We talk plenty about genre in these pages, and there are of course many accepted genre terms we use a lot – horror, scifi and fantasy are pretty well defined on the whole. After that we come to our subgenres, our steampunk, cyberpunks, body horror, folk horror, grimdark and the like.
And then, of course, there are broader terms coined – the uncanny, the fantastic and, today’s topic, weird fiction. This little bit of terminology might be one of the trickiest to nail down of the lot – but we’re going to give it a good go today, as well as serving up some tricks and techniques and a reading list to send you away with.
Weird is the word
Let’s tackle the idea of weird fiction from a few angles to kick off with. You might consider it something more overarching than our usual triumvirate of horror, fantasy and SF – any of those categories could also be weird fiction in themselves.
