Weird fiction, it seems, is having a moment in the zeitgeist; horror, we’re told, is also having a moment in the zeitgeist. It isn’t surprising, given the state of the world, that these two modes are increasingly attractive to readers, but their dual ascendancy immediately leads one to wonder: What’s the difference between them, anyway? Are they the same thing? Is one a subset of the other, do they overlap, are they fully distinct? Weird fiction, in particular, is notoriously difficult to define, fuzzier and more niche than horror. With that in mind, I’d like to suggest three different axes along which we can differentiate weird fiction from horror: genre fidelity, explicability, and directionality.
Genre discussions of weird fiction tend toward two tactics, which both centralize horror to differing degrees. The first is to point to weird fiction as the overlapping space between genres, especially with horror in the mix—what we might call “the Venn Diagram Theory of the Weird.” Penguin Random House, in an attestation to the growing popularity of the weird, has recently launched a Weird Fiction line, repackaging public domain texts that, in their words, contain a “visionary blend of horror, fantasy and science fiction.” Elsewhere, the scholar Claire Quigley has defined weird fiction as “a melting pot of science fiction, horror, urban fantasy, Gothic literature, magical realism, and more.” The broadness of this definition renders it rather unhelpful, the lack of specificity immediately calling up a myriad of counterexamples. Science fantasy is hardly necessarily weird fiction, nor is horror science fiction or dark fantasy. The main issue isn’t that the Venn Diagram Theory is inaccurate—weird fiction does draw upon tactics inherent to everything lying within the umbrella of speculative fiction—so much as it’s orthogonal to the point, which is how weird fiction uses tropes and commonplaces from each of the genres: to unsettle and emphasize the anxiety of living in an ontologically uncertain world. Or, just as importantly, by not using genre commonplaces; this is why we can pull in figures like Kafka and Shirley Jackson (or Herman Melville) who embody the weird without working in areas that we would usually point to as lying within speculative genres. The weird unsettles without consideration of genre, not by consciously mashing them together.
The second generically minded tactic is to point to weird fiction as a subset of horror, bringing tropes from science fiction or fantasy into a genre-horror framework. Wikipedia currently notes that weird fiction is speculative fiction that “either eschews or radically reinterprets traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction, such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves.” This definition stems from Lovecraft himself, who argued in his “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” that “the true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present.” This definition pertains perfectly to weird horror,1 the overlap of horror and weird fiction, but I think the focus on negative affects is too particular to describe everything the weird has to offer. To distinguish between horror and weird fiction, then, it’s necessary to decenter Lovecraft from discussions of the latter, his cosmicism one facet of the weird but never the lone or even dominant one.
Horror, of course, is both an affect and a genre; thought of this way, the vast majority of genre-horror contains the weird in the early moments of a story when a sense of dread begins to creep in from the margins, forcefully or smoothly. It often dissipates, though, in the move from anticipatory terror/dread into horror/revulsion once the threat (often as not a monster) that’s been weirding the world is named, known, enclosed by generic rules. By containing and dispelling the mystery, the weird is dismissed and the genre-bound character of the work shines through. Genre fidelity typically gives a sense of certainty, of expectations and understanding, that’s anathema to the weird—as the academic Timothy Jones put it, “To offer a history or even a definition of the weird tale risks unweirding it, potentially placing an unearthly and sometimes wide-eyed literature too squarely in the world.”2 This is why Scott Nicolay’s Dogme 2011 for Weird Fiction focused more on what a weird tale shouldn’t do than what it should: it’s easier to draw a line around what weird fiction isn’t than what it is.
This brings us to the second axis which distinguishes weird fiction from horror: explicability. In weird fiction the indifference to the explicability of genre rules is what makes the generic slipperiness of the weird orthogonal—the point isn’t combining different generic mainstays, but ignoring the rules of genre in the first place. It’s helpful here to think of genre not as bookshelves, or distinct categories in which a text is shelved exclusive of others, but as valences, tactics, techniques that might appear or disappear as we read, spectrums rather than hard divisions. The literary theorist Kate Marshall, indeed, points to weirdness as “a shift from genre to mood . . . evoking atmosphere by literalizing it . . . Genre becomes mood when it taps into the strangeness of reflexive knowing, of feeling, paradoxically, the limitations of the human vantage in the generic reach beyond.”3 Weird fiction lives in questions, not answers; this is why the weird leeches away from those works of horror that steadfastly resolve by the end, especially if that resolution is happy or victorious; and also out of horror that dwells in transgression, which is about breaking social rules, not revealing the inexplicability of the world underlying them. The weird forecloses a return to normalcy—or, often, the possibility that normalcy ever existed in the first place. It’s the ending within the liminal state, not the movement through it.
