{"id":3498,"date":"2017-01-07T23:45:45","date_gmt":"2017-01-07T23:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/?p=3498"},"modified":"2017-01-07T23:45:45","modified_gmt":"2017-01-07T23:45:45","slug":"sneerwell-verjuice-school-weird-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/sneerwell-verjuice-school-weird-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Sneerwell and Verjuice: The School for Weird Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

What would you choose for your daily dose of weird fiction? Insane Lovecraftian gibberings as minds break down on exposure to cosmic horror? A growing sense of futility and failure when the truth of the world reveals itself? Or perhaps a lingering, bitter-sweet recognition that we are not meant to know what existence really is, but that we must persevere regardless? And while we’re asking questions, what has Peter Cushing<\/strong> got to do with writer Sheridan Le Fanu<\/strong> and his great-uncle? Come inside, stranger, and sit yourself down on this oddly-shaped iron chair…<\/p>\n

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a man earlier today, assailed by definitions of weird fiction<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Why We Don’t Know What We’re Doing<\/h2>\n

Greydogtales<\/em> is not one of those gosh-darned clever literary sites. We don’t worry about genre questions a lot, but we like to poke a stick at things now and then. Last year we ran five particular ‘weird fiction’ features which garnered an unexpected amount of attention, and we thought we’d revisit those articles very briefly, a final farewell. And add new stuff, some of our usual semi-scholarly quotes, and peculiar trivia, because\u2026 because it’s what we do.<\/p>\n

Each of those features considered aspects of weird fiction and its writers, from old-timers H P Lovecraft<\/strong> and Fritz Leiber<\/strong>, to current explorers John Langan<\/strong> and Michael Wehunt<\/strong>. In the process we travelled with some unexpected bedfellows, such as Lodovico Ariosto<\/strong> and G K Chesterton<\/strong>. We’ll start gently with a musing or two on the subject at hand…<\/p>\n

There is no definition of the genre, if it is a genre at all. Maybe it’s an animal that you only recognise when you see it, different for each person. Apart from the broad themes we mentioned at the start, ‘weird fiction’ can include:<\/p>\n