The Weird Fiction That Saw Me Through 2020 - Jonathan Thornton

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 mirroring the transfigured landscapes created by human destruction of the environment. The collection’s title implies a haunting, but not of traditional ghosts or spectres. Womacks’ stories are haunted by extinct species, our animal kin whom we have destroyed and are incomplete without. Characters dream about what it would be like to touch a cat or hear the dawn chorus. These losses are paralleled by the recurring images of collapsing relationships, miscarried births, missing or dead loved ones. Womack’s ghosts are the ghosts of the Anthropocene, our lives rendered uncanny and disconcerting by the lack of what we ourselves have destroyed.

These concerns resurface in Womack’s debut novel in English, The Golden Key (2020). An ambitious mixture of Victorian detective fiction, fairy tale drawing on the work of George MacDonald, and gothic mystery, The Golden Key weaves these modes together into an exploration of societal grief and the conflict between rationalism and the supernatural. As such it draws on much early Weird fiction from the Victorian era, particularly in its exploration of the Norfolk fens as a liminal space that challenges the iron-clad rationality of its protagonist, a place where local mythology, folklore and superstition exert an almost-physical presence. But what makes The Golden Key so striking is the way in which Womack links the Victorian gothic to her contemporary concerns of the Anthropocene. Womack explicitly draws parallels between the early days of capitalism and industry under the Victorians, coupled with imperialist notions of humanity’s sovereignty over nature and the Other, and the destruction meted out by humanity during late period capitalism. The disruptions to the environment wrought by Victorian industrialists, the changes of land use brought about by the building of factories and the displacement of agriculture are at the heart of the uncanny in The Golden Key, and so are shown to be haunting modern attitudes that see the environment as a resource for humans to exploit. It is these concerns that make Womack’s novel and short fiction so resonant today, especially as we read them in the throw of a global pandemic whose spread has been so thoroughly shaped by our human activities and attitudes. 

2020 has also been a year of seeking comfort in older works of fiction. Handheld Press’s two anthologies Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women 1890 – 1940 and Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women 1891-1937, both edited by noted scholar of the Weird Melissa Edmundson, are fantastic collections that seek to redress the gender imbalance of much history of the Weird by highlighting the innovative and varied contributions that women writers made to the Weird during its formative years. Both collections feature stories by women writers who frequently contributed to the pulp magazines, but also writers not usually associated with the Weird such as Stella Gibbons and L. M. Montgomery. Taken together, the stories are easily the equals of more well-known male writers such as M. R. James, Arthur Machen or H. P. Lovecraft, and demonstrate the surprising range of these writers working in the early days of the genre. Of particular note is May Sinclair’s ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’, included in the first anthology, which demonstrates just how formally experimental the Weird could be in the early days. Its explicit exploration of sexuality, pleasure and addiction anticipates Clive Barker and would have given Lovecraft the cold sweats.

Like many others I have also watched a lot of TV over lockdown, most of it not particularly Weird. In particular, I feel that adaptations of popular New Weird texts like China Mieville’s The City And The City, adapted for screen for BBC Two by Tony Grisoni and Tom Shankland (2018), and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, adapted by Alex Garland (2018), both demonstrate that if cinema and TV are going to successfully engage with the New Weird they need to actually invent a New Weird approach to cinematography. I do credit binging Star Trek, Babylon 5 and Red Dwarf with my partner and my cats for helping me maintain my slender grip on reality throughout such a challenging year.