Ariadne's Thread

 A woman must save her lover from becoming the Fairy Queen’s tithe to hell. A schoolboy is challenged by the devil to a battle of riddles. A woman leaves her husband and child to be with her lover, only to discover he is the devil taking her to hell. These are all the plots from traditional folk songs that feature prominently on albums by folk rock bands Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle. The folk rock movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s may not seem like the most obvious place to look for the Weird, but by drawing on what Robert MacFarlane would later call “The English eerie”, the British folk rock bands engaged with a tradition of British Weird that stretches back to the Child Ballads, filters through pioneering Weird fiction writers like M. R. James and Arthur Machen, and has a lingering influence today on books, films and music broadly categorised under the folk horror revival. For this reason, I argue that the classic folk rock albums of this era deserve ...

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...