The Uncanny Power of Weird Fiction

From Leonora Carrington to Haruki Murakami, disparate writers tap into something universal when they channel the bizarre.

Jeff VanderMeerOct 30 2014, 7- The Atlantic

In volume one of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series, the 1984 story “In the Hills, the Cities” describes how the citizenry of competing villages lash themselves together to form giant human figures as tall as skyscrapers, which wage bloody war upon each other in remote valleys. In Georg Heym’s 1913 story, “The Dissection,” a dead body in an autopsy room “quivers with happiness,” revealing a form of hidden life. Contemporary Finnish writer Leena Krohn’s novel, Tainaron, is told in letters from a nameless correspondent visiting a city lit by the glow of its residents: intelligent insects. The titular character of Haruki Murakami’s “Ice Man,” indeed made of ice, is changed in subtle yet powerful ways by a trip to a frozen land.

This is the realm of the uncanny, sometimes known as the weird tale, or literature of the strange.
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