As a huge fan of weird fiction (and horror), I was instantly drawn to the prospect of an intellectual and/or academic investigation into what weird fiction is all about: the weird vibe, its tropes, its defining elements, themes and philosophical enquiry and the like. Fisher and I share an interest in these things, as he says he’s “been fascinated and haunted by examples of the weird and the eerie for as long as I can remember” (8). Yet already from the introduction, it seems as though his interest lies with the weird and the eerie as two distinct modes, and that, even though these modes come from “major cultural examples of the weird and the eerie” which “are to be found at the edges of genres such as horror and science fiction” - as he correctly points out - he nevertheless tries to extrapolate these modes from those so called “genre associations” (books and magazines) because he believes they have “obscured what is specific to the weird and the eerie”. (8)

Fair enough, you can do that. You can say that the weird isn’t a genre, but it’s nevertheless inextricably linked to it. You can also separate the concept of monogamy from romance novels, feeling of suspense from thrillers or the physical act of laughter from comedies, but to what end? Where does that get you? I don’t agree that core aspects of literary genres obscure those core aspects, but rather displays and enhances them. Weird fiction makes it very clear indeed that it makes use of a weird mode and weird elements and weird tropes, or else it couldn’t even be classified as weird fiction.

In any case, I still learned a lot from Fisher’s chapter on the weird. Things I hadn’t yet put into words, things I knew or felt somewhere deep inside, but never quite realized that I did. So, it was educational to me. So much so that I can see myself coming back to this book more than once in the future. Weird can be so many things, you know! For instance, he argues that the weird doesn't have to be supernatural, that it's about something stranger than our ordinary experience can comprehend, that real externality is crucial, (more specifically, encounters with the unknown), that it's about fascination, about what’s compelling. And he argues, convincingly, that neither suspense nor horror are defining features of Lovecraft's fiction. Oh, I definitely loved his discussion of the weird in Lovecraft’s writing! If you’re a fan of Lovecraft, you’ll probably love it too.

“What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange – not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we ‘enjoy what scares us’. It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.” (8)

Allow me to give you a brief summary of his main points: Fisher starts out by differentiating the terms from Freuds concept of unheimlich, specifying that this is about “the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange – about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself” (10). The weird and the eerie, he argues, “make the opposite move: they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside”. The weird, specifically, is “that which does not belong” (10) or a conjoining of “two or more things which does not belong together” (11), while the eerie is primarily about agency (unknown entities) or lack of agency and “concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non-existence: Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?” (12) These two modes do not have to be negative, as the weird can invoke a sense of newness, and the eerie a release from the mundane.

“The outside is not ‘empirically’ exterior; it is transcendentally exterior, i.e. it is not just a matter of something being distant in space and time, but of something which is beyond our ordinary experience and conception of space and time” (22)

He initially concludes that “There is certainly something that the weird, the eerie and the unheimlich share. They are all affects, but they are also modes, modes of film and fiction, modes of perception, ultimately, you might even say, modes of being. Even so, they are not quite genres.” (9) Unfortunately, he doesn’t elaborate on this premise and initial conclusion throughout the essay and seems instead to call the weird and the eerie not only as affects and three different kinds of modes (!), but also as notions, as a charge, a dimension, an effect, an edge, a feeling and an aesthetic experience. It’s not always clear to me what he means, what the differences and nuances are here, but I did have no idea that you could distinguish unheimlich, weird and eerie from each other. Despite my initial confusion, most of the first part of the book was very fascinating.

He also discusses things like jouissance, the grotesque, time travel and the death drive. In every chapter, he introduces a cultural product (book, movie, music) and argues why they’re weird or eerie. I’m not familiar with most of the things he discusses, and I haven’t read most of the theories or authors he’s mentioning, so that made it a bit more complicated. I simply didn’t understand all of it and felt lost throughout the second half of the book.

“We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature’s products into hideous new forms” (35)

Sometimes I think his observations and arguments seem a bit random, and in the end, I'm not very convinced that all of these works are either weird or eerie. I enjoyed most of the stuff he had to say about the weird, for sure, but it got harder and harder to follow his train of thought and where he was going with his arguments, some of which are a bit far-fetched (I mean, he argues on page 121 that love is an eerie agent because it’s a mysterious, unknown force with its own occult powers and capacities!) and some of which went way over my head. Again, I think that's largely because I haven't read most of the stuff he's talking about. And he didn't always succeed in making things easier to understand for the uninitiated.

Just to be clear, this is not a genre study! If you want that, you’re most likely better off reading the way too expensive “Weird fiction: a genre study” by Michael Cisco, which I intend to one day.

So yes, you would enjoy reading the first part of this book if you’re a weird fiction fan, but I wouldn’t call it an essential read or anything.