Author Picks: 6 Books in the “New Weird” Genre

If good art makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange, then this 2018 translation of SISYPHEAN is a masterpiece—one consisting of both amorphous creatures of far-future genetic experimentation and the banality of an office job. Surrounded by endless fields of mud, “the company” occupies a deck a hundred meters high, and on it, Hanishibe, Umari, and “the worker” must navigate the secrets and grotesqueries of their grim world. Opaque and unmooring, Torishima’s story invites readers into his extraordinarily weird world of rich sensations and social commentary—dressed up in elaborate cosmologies and, uh . . . loose organs.

There was a moment in time when surrealism joyfully leaked from fine art into prose and back again, and I firmly believe that Anna Kavan is the unsung heroine of 20th-century surrealist literature. Nowhere does a chilling (no pun intended) and dreamlike vision of society’s fragility come together more vividly than in ICE, in which a frail young woman is pursued mercilessly as an Ice Age descends on the entirety of the world. Moving seamlessly between reality and fantasy (as in fantasy . . . like . . . there are dragons), Kavan showcases the best of science-fiction worldbuilding while maintaining an emotional resonance one expects to find in high-brow literary fiction. It’s a harmony that will haunt readers long after they turn the final page, and it remains a go-to for when I want to show my students the endless possibilities that come with “rejecting” genre. 

Transgression, chaos, and a certain je ne sais quoi dominate the pages of Yelena Moskovich’s 2016 novel, in which a Greek chorus of trafficked women (all named Natasha) find themselves in limbo, watching jazz singer Béatrice and Mexican actor César fall into a labyrinth of menace, ephemera, and—of course—sex, in modern France. With a cult status among the MFA crowd, THE NATASHAS makes coherent plot seem embarrassingly blasé, and remains a testament to both the power of experimentation, and the audience that it can find.

The New Weird genre is slippery at best, and purists might say that Ben Marcus’s 2012 novel, which had a mixed reception, is too firmly anchored in literary fiction to benefit from the freedoms of Weird lit. I’d loudly disagree with this perspective: Marcus's exceptional command over prose deserves recognition beyond the confines of conventional literary norms, and by venturing into uncharted territories (in THE FLAME ALPHABET the sound of children’s voices casts a plague over adults, causing their faces to shrink and their bodies to wither), he’s become a bit of a New Weird hero. Filled to the brim with Judaic lore, body horror, and apocalyptic ennui—the tonal love child of Cormac McCarthy and Roald Dahl—I can’t imagine a reader whose bookshelf this one doesn’t belong on.

What more can be said about the living king of New Weird that hasn’t already been sung by millions of adoring fans, major producers, and conservationists alike? The Southern Reach trilogy examines the mysteries surrounding Area X, a seemingly immeasurable patch of earth within a barrier that divides . . . dimensions? Time? The laws of nature? The first installment in the series, ANNIHILATION is a delicate and gorgeously arranged travelogue following four researchers who have volunteered to go into Area X, despite the fact that no one who has entered has ever returned. (Which isn’t to say that things bearing resemblance to people who have gone in haven’t come back. . . .) Director Alex Garland’s 2018 adaptation was a wholly new and, in my opinion, undercelebrated vision of this novel, and it sparked a renewed interest in not only VanderMeer’s works (the metafictional CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN is a particularly joyous one), but in the possibilities of the New Weird genre writ large.

Hallucinatory and bizarre, interweaving the mythical and the excruciatingly real, Awad’s third novel (Simon & Schuster’s first acquisition of her work) is somehow about chronic pain, creative mutiny, and Shakespeare. When a college theater professor finds herself on the brink of losing everything, having suffered injuries from an accident that cost her her acting career, with a crumbling marriage and a dependence on painkillers getting worse by the day, mysterious figures appear, offering to help. If you guessed that things are not quite as they seem, you’d be correct; as one eloquent Goodreads review put it: “Mona Awad is a f*ckin weirdo, writing books for other f*ckin weirdos. And I love her for it.”

I’ve been delighted to watch readers guess at my debut novel’s genre as reviews come in: Some describe it as literary—and they’re not wrong!—but I mainly see “horror” and “thriller.” There are horrifying and thrilling things that transpire in the world of Delphi Baxter, whose final days working in a theme park that she’s been devoted to for most of her life are spent feeling that something isn’t quite right. Animatronics that seem somehow involved in grisly deaths. Troubling memories of a shed arise. Feats of engineering glitches, and optical illusions go ever so slightly wrong. And somewhere, outside the park gates, letters exchanged between a brother and sister reveal a looming danger. There’s a horse in a house party, and a horse-like-thing in a cave. Echoes. Errors. Heat. None of those things, or the mystery at the heart of it all, add up to something that belongs in one tidy genre. And while I understand that the vocabulary we have to describe stories is limited, maybe there will come a day when books like mine can simply go by Weird. Maybe that day is already here.