The Weird and the Eerie

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The "time-shifts" that enable all this, it's hinted, originate in the traveler's present (the year 2020, which was Aldiss's future as the book was published in 1973), but near the end of the book, having followed the Creature into the far North (as Victor Frankenstein did in Shelley's novel), he encounters a setting that seems to negate a difference between past and future and that suggests the questions of "agency" and emptiness/presence that Fisher sees as intrinsic to "the eerie. Lovecraft’s fictions, at their evocative best, are about a steady dethronement of anthropocentric models.

However, it is a much more accessible book than some others in the field, and I highly recommend it.Fisher retains a soft spot for that Žižekian mode of cultural criticism that links Marx to the medium of Lacan’s “weird psychoanalysis. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie.

Perhaps Fisher wasn't familiar with Aldiss's book, or for some reason didn't wish to refer to it in "The Weird and the Eerie," but I can't help thinking that readers who find that book and its subjects interesting might also be interested in reading "Frankenstein Unbound. 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? As the nights are drawing in and Halloween is just around the corner, it feels like time for a review of The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher.Fisher uses this as a starting point to present us with an enthusiastic and passionate smorgasbord-treat of novels, short stories, mainstream modern cinema and music: for example, we get references to MR James Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, The Fall’s album Grotesque, Brian Eno’s Ambient 4, HP Lovecraft’s novels, Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and the films, Under the Skin, Interstellar, The Shining, Mulholland Drive and Picnic at Hanging Rock. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Most Marxist critics are profoundly allergic to fantasy, with its tendency toward mythic underpinning and archetypal fixity — witness the comical contortions of Fredric Jameson to bracket off the entire genre in his book on science fiction, Archaeologies of the Future, essentially because he has decided that all hobbits are anti-historical bourgeois counter-revolutionaries.