I, like many of us, am always scared. A friend of mine once asked me why. And the first thing that came to my head was to show him Junji Ito’s “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.” I said that while the story itself did not express the particular nuances of what I am afraid of—many of which will come to light—it did, however, capture the general ambiguous mood of why. For any of us who have not read it, I will say only that the short manga revolves around a fissure in a mountain appearing one day, showing to everyone, everywhere, that there are millions of holes perfectly shaped to the size of a human—and these holes are not just a sweep of holes set to fit a standard size for everyone. These holes fit your exact dimensions. They are made just for you.
My friend didn’t see why the fault was so scary, though, because he didn’t believe why anyone would care about the holes. It was a good point. Why did I care? Why do the characters in the story camp at the fault? What possesses anyone to be obsessed about what is ultimately their doom? Why, I might ask, do we return time and time again to tales that tell of strange, horrendous fates that befall us, if in our every day life we are always scared? It felt weird. Mark Fisher’s definition is best used here: That the weird, for this essay, might be described as a sense of wrongness— but what is often missed out is that the wrongness isn’t some ontological revelation about the universe having gone awry. It is existential. It untethers one from their world in such a way that even the most obscure mechanics of control come to light. If you find holes designed for you, then you cannot be anything but invested; the weirdness is that there are designs for you, you who culture seems to disregard and forget. It affirms your paranoia that the world cares about you in a deeply nefarious way.
The weird being horrifying but not horror is important in that horror can be a conventional, hierarchically affirming genre. Professor Haiyang Yang, for example, says those who enjoy horror must have a psychological “protective frame,” and the frame can be a safety frame (the horrors aren’t there), a detached frame (the horrors aren’t real), and a control frame (we have control of how the horror manifests). This way of thinking is not new. Stephen King, who is no stranger to the weird, writes in Danse Macabre, “Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides in all of us. We love and need the monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings. . . [It] is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply.”
Weird writing and horror in the sense that King and Yang mean it don’t align. Both of these ideas instantly support the presupposition that there is order, that there is a safety frame to watch from, there is a portal to the terror (be it a book, a game, a show). I cannot emphasise how wrong these are. The aberrations do not imply a lack of order; they are realisations of the lie that order is, and instead are paragons of truths about what that order is ultimately trying to hide. What is “order”? King says Republican, and so that obviously politicises order as some hierarchical structure that cares little about progress, and more about power for those they consider right. Is this a safety frame? Is it safe to be in an order if you are not Republican? Look at the Epic of Gilgamesh. The very first monster, in the very first story, is Humbaba, guard of the Cedarwood Forest. His roar “is a Flood, his mouth is fire, and his breath is Death!,” assigned “as a terror to human beings.” I imagine to the Mesopotamians, this story did the same as H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu story might. Humbaba is everything inimical to humankind at that time. He is the flood that wiped out civilization (if we are to believe this to be the same flood in all myths), he is fire that burns wood, and grass, and crops, and his breath is the literal end that has terrified every creature who can imagine since the beginning of their fear. Cthulhu is the same. He is formless and yet form, he is oceanic in origin, and, oh god forbid, affects the psychosphere and those especially in tune with the electromagnetic fields of reality. The quantum revolution, the “redolent spheres” of non-Euclidean geometry, and even the idea that spacetime bends were all emergent ideas at the time. Both creatures would be argued as ontological fears by a writer of conventional horror. Existentially, however, they might realise these monsters simply reflect the failure of civilisation to understand the universe. The weird is not wrongness, after all, but the incubated wrongness of our failure to understand through the words and histories given to us.
The arguments that King and Yang make conventionalise horror in the most vile, stale ways, where horror is of anything outside of some pre-agreed-upon order or safety. What about Humbaba, who is slain? What about the forest, the plant-life not learnéd in human tongue, the insects in the grass, or the tiniest, smallest creatures terrorised daily by the scourge and frankly weird anomaly of civilisation? If there are safety frames, if there are orders, then that means that there are times at which people are not afraid—and that scares me the most. It scares me because that means there is evidence of a boundary that exists to keep me away, to keep me afraid. We weird and terrified folk know this so well. I’ve met people who cried like I did for rocks we’ve lost to rubbish bins, have shared the same fears of a walk home in the night, when police care more about throwing you in a cell than saving you from the cold. The world is not made for we who cry for butterflies, who see themselves in the maggots and the worms and the barren land where trees once stood. If you do not feel safe, then you, like me, are an aberration.
Whenever horror authors talk about the grander schemes of why we’re afraid, they try their best to argue it’s because it jeopardises our sense of safety. The weird, however, constantly had writers telling me otherwise. Thomas Ligotti puts it best. “If you read a lot of horror literature because you like to be scared, then you’re probably a normal, healthy person. If you read horror literature to fulfill some deeply personal predisposition, be assured there is something odd and unwholesome about you. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s not alright to be that way.” Why weird and horror go so well together—when done right—is because there is the final validation that there is a design and it is conspicuous and it does care about you, in the same way abattoirs care about the quality of their meat. Collectivisation is easy for capital to market to, but weird collectivisation avoids the easy brandification of the self. It constantly blurs genres, constantly blurs tones, and can never sit still across the canon. To be unwholesome is to be unfulfilled, maligned, ignored, discontented by the world that fundamentally caters to someone else. The weird exists, by contrast, for anyone, anywhere, at anytime. We find old writers, we find new eras of study, and we renegotiate the very idea of genre in the first place. The internet has helped overcome the basic economics of neoliberalism, because, largely, you couldn’t accommodate the “odd and unwholesome,” for they are not in the order. We flock to forums and Discords and comment sections and chatlogs, all of which are still beholden to platforms invested in sustaining the same distinction between them and us.
As writer of the weird and the supernatural, Joel Lane argues the uncanniness of the weird is not about the outside, not anything unnameable, not the misunderstood. For Lane, “Fear . . . resides in the mortal perspective, the nature of human life and experiences it contains. The outside begins at home.” Where would Yang argue is the safe space? Where is the “order” for King in how Lane imagines it? Lane understands how the weird moved toward a mode of fiction built to critique through terror, to deconstruct through despair, and to collectivise through the shared understanding of one another’s pain. The weird of today embraces the unknown, because at least then we are not left in the conventional spaces where our identities can be so easily categorised and medicalised and, thus, penalised.
Lane, for example, was writing at a time when simply being queer was transgressive, strange, and “unknown” under a Thatcherite government that determined only heterosexuality and the nuclear family was right, proper, and normal. The weird becomes a space of resistance, not by choice, because when your very identity is considered as horrific, simply getting out of bed and choosing to be here is an act of revolution. Only the weird can truly capture the tormenting logic of simply being alive as an act of war. This action is not glorious; it is not valorous. It is tiring and toxic and expensive to the mind so poor in its ability to comprehend a moment of relief in an exhausting world.
Like Ito’s Fault, there is a design for everyone in this world to hurt in a way uniquely suited to them. Weird is at its best trying to capture this sense of crisis invading the day to day. In The Lost District, Lane’s characters are constantly in the margins of the real. Living in abandoned factories, making love in cold, rusted council estates lit only by a few scant stars that can pierce the oppressive musk of an industrialised Birmingham. Very often, pleasure can only be found in pain.
The intermingling of pleasure and pain should surprise no longtime horror fans, who think instantly of Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart, or the film Hellraiser. Clive Barker is from the same city as myself, and Liverpool, from the ’70s to now, has been a city under siege. Margaret Thatcher’s government systematically dismantled Liverpool—they put us in managed decline (defunded, undervalued, delegitimized), helped cover up a tragic accident known as Hillsborough (where ninety-seven people died), legitimised anti-Scouse voices through tabloid presses that proceeded to defame the city as graverobbers and all round thieves—and, nationally, her government implemented Section 28: the criminalisation of homosexual content. Both Lane and Barker are queer writers, and both dwell in the teratological destruction of the flesh. No matter the oppression of the working class in Liverpool, patriarchy still exists, and heteronormativity to boot. To be in a city so brutalised in discourse, but one that seems to inflict that pain inwards, on its own people, is the seeming paradox that only the weird might explain. The queer body as a site of pain—one that learns to love the pain because it’s the only relief left. When Pinhead graces the screen, played by the Scouse Doug Bradley, it’s hard to imagine if this story could have originated anywhere but Liverpool, from Barker who had multiple realities he might have felt enmonstered by.
