What is the weird? When we say something is weird, what kind of feeling are we pointing to? I want to argue that the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.

The weird, by contrast, is notable for the way in which it opens up an egress between this world and others

Lovecraft’s descriptions do not allow the reader to synthesise the logorrheic schizophony of adjectives into a mental image

The centrality of doors, thresholds and portals means that the notion of the between is crucial to the weird. It is clear that if Wells’ story had taken place only in the garden behind the wall, then no weird charge would have been produced. (This is why a feeling of the weird attaches to the lamppost at the edge of Narnia in C.S. Lewis’ stories, but not to Narnia proper.) If the story were set entirely beyond the door, we would be in the realm of the fantasy genre. This mode of fantasy naturalises other worlds. But the weird de-naturalises all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside.

the opposition between the quotidian and the numinous

The tracks are palimpsests

There is certainly laughter here, a renegade form of parody and mockery that one hesitates to label satire, especially given the pallid and toothless form that satire has assumed in British culture in recent times

After a while, Doyle comes, reluctantly, to accept his Fate — which in literarygeneric terms is to be propelled, by means of SF, into the nineteenth-century picaresque

The mise-en-abyme here produces a charge of the weird, both because of the scandal of an uncreated thing, and because of the twisted causality that has allowed such a thing to exist

in an atmosphere of louche decadence, the business and cultural elite linger like models or gawp like voyeurs as they stand around a swimming pool

precisely given what Jameson calls the “cabbage stink” of naturalism:

The misery of happiness, […] of Marcuse’s false happiness, the gratifications of the new car, the TV dinner and your favourite programme on the sofa — which are now themselves secretly a misery, an unhappiness that doesn’t know its name, that has no way of telling itself apart from genuine satisfaction and fulfilment since it has presumably never encountered this last.

In this lukewarm world, ambient discontent hides in plain view, a hazy malaise given off by the refrigerators, television sets and other consumer durables. The vividness and plausibility of this miserable world — with misery itself contributing to the world’s plausibility — somehow becomes all the more intense when its status is downgraded to that of a constructed simulation. The world is a simulation but it still feels real.

Some of the most powerful passages in Dick’s work are those in which there is an ontological interregnum: a traumatic unworlding is not yet given a narrative motivation

With Inland Empire, world-haemorrhaging has become so acute that we can no longer talk about tangled hierarchies but a terrain subject to chronic ontological subsidence. [...]