![]() JS Breukelaar’s debut novel American Monster encompassed aspects of science fiction and horror and filtered them through a surreal lens she described her next novel, Alethia, as “part ghost story, part crime novel.” Her first exposure to weird fiction came through the movies she cited in particular “ The Wizard of Oz, Jane Eyre, but also Pan’s Labyrinth, Never-Ending Story, Cronenberg, Kurosawa…” For Breukelaar, the importance of weird fiction is less about defining it and more about what it does. ![]() ![]() It might blend genres or overturn their conventions, while still remaining clearly anti-realist.” When asked about it, she pointed out that the earliest examples of the form “predate the marketing categories of fantasy, science fiction, and horror.” For her, weird literature is “speculative fiction with a complicated relationship to genre. Is it a genre or an aesthetic? Does it represent a new literary evolution or a revival of underrated styles from a century ago? Sofia Samatar’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria is at once a deeply felt character study, a description of a world similar to (but clearly not) our own, and an unconventional ghost story–compelling work that occupies a host of categories. ![]() It is perhaps appropriate that weird fiction, like so many of the beings and landscapes that populate it, eludes easy description. ![]()
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