Reverie or epiphany, yes, but dark reverie or epiphany - not the lightness of “I wandered lonely as a cloud” but the weight of, for example, seminal early twentieth-century weird writer and artist Alfred Kubin’s sensation of being “overcome…by a dark power that conjured up before my mind strange creatures, houses, landscapes, grotesque and frightful situations.” Like what we loosely group into the genre of “horror,” The Weird can be transformative - sometimes literally - and it entertains monsters while not always see them as monstrous. With unease and the temporary abolition of science can also come the strangely beautiful intertwined with terror. As Lovecraft wrote in 1927, the weird tale “has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” Instead, it represents the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane - a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread” or “malign and particular suspension or defeat of…fixed laws of Nature” - through fiction that comes from the more unsettling, shadowy side of the fantastical tradition. 1923) is a story that has a supernatural element but does not fall into the category of traditional ghost story or Gothic tale, both popular in the 1800s. Lovecraft in his nonfiction writings and given early sanctuary within the pages of magazines like Weird Tales (est.
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