New Weird

Weird carries with it a variety of meanings that have been granted to it over the centuries. The most interesting contexts for it, however, are those it has been used for most recently, and the contrast between the Old Weird literature and the New Weird.

The Weird of Weird Tales magazine published in the 1920’s was mostly concerned with new sorts of alien and existential horrors. They were less preoccupied with monsters of old and more interested in the idea of hidden societies. The true difference between the monsters in the likes of Count Dracula and Frankenstein, and the unknowable entities of the world of Lovecraft, is one of metaphor.

Monsters of the Victorian era were representations of very human failings. Frankenstein is a fairly straightforward metaphor of the dangers of scientific progress without thought for the moral philosophy behind it, and a tale of a neglectful father/creator figure. The monsters that live in the pages of the Weird, however, are much more obscure than that. They represent hidden worlds and knowledge beyond human comprehension. They stand for no horrible truths about the human condition, but about how little truth we actually know. Monsters of the weird are often not malicious, they simply operate on a moral compass that humans have no frame of reference for.

One of Lovecraft’s more famous stories, The Color Out of Space, is not scary simply because of the effects it inflicts upon the surrounding landscape and nearby family. The Color is scary because even by the end of the story, we still have no idea what the color was, why it came, why it left, what it wanted, or if it wanted anything at all. The Color simply was there, then was gone, and it left an otherworldly disease that threatens to slowly poison the rest of the area around it.

Victorian horror dealt with the concrete, and the human failings in man. Our sadness, our rage, and our fear was made manifest in the old monsters. But the creatures of new weird went beyond such trifles, and in doing so created an amoral world beyond the scope of our knowledge, showing us how little we knew in the first place.