Weird fiction’s refusal of genre-rigidity and explicability brings us to what I think is the most important delineation of horror and the weird, what we might call their directionality: horror, an incursion, moves inward to the body, while the weird, a revelation, moves outward, emanating from and unsettling the world. Horror is one of the body genres, intended to provoke a physiological reaction (as the horror author Hailey Piper recently put it, horror and romance are the “carnal genres, the wet genres, the genres to get your skin buzzing and your heart pounding”). Weird fiction, on the other hand, unsettles the world and provokes an ontological reaction by ignoring the rules that we thought bounded reality; as it also ignores the rules of genre, ignores needs for understanding and resolution, and reveals the world as something other than what we had understood it to be. Liminality is so necessary for the weird because of the lack of resolution: The character/reader is not resolved into a new relationship with the world, even though the old one has been severed. The unsettlement is the thing.
This directionality also moves against the Freudian uncanny, which looks ever backwards, toward a return of the repressed,4 the weird moves unsettlingly outward. Shklovsky’s ostranenie is a more helpful concept: “to increase the difficulty and length of perception” in order to defamiliarize (and avoid genre conventions, and escape explicability). So is dépaysement—a French term with no direct English analogue, capturing both disorientation and change of scenery, the unsettlement felt in a new environment, an unknown situation; literally “to be without country.” Also apt is estrangement, “to arouse especially mutual enmity or indifference in (someone) where there had formerly been love, affection, or friendliness,” or “to remove from customary environment or associations.” This last is instructive, I think, in terms of both the estrangement of character from world and of the text from the “customary environment” of genre, and also in the weird’s distinction from horror’s interest in transgression, which is not removal, but refusal and opposition. Whatever the affect, dreadful or fascinating and numinous, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the environment, the world, is unsettled, changed, left as something other than it was (or seemed to be) at the onset of the story.
These are the affects of the weird, where the three axes—the genre infidelity, the dedication to the inexplicable, the unsettling of the world—move from horror into something weirder, vaguer and less easily grasped (movement, here, is key; these are spectrums, not hard lines of division), in a profound unsettlement of a reality we thought we understood. Weird fiction, we might say, is that which uses the tools of the irreal, often but not always within the framework of horror’s negative affects, to unsettle the world. “The Willows,” by Algernon Blackwood, one of the mode’s ur-texts, sums it up thusly:
A sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror. Their serried ranks, growing everywhere darker about me as the shadows deepened, moving furiously yet softly in the wind, woke in me the curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world where we were not wanted or invited to remain—where we ran grave risks perhaps!
The overall effect of the estrangement and dépaysement underlying/superseding/replacing the everyday world is what Walter Benjamin called “profane illumination”: a piercing of the illusory veil overlying the world. Ignoring the rules of genre (and reality) helps the weird catch in the mind of the reader, to unsettle narrative and setting and, at its most successful, rasping against or irrupting through the ontological settlement of both character and reader, avoiding closure, explication, easy answers or cozy reassurance. As I write this in the waning days of the awful year 2024, the fifth year of the plague, fascism on the rise, the neoliberal order crumbling around us, the relevance of such a fiction, such liminal weirdness, to grasp in metaphor the awful state of the world, is more important artistically than ever.
1. There’s an argument to be made that weird horror, and much of what people call “new weird,” is an incorporation of new wave speculative fiction, with its modernist techniques and generic fuzziness, into genre-horror.
2. Timothy Jones, “The Weird Tale,” in Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter (eds.) The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
3. Marshall, Kate. “Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century.” Novels by Aliens. University of Chicago Press, 2023, pg 5.
4. Making the uncanny more of a Gothic affect than a weird one, although it’s rarely applied that way.
