The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won’t find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon. The Weird is the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology

Award-winning author Michael Moorcock, from his introduction

“What is good about the majority of these stories is precisely that they leave you with many more questions than answers, the mark, in my view, of a superior kind of fiction... It does, in fact, what most of our best fiction does, irrespective of category.”

China Miéville, bestselling and award-winning author of Embassytown, from his afterword

“These texts, dead and/or not, burrow, and we cannot predict everything they will infect or eat their path through. But certainly your brain, and they will eat the books you read from today on, too. That is how the Weird recruits.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE WEIRD: TABLE OF CONTENTS Alfred Kubin, “The Other Side” (excerpt), 1908 F. Marion Crawford, “The Screaming Skull,” 1908Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” 1907Saki, “Sredni Vashtar,” 1910M.R. James, “Casting the Runes,” 1911Lord Dunsany, “How Nuth Would Have Practiced his Art,” 1912Gustav Meyrink, “The Man in the Bottle,” 1912 Georg Heym, “The Dissection,” 1913 Hanns Heinz Ewers, “The Spider,” 1915 Rabindranath Tagore, “The Hungry Stones,” 1916 Luigi Ugolini, “The Vegetable Man,” 1917 A. Merritt, “The People of the Pit,” 1918Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Hell Screen,” 1918 Francis Stevens, “Unseen---Unfeared,” 1919Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919 Stefan Grabinski, “The White Weyrak,” 1921 H.F. Arnold, “The Night Wire,” 1926H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” 1929Margaret Irwin, “The Book,” 1930Jean Ray, “The Mainz Psalter,” 1930 Jean Ray, “The Shadowy Street,” 1931 Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” 1933Hagiwara Sakutoro, “The Town of Cats,” 1935 Hugh Walpole, “The Tarn,” 1936Bruno Schulz, “Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass,” 1937 Robert Barbour Johnson, “Far Below,” 1939Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost,” 1941Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1941Donald Wollheim, “Mimic,” 1942Ray Bradbury, “The Crowd,” 1943William Sansom, “The Long Sheet,” 1944Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” 1945 Olympe Bhely-Quenum, “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts,” 1949 Shirley Jackson, “The Summer People,” 1950Margaret St. Clair, “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles,” 1951Robert Bloch, “The Hungry House,” 1951Augusto Monterroso, “Mister Taylor,” 1952 Amos Tutuola, “The Complete Gentleman,” 1952 Jerome Bixby, “It's a Good Life,” 1953Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl,” 1956 William Sansom, “A Woman Seldom Found,” 1956Charles Beaumont, “The Howling Man,” 1959Mervyn Peake, “Same Time, Same Place,” 1963Dino Buzzati, “The Colomber,” 1966 Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” 1967 Merce Rodoreda, “The Salamander,” 1967Claude Seignolle, “The Ghoulbird,” 1967 Gahan Wilson, “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be,” 1967Daphne Du Maurier, “Don't Look Now,” 1971Robert Aickman, “The Hospice,” 1975Dennis Etchison, “It Only Comes Out at Night,” 1976James Tiptree Jr., “The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Terrible Things to Rats,” 1976Eric Basso, “The Beak Doctor,” 1977Jamaica Kincaid, “Mother,” 1978 George R.R. Martin, “Sandkings,” 1979Bob Leman, “Window,” 1980Ramsey Campbell, “The Brood,” 1980Michael Shea, “The Autopsy,” 1980William Gibson/John Shirley, “The Belonging Kind,” 1981M. John Harrison, “Egnaro,” 1981Joanna Russ, “The Little Dirty Girl,” 1982M. John Harrison, “The New Rays,” 1982Premendra Mitra, “The Discovery of Telenapota,” 1984 F. Paul Wilson, “Soft,” 1984Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild,” 1984Clive Barker, “In the Hills, the Cities,” 1984Leena Krohn, “Tainaron,” 1985 Garry Kilworth, “Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands,” 1987Lucius Shepard, “Shades,” 1987Harlan Ellison, “The Function of Dream Sleep,” 1988Ben Okri, “Worlds That Flourish,” 1988 Elizabeth Hand, “The Boy in the Tree,” 1989Joyce Carol Oates, “Family,” 1989Poppy Z Brite, “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” 1990Michal Ajvaz, “The End of the Garden,” 1991 Karen Joy Fowler, “The Dark,” 1991Kathe Koja, “Angels in Love,” 1991Haruki Murakami, “The Ice Man,” 1991 (translation, Japan)Lisa Tuttle, “Replacements,” 1992Marc Laidlaw, “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio,” 1993Steven Utley, “The Country Doctor,” 1993William Browning Spenser, “The Ocean and All Its Devices,” 1994Jeffrey Ford, “The Delicate,” 1994Martin Simpson, “Last Rites and Resurrections,” 1994Stephen King, “The Man in the Black Suit,” 1994Angela Carter, “The Snow Pavilion,” 1995Craig Padawer, “The Meat Garden,” 1996Stepan Chapman, “The Stiff and the Stile,” 1997Tanith Lee, “Yellow and Red,” 1998Kelly Link, “The Specialist's Hat,” 1998Caitlin R. Kiernan, “A Redress for Andromeda,” 2000Michael Chabon, “The God of Dark Laughter,” 2001China Mieville, “Details,” 2002Michael Cisco, “The Genius of Assassins,” 2002Neil Gaiman, “Feeders and Eaters,” 2002Jeff VanderMeer, “The Cage,” 2002Jeffrey Ford, “The Beautiful Gelreesh,” 2003Thomas Ligotti, “The Town Manager,” 2003Brian Evenson, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” 2003Mark Samuels, “The White Hands,” 2003Daniel Abraham, “Flat Diana,” 2004Margo Lanagan, “Singing My Sister Down,” 2005 T.M. Wright, “The People on the Island,” 2005Laird Barron, “The Forest,” 2007Liz Williams, “The Hide,” 2007Reza Negarestani, “The Dust Enforcer,” 2008 Micaela Morrissette, “The Familiars,” 2009Steve Duffy, “In the Lion's Den,” 2009Stephen Graham Jones, “Little Lambs,” 2009J. Robert Lennon, “The Portal,” 2010 K.J. Bishop, “Saving the Gleeful Horse,” 2010

About the Author

THE WEIRD was compiled and edited by Hugo Award-winner Ann VanderMeer and World Fantasy Award-winner Jeff VanderMeer. They have recently co-edited such anthologies as Best American Fantasy; Best American Fantasy 2; Steampunk; Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded; The New Weird; Last Drink Bird Head; Fast Ships, Black Sails; and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. They are the co-authors of The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals: The Evil Monkey Dialogues. Jeff’s latest books include Finch, a World Fantasy and Nebula Award-finalist; the short story collection The Third Bear; the non-fiction collection Monstrous Creatures; the coffee table book The Steampunk Bible (co-authored with S. J. Chambers); and the writing guide Booklife. Ann is the editor-in-chief of Weird Tales magazine, the oldest fantasy magazine in the world, and is a regular contributor to the popular science fiction and fantasy web-site io9. Together, they have been profiled by National Public Radio and online at WIRED. com and the New York Times’s Arts Beat blog. Both active teachers, they have taught at the Clarion and Odyssey writing workshops and the teen summer camp Shared Worlds, where Jeff serves as the assistant director. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with too many books and four cats.

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