The Weird and the Eerie

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The eerie repetitions of Red Shift means “the reader is abducted into mythic time,” Fisher suggests, as if time itself has been traumatized and locked into compulsive repetitions, and time has slowed or clogged up. Marx, after all, reached for the language of the supernatural to grasp at the spectral substance of surplus value or commodity fetishism. Fisher separates each concept in the book’s two sections: both include brief definitions and explores what he defines as two closely related modes of thought. R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christoper Nolan.

He wrote beautifully, of course, but the act of writing is secondary to his observation of the world, the ability to see the world aslant, to make of the the ordinary something extraordinary.In this essay, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes.

For Fisher, the weird points towards ‘wrongness’, carefully pointing out that it is not the thing itself that is wrong, but rather our conception of the world. It makes sense of these quieter emotional ranges of creeping dread or inevitable doom which Gothic criticism, screaming about body horror and torture porn, has largely failed to address.lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets. Both have often been associated with Horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. However, of the familiar things, I was given a bit more to chew on with how I think about and consider them.

Our western culture really promotes that we need to resolve or feel resolved about things especially if they are to be considered acceptable on scale. The "time-shifts" that enable all this, it's hinted, originate in the traveler's present (the year 2020, which was Aldiss's future as the book was published in 1973), but near the end of the book, having followed the Creature into the far North (as Victor Frankenstein did in Shelley's novel), he encounters a setting that seems to negate a difference between past and future and that suggests the questions of "agency" and emptiness/presence that Fisher sees as intrinsic to "the eerie.Dick’s cardboard pulp worlds glitch and judder, revealing to their terrified narrators the ramshackle structure of reality. In this extended assay, author Mark Fisher argues that the Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Rather, he suggests that the weird and the eerie ‘allows us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. Gothic criticism, of which there is a vast boiling vat these days, has been rendering down the ectoplasmic energy of “spectrality” into sound bites for 25 years, while critics seem to arrive pre-loaded with cookie-cutter cribs from Freud’s “The Uncanny,” in which they laboriously explain yet again that the term unheimlich means rather more literally the unhomely in German, but that the “homely” is housed inside the “unhomely,” the outside in the inside, the strange in the familiar. In this new essay, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes.

In film, David Lynch was always “wild at heart and weird on top,” from his early animated short films up to Inland Empire. This is just what Lynch does in his late films, when the celluloid itself seems to almost judder out of the gate and the immersive illusion of cinema is continually challenged by gaps and holes, the jarring discords of un-synced sound and image. Stranger Things was quite weird, although a little too soft-focused and retro to be fully paid up, but The OA was definitely out-and-out weird. The weird and the eerie work at this from the other direction, Fisher suggests: “they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside.We are left in the wake of a vanishing, sensing an eerie present absence, a hooded figure watching from somewhere else. The most celebrated instance is the late 1950s series, Quatermass and the Pit, in which the archaeological discovery of fossilized Martians under London reveals humanity’s xenobiological origins. LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin.