The Weird and the Eerie

Product Information

This explains the embrace of Lovecraft’s weird realism by philosophers challenging phenomenological paradigms, or leaning toward the radical end of “Thing Theory,” where things escape routine imprisonment inside the implicit hierarchy of the subject/object binary.

John Harrison and China Miéville, briefly rallied to this banner in 2003 before morphing into something else (although the critics still lumber around with the term). If you have any interest in the state of the world, you must read Fisher's 'Capitalist Realism' - the best book on its subject and in its class. But Fisher leaves space for the lesser-known late works of Kneale in the 1970s, the effectively creepy haunted house tale The Stone Tape and the last, despairing Quatermass series from 1979, made on the cusp of the collapse of postwar Keynesian consensus and the death rattle of ’60s utopianism as Thatcher came to power. Dick’s cardboard pulp worlds glitch and judder, revealing to their terrified narrators the ramshackle structure of reality. The book displays his signature knack for reading popular culture (principally music, fiction, and film) in an expressive, demotic way that is still vigorously political and philosophical.Fisher separates each concept in the book’s two sections: both include brief definitions and explores what he defines as two closely related modes of thought. Fisher retains a soft spot for that Žižekian mode of cultural criticism that links Marx to the medium of Lacan’s “weird psychoanalysis. However, of the familiar things, I was given a bit more to chew on with how I think about and consider them.

Fisher’s sensitive, sustained reading of Alan Garner’s opaque and mysterious novel, Red Shift (1973), shows that he can practice literary criticism too. THIS BOOK WAS PUBLISHED in the United Kingdom on December 15, 2016; Mark Fisher died on the January 13, 2017. Our western culture really promotes that we need to resolve or feel resolved about things especially if they are to be considered acceptable on scale. Something moves in these apparently empty or vacated sites that exists independently of the human subject, an agency that is cloaked or obscure.The uncanny, Fisher says, puts the “strange within the familiar” and “operates by always processing the outside through the gaps and impasses of the inside. R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you My Lad” or Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, an album composed to evoke the East Anglia of his childhood?

It makes sense of these quieter emotional ranges of creeping dread or inevitable doom which Gothic criticism, screaming about body horror and torture porn, has largely failed to address. In this new book, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes. What motivates the birds to flock together in such implacable malignancy in Daphne du Maurier’s short story, or in Hitchcock’s re-Oedipalized adaptation? Numerous times as I read, I remembered Brian Aldiss's novel "Frankenstein Unbound" as an example of various parts of Fisher's thesis.

Early on, Fisher rinses Freud’s essay Unheimlich (uncanny/unhomely) as ‘disappointing as any mediocre genre detective’s rote solution to a mystery’ by only putting the ‘strange within the familiar’. P. Lovecraft, but it has long slithered free of those confines, and now leaves a trail not just straight across the internet, but on the page and in mainstream TV shows and movie screens. In this case, his final book, The Weird and the Eerie, discusses at length what is weird and eerie, this philosophy of aesthetics. This idea characterizes that specific moment of folk horror in 1970s British culture as something much more complex than a retreat from the overtly political avant-gardism of the 1960s, inflecting that impulse subversively into the very bucolic landscapes so often used as the basis for retrenchments of Englishness in conservative thought.