Ariadne's Thread

An introductory note: my reading this year has been taken up with submissions for the Arthur C. Clarke Award—for which I am serving as a judge for 2021—and I type this wearing a formidable Cone of Silence which prevents me from talking (and typing?) about novels specifically. Thus, the following list will be free of long-form prose. Weird comes in many aspects, however…   Attack on Titan   Attack on Titan is a visceral, disturbing anime series about giant humanoids who all but decimate human society. The survivors shelter within a walled city, and desperately try to repel the giants and find out what, exactly, they are. Twists and turns ensue. The first series is a little slow-paced—at least, for a show about bone-chomping gigants—but stick with it and Attack on Titan will deliver some of the most memorable images that will ever haunt your dreams.   Devilman Crybaby Speaking of chomping, Devilman Crybaby is another anime that centers around a group of students who become embroiled in

Read Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls The genre of this book is impossible to pin down, as it incorporates aspects of gothic, sci-fi, thriller, criminal investigation and…time travel?!  A serial killer is able to murder young women across time, utilising a ‘haunted’ house, and his only survivor begins to piece it together.  You would think that under the weight of so much genre, the narrative would collapse, but the consistent threads are enough to fascinate and pull you through the chaos of interweaving narratives.  Which, incidentally, force you to ponder the nature of hauntings, memory, trauma and time.  Usually, I struggle with crime novels, because while I acknowledge that a disproportionate amount of crimes happen to women, crime fiction can often devolve into a sadistic catalogue that may as well be entitled “Girls, and the awful things to do to them.”  Thus, a balance between realism and good storytelling can be hard to find.  Beukes, however, gives the victims of the text brie

Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves Surprisingly, I read little ‘weird’ fiction in 2020. I mainly found myself drawn towards large-scale fantasies like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, longing to escape the world by delving into something completely unreal. However, what I did do was re-read House of Leaves, a text I deal with in my thesis. It’s difficult to know where to begin on Danielewski’s first novel. An interwoven narrative of multiple voices, it centres around the space of the House on Ash Tree Lane, inhabited by the Navidson family. The way Danielewski utilises the gaze, space, and typography blend together into a hypnotically terrifying tale that heavily features the mythological concept of the Labyrinth. Its voice is a parody of academia, each concept or symbol never what it seems, and even if it is, it rallies against interpretation to the point of obsession. Reminiscent of internet searches and the way information searching can spiral, Danielewski’s novel is a fragmente

The Weird has always seemed to me as a particularly fruitful way of engaging with reality, which is itself frequently pretty weird. This felt especially true for 2020, a year that showed us just how fragile the fabric that makes up our everyday lives and our consensus reality can be. So it felt very fitting to be reading the fiction of Marian Womack. Womack is an Andalusian-born writer and translator living in England. Her short story collection Lost Objects (2018) sets out her major project as a writer – to use the Weird as a way to confront the Anthropocene. The short stories span a variety of modes, from the near future post-apocalyptic to planetary SF to myth, fairy tale and alternate history. Genre seems to be more a starting point for Womack, from which the Weird inevitably emerges as the story pushes against or confronts the generic assumptions of its starting mode. Dreams and visions erupt into biologically rigorous science fiction stories, the inner lives of the protagonists m