The Weird and the Eerie

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He wrote beautifully, of course, but the act of writing is secondary to his observation of the world, the ability to see the world aslant, to make of the the ordinary something extraordinary. He takes the eerie from lazy, everyday usage and gives it conceptual rigor: places are eerie; empty landscapes are eerie; abandoned structures and ruins are eerie. It makes sense of these quieter emotional ranges of creeping dread or inevitable doom which Gothic criticism, screaming about body horror and torture porn, has largely failed to address.

This idea characterizes that specific moment of folk horror in 1970s British culture as something much more complex than a retreat from the overtly political avant-gardism of the 1960s, inflecting that impulse subversively into the very bucolic landscapes so often used as the basis for retrenchments of Englishness in conservative thought. This is just what Lynch does in his late films, when the celluloid itself seems to almost judder out of the gate and the immersive illusion of cinema is continually challenged by gaps and holes, the jarring discords of un-synced sound and image. Right at the start of his book, Fisher acknowledges that Freud’s unusually chaotic essay is full of brilliant possibilities but ends with an interpretation “as disappointing as any mediocre genre detective’s rote solution to a mystery. This wonderfully provocative dismissal sets Fisher up to articulate an alternative set of terms outside ossified Gothic criticism and dictates the wholly new conceptual structure of his book.

lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets. In this essay, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes.

In this new book, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes.In this extended assay, author Mark Fisher argues that the Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties.