommendations given by others. For a birds eye view, I think H.P. Lovecraft "Supernatural Horror in Literature" will catch you up to the early 20th. Then the VanderMeer's excellent, World Fantasy Winning anthology will finish off the rest. They put a great deal of thought into the stories they picked and I think each story fairly represents the aesthetic of each writer given the limits a single story picked can do. So you'll know if you really like Robert Aickman or if you really hate Robert Aickman after reading The Hospice, for instance. Then there are also some gems that even those of us who have read much in this field missed. My personal one is Elizabeth Hand's beautiful weird tale "The Boy in the Tree."

Those would be the first two I'd recommend and that would also probably be the most fiscally easy path.

[xylokopos]

Adding to the excellent recommendations thus far:

Paul Willems
Michel de Ghelderode
Guy de Maupassant
Silvina Ocampo
Felisberto Hernandez
Horacio Quiroga
Leonid Andreyev
Fyodor Sologub
Jeremiah Gottelf [the black spider]
Jacques Chessex [the vampire of ropraz]
Serge Brussolo
Michael Ende
Stefan Grabinski
Italo Calvino

On the periphery of the weird, but right at the point where the horrible, the dreamlike and the surreal meet, you shall find

Sadeq Hedayat
Georg Heym
Bao Ninh
Laszlo Kraznahorkai

Amen.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Which Bao Ninh stories?

László Krasznahorkai has a collection called The World Goes On coming in November.

[xylokopos]

Robert,

I was thinking of Bao Ninh as a borderline Weird author on the strength of The Sorrow of War alone. It is hard to tell when he moves from the merely symbolic to the obviously supernatural: there are ghosts visiting him during his days in the body collecting team and ghosts that come later during his nights of frantic writing; the long and yellow figures in his father's paintings; and the endless haunting of the Central Highlands and of his mind and of his room in Hanoi. I think the story is saturated with Vietnamese superstition and lore and I think it reads like an exorcism in its most accurate and potent form. Of course, it also remains a memoir of war and lost youth and it serves as a counterpart to Michael Herr's Dispatches; but it is inundated with such profound existential sorrow that the narrative veers into the otherwordly.

PS. Have we mentioned Cisco yet? Craig, read Cisco.