Weirdness winding down

kw: book reviews, continued review, story reviews, fiction, fantasy, horror

The third and fourth (final) sections of The New Weird are titled Symposium and Laboratory. Three of the five pieces in Symposium are essays, and the other two are discussion threads. All revolve about "What is the New Weird?" This is a clear indication that, if New Weird ever existed as a unified genre, that is over. Based on my own understanding of the fiction collected for this volume (see the prior two posts), the rubric is struggling to include material that is not always new (in tone or goal) nor weird.

In an old Pogo Possum panel, Howland Owl is holding a book titled "Nuclear Physics". He remarks, "New Clear Fizzix? 'Taint New, 'taint clear…" he drops it into a bucket full of water and adds, "And nary a fizz!" 'Nuff said.

Laboratory is a seven-part, seven-author continuing narrative. I think of Weird as having a supernatural or fantastic or at least occult element. The "weird" in this case is more "unsettling", such as the locust-worshipping cult, some of whose devotees implant living locusts under their skin, or the parasitic Salps, which seem strange but whose life cycle is an enlargement of several kinds of small parasitic wasps. The denouement, which I cannot really call an ending, seems to be a thermonuclear blast, though the description is an attempt to make it more eerie than that. In sum, this is more akin to the segment on some showings of "America's Funniest Videos": "Weird Enough For Ya?". No, not really.

In the book as a whole, I liked quite a bit of the fiction. Some I definitely didn't like. The volume is a fine attempt by the VanderMeers to gather together threads that bear at least a glancing relationship to the quite diverse meanings of "weird" (my big unabridged dictionary lists seven senses). However, it is a bit like herding squirrels.