Splendors and Spectacles: Stories on the Weird Side

by Daniel Gower

It is an undeniable fact that some of the best known works of literature contain a good bit of weirdness. The Iliad and the Odyssey have gods and monsters, Beowulf has a man-eating monster and a dragon, Dante's Inferno is a literal tour of Hell, Hamlet has a ghost, and Macbeth has witches. So weird fiction is an honorable tradition. It has a noble pedigree and an aura of respectability. None of that is necessary to justify the reading of it, however. Weird stories are just plain fun to read. So here are eleven of them to edify and entertain you, an outre medley of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. An alien with an enormous lifespan takes a disturbing look at our past and our present, a man is disturbed by what he sees when he gets a look at our distant future, a female superhero has a most unusual origin story, a group of men and women carry out a quest to petition the god of their world to save their race from extinction, a rapist learns the horrifying truth about his intended victim, a family is forced to play a harrowing board game on Halloween, a young man and woman are chosen by a strange being to bring down a horrendous villain, and an ordinary guy is assigned the huge responsibility of managing a vitally important space station in a series of humorous tales, in which he encounters a clone orgy and his child by an alien woman he has never even met, among other oddities. So take a break from the ordinary, the mundane, the prosaic. Get a weird feeling; you'll enjoy it. On top of that, it's a good idea to become well acquainted with the weird, because when something weird comes along you're going to want it to be on your side.

279 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 8, 2019