Weird fiction often attempts to inspire awe as well as fear in response to its fictional creations, causing commentators like Miéville to say that weird fiction evokes a sense of the numinous.Īlthough weird fiction has been chiefly used as a historical description for works through the 1930s, the term has also been increasingly used since the 1980s, sometimes to describe slipstream fiction that blends horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Weird fiction is sometimes symbolised by the tentacle, a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European folklore and gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers such as William Hope Hodgson, M. Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction.

China Miéville defines weird fiction thus: Weird Fiction is usually, roughly, conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (horror plus fantasy ) often featuring nontraditional alien monsters (thus plus science fiction ).ĭiscussing the Old Weird Fiction published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock says, Old Weird fiction utilises elements of horror, science fiction and fantasy to showcase the impotence and insignificance of human beings within a much larger universe populated by often malign powers and forces that greatly exceed the human capacities to understand or control them.

John Clute defines weird fiction as a Term used loosely to describe Fantasy, Supernatural Fiction and Horror tales embodying transgressive material. Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Stars Collide by H.P. Munro