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 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

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

a requiem for the Sixties: a dark parable about the thanatropic drives which youth messianism could nurture.