The Weird

Weird works unsettle, decentering humanity on a cosmic scale and, at other times, breaking down the human barriers erected around race, class, gender, and sexuality. Featuring a comprehensive editors’ introduction to the Weird as a mode engaging with forms of knowledge, transcendence, and resistance, this collection offers a broad-reaching discussion of Weird fiction, film, art, and thought. Its 31 essays explore theoretical and philosophical applications of the Weird, such as Black Metal Theory, and key Weird themes and tropes such as cosmic horror, radical embodiment and sensation, dark ecological speculation, and forms of alterity. Essays are highly varied in period focus and subject matter, ranging from early Weird works by William Hope Hodgson and Conan creator Robert E. Howard, to the surrealist paintings of Leonora Carrington, to more recent works by David Lynch, Octavia Butler, and Yorgos Lanthimos.

Carl H. Sederholm is Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University. He is the editor of The Journal of American Culture, the co-author of Poe, the "House of Usher", and the American Gothic, and the co-editor of several volumes, including Adapting Poe, The Age of Lovecraft, Lovecraft in the 21^st Century, and Forgotten Disney. He is also the author of multiple essays on authors such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Shirley Jackson.

Kristopher Woofter teaches in the English Department at Dawson College, Montréal. He is the editor of the journal Monstrum and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated volume Shirley Jackson: A Companion. He is co-editor of American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition, and Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema. Other publications include essays on F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and the documentaries The Hellstrom Chronicle and Into Eternity.