(Roughly) Daily

In a review of five recent books, Robert Baskin considers the genre of “weird fiction”…

On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, the British science fiction and fantasy writer M. John Harrison [accomplished author, Booker judge, and long-list nominee this year] asked a question on Third Alternative magazine’s messageboard: “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?” This incited a taxonomic fury, as writers, fans, and amateur scholars attempted to define this new subgenre. Harrison eventually offered his own definition; the New Weird, like stories published in the namesake early twentieth-century pulp magazine Weird Tales, is a mix of “horror, sf, and fantasy,” with an emphasis on the horror…

[Baskin usess the books in question to review the genre’s history (Poe, Lovecraft, Edith Wharton [!]) and its current state (Miéville, VanderMeer, et al.); he concludes…]

… So why read this shit? Why reissue it? 

Weird fiction is a literature of crisis. The main narrative move of every important Weird fiction story is the Weird intrusion, the appearance of the new and wrong object or sensation or practice that does not belong. These intrusions challenge and endanger the protagonist’s sense of metaphysical stability. In the King in Yellow, the Weird intruder is the titular play—the madness of the text refuses to remain on the page. China Miéville argues that this awareness of crisis makes Weird Fiction uniquely open to interpretation: a “leeway for readings against the ideological grain is part of what makes Weird Fiction such an ongoingly fascinating field.” The Weird is not just a literature of fear and repulsion; it also always includes wonder and attraction. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” – Lovecraft’s contribution to the Weird Mount Rushmore – depicts the state’s extermination of a group of racially ambiguous New Englanders who made the mistake of breeding with fishy foreigners. Despite this, the story ends in sublime ambiguity [spoiler for a nearly century-old story to follow]. The protagonist, who has spent the rest of the story in hateful terror of the Innsmouth locals, discovers that he is one of them, and in my favorite passage in all of Lovecraft, decides to go to the sea with his cousin and embrace The Weird: “We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’hanthlei, and in that layer of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.” What was once feared is now cause for exultation. The move between terror and wonder recurs throughout the Weird corpus—if you’re attuned to its Weird frequencies…

A literature for our times: “‘We Shall Dwell Amidst Wonder and Glory For Ever’: On Weird Fiction,” from @clereviewbooks.bsky.social.

* Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

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As we engage extremity, we might recall that i was on this date in 1946 that Santa Claus Land, the world’s first themed amusement park, opened in Santa Claus, Indiana…

In 1941, Louis J. Koch visited the town of Santa Claus in Indiana. He found it sad that some children would visit this town eager to meet Santa only to find that he was not there. This fueled his desire to create a Santa Claus Land park where kids could see Santa any time of the year. Due to World War II, construction didn’t begin until August 1945.

The park opened on this day in 1946 with free admission, a toy shop, toy displays, a restaurant, a few rides and of course the jolly old elf himself. Later, a deer farm was added.

In 1955, a new section, Pleasureland (now known as Rudolph’s Reindeer Ranch) was added. As the park grew, the focus of the park grew as well focusing on families rather than just children.

By 1984, the park added a Halloween and a Fourth of July section to the park and changed its name to Holiday World. In 1993, the Koch family added the Splashin’ Safari Water Park. In 2006, during the park’s 60th anniversary, Holiday World added a Thanksgiving section.

– source

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