Editorial: What Weird Horror Reveals
Weird horror for us has a sticky quality. It tends to stay around long after the story is over. All successful horror can linger in the mind of the reader, but weird horror for us goes one step further. Instead of confirming the nightmares you already have, it reveals the wrongness that has always existed around you by letting you peek through the fabric of the world.
Weird horror forces us to interrogate the boundaries between the body and the mind, as well as the relative position of a story’s protagonist: in space and time, within society and anti-society, in the meatspace universe and the memory palace that the self can simultaneously occupy.
Body horror becomes a tool of oppression, as well as transformation. Grief becomes a well that, yawning open, births floral monsters. The binds of propriety and complacency tighten to the point of sundering, at which point the devils come out to play. Strange phenomena become even stranger as you fight against them, only to give in.
Everything is slightly off after reading such a story. Everything is disturbing—even little children, as you will see for yourselves in Within the Dead Whale.
After meeting The Clockwork Sisters, you’ll never stop wondering what’s hiding inside someone’s beautiful skull. Or what the Dissection of a Mermaid might reveal about your own well-hidden grief.
They say something is better than nothing but what if The Trade is that you are now constantly reminded of what you lost? What if bringing terrifying justice to those who deserved it came with the sound of a Vinegar-Gurgle? Would you open your ears to hear it?
When you entered The Tub for a few moments of peace, you wouldn’t have guessed that this peace (and your body) could stretch for eternity. You’ll experience the deliciousness of motherhood like nobody else if you wish To Serve the Emperor. The Final Harvest of those motherly actions might look like plants, sprouting from a rotting corpse.
In these stories, all kinds of borders become porous and permeable. The self merges and clashes with the environment and the other. The body and mind ooze between interconnected vessels. Reality and unreality become two sides of the same cursed coin as they enter into communion with the Weird, to emerge into something beautifully grotesque and wholly unrecognizable.
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