Cosmic spiders. Octopus gods. Back-alley narcotics that let you access other people's dreams. Ravaged, forlorn landscapes strewn with rubbish, populated only by beings so alien, so distinct from anything you've ever experienced before, so novel in their horror that you can't even find the words to describe them.
That would be as good a place as any to start if we're going to talk about Weird Fiction and the New Weird – the idea that something could be so utterly numinous or terrifying that we can't even put it to words. Which presents a challenge because we suffix the word 'Weird' with this other word called 'Fiction' which is literally about putting words to ideas to tell stories. But we've come to the central philosophy of the Weird, if there is one.
The Weird is all about stories so singular and unique that they wouldn't really fall into any of the other speculative fiction categories very comfortably. Through that, it essentially becomes a sort of umbrella-genre for a variety of different subgenres that populate spec-fic. The three most iconic writers in the history of this genre would be Robert E. Howard, most well known as the founding father of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre but a significant contributor to the early weird mythos, Clark Ashton Smith, a poet and closet pulp fantasist who wrote a stunning amount of very austere, majestic yet terrifying short stories and H.P. Lovecraft, whom I'm sure you've all heard about.
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In fact, it is Lovecraft with his puissant, tentacular cosmic deities who toy with the lives of hapless mortals below, who provided a sort of base for this fledgling genre to grow as many writers, including Howard and Smith began to contribute to the Lovecraftian 'mythos', an often inconsistent but consistently horrifying pantheon of cosmic gods, goddesses, demons and those which cannot be named. This reference to Lovecraft-Smith-Howard as being the originators of this genre will be a controversial statement among Weird enthusiasts as many writers before dabbled in the tropes we've all come to identify as being characteristic of the weird. Among them are William Hope Hodgson with his Night Lands and George MacDonald.
To say that there is, or ever was, any strong sense of homogeneity within this genre would be to go against what the idea of the weird represents. True, there are some things writers in this tradition love returning to: cosmic space-gods, aliens who neither want to be our friends or to shoot at us with ray guns because their concept of life is so unique and removed from ours that it wouldn't even be conceivable, ancient grimoires that would drive any curious reader mad if her mind isn't strong enough to encounter these ideas, tainted family bloodlines, long dead civilizations come back to haunt us and so on.