Thomas Ligotti calls this very obsession with horror despite our being horrified by the things we live through: “confrontational escapism.” For Ligotti, especially during his earlier writings, the consolations of horror in the weird is that we who are constantly terrified, constantly belittled, constantly forgotten, beaten down, confined, controlled, and hated, should embrace this position put upon us by finding power in the monstrous.
Werewolves shred skin, Dracula stylishly terrifies a genteel and upper class London through lust and lasciviousness, Nyarlothetep relishes the unhinged exploits of humanity’s most imaginative. If we are so terrifying, then we have in our own sense of being a means of production to counter that which seeks to make us terrible. In his essay “The Consolations of Horror,” Ligotti opens with “Horror, at least in its artistic presentations, can be a comfort,” and that often “we not only wish to know the worst, but to experience it as well,” because the “mere possibility of such knowledge introduces a monstrous and perverse temptation to trade the quiet pleasures of mundane existence for the bright lights of alienage, doom, and, in some rare cases, eternal damnation.”1 Ligotti tracks the progress of the horror lover who proceeds into the genre from a desire for escapism from their sense they are victims of damnation to a place where they entertain the possibility of causing that damnation. The reader, if aware of their role, might see, as Ligotti insists, they “get to be the monster for a change.”2
The weird’s strength is here, in that paradox, that we find solace in the monster on the screen—because for all the seeming infinite powers of white, patriarchocapitalist governments, they have to finish their stories with the monster’s death, with the return to the status quo. Any good weird story will seek not the affirmation of the narrative, but will sit with the uneasiness of instability, chaos, and decay: It’s through these thematic holes in the fabric of sovereignty that weirdos can reimagine a world better for ourselves, through stories that collectivise individuals, through fears we all share and can understand through our togetherness. The real meat of a story, of being storied, of being narrativised or seeking out the dread in all of that, is the attempt to talk, the attempt to listen. Being weird is being afraid is being curious. In Hiron Ennes’s Leech, the doctor, who is quickly revealed as a hivemind parasite affecting a myriad of humans across society, reflects on how across many human tales, “no matter where I travel,” “I find accusations of human mimicry and infiltration . . . I cannot quite understand these fables, nor can I discern their use. I suspect they are born from the peculiar, specific anxiety that there is something fundamentally fragile about humanness. The dread that perhaps, if one takes the time to peel back the skin of another, they will find an imposter, a machine, or stranger still, something like me.”
That same dread, strangeness, anxiety, weirdness we feel, destabilises any order, travels in folklores across time and space to worm through the supposed impregnable foundations of culture and empire, to reroute, renegotiate, to rewire language, people, life, as something innately strange, innately uneasy, hesitant to be defined, and terrifying to comprehend. If the weird allows anything that conventional fears disallow, it is the invitation, then, to be strange, to be inhuman. The weird is a literal space, and one gesturing as the antithesis of King’s “order,” for those who would once have been isolated and are alone and maligned. While that space still exists for those of an elite, while blockbuster horrors affirm status quos, while money flows up and not down, while homes get scarce, while unimaginable terrors befall our kin day by day, there is at least this, here, a brief moment of reflection, an attempt to make sense of everything everywhere that hurts us all too much.
Perhaps this is the staying power of the weird. We are scared, but we are trying, trying to grapple with the shape of our hurt, the hole carved into the mountain. We are trying, when it is very hard to try.
1. Thomas Ligotti, “The Consolations of Horror,” in Crypt of Cthulhu, p. 43
2. Ibid.
