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The Machine Book of Weird
In 2020 life took a sudden interior turn. Since then critics and writers have wondered what the literature of the lockdown might look like. The possibility lingers that it may have already been written.
A century ago, writers throughout the supposedly civilised world realised their once familiar, domestic world had changed profoundly and began to describe it in singular unsettling ways. In a rare act of literary criticism, Freud used the word ‘unheimlich’ to describe the disquieting short fiction of his time.
What we might call ‘the weird’ instead of the ‘unheimlich’ emerges again as a central concern of our locked down culture. We are all too aware that our interior reality — strangely similar to the anxious languor of the late Victorian or Edwardian drawing room — can be viewed suddenly and shockingly from the outside. Indeed it must be. Not only have these stories endured they are now more relevant than ever. Machine Books has collected the best of these weird tales — the funny, the horrific and the simply disturbing — to offer insight and commentary on the insane times we are living through.
A century ago, writers throughout the supposedly civilised world realised their once familiar, domestic world had changed profoundly and began to describe it in singular unsettling ways. In a rare act of literary criticism, Freud used the word ‘unheimlich’ to describe the disquieting short fiction of his time.
What we might call ‘the weird’ instead of the ‘unheimlich’ emerges again as a central concern of our locked down culture. We are all too aware that our interior reality — strangely similar to the anxious languor of the late Victorian or Edwardian drawing room — can be viewed suddenly and shockingly from the outside. Indeed it must be. Not only have these stories endured they are now more relevant than ever. Machine Books has collected the best of these weird tales — the funny, the horrific and the simply disturbing — to offer insight and commentary on the insane times we are living through.
420 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 29, 2023
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