Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1 Read online

  YEAR’S BEST

  WEIRD FICTION

  VOLUME ONE

  GUEST EDITOR

  LAIRD BARRON

  SERIES EDITOR

  MICHAEL KELLY

  AN IMPRINT OF

  ALSO BY LAIRD BARRON AND MICHAEL KELLY

  By Laird Barron

  The Imago Sequence & Other Stories

  Occultation

  The Light is the Darkness

  The Croning

  The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

  By Michael Kelly

  Songs From Dead Singers

  Scratching the Surface

  Ouroboros

  Apparitions

  Undertow & Other Laments

  Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell, Lewd I Did Live

  Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I

  Shadows & Tall Trees

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Also by Laird Barron and Michael Kelly

  Foreword — Michael Kelly

  We Are For the Weird — Laird Barron

  The Nineteenth Step — Simon Strantzas

  Swim Wants to Know If It’s As Bad As Swim Thinks — Paul Tremblay

  Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron — A.C. Wise

  Year of the Rat — Chen Qiufan

  Olimpia’s Ghost — Sofia Samatar

  Furnace — Livia Llewellyn

  Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us? — Damien Angelica Walters

  Bor Urus — John Langan

  A Quest of Dream — W.H. Pugmire

  The Krakatoan — Maria Dahvana Headley

  The Girl in the Blue Coat — Anna Taborska

  (he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror — Joseph S. Pulver Sr.

  In Limbo — Jeffrey Thomas

  A Cavern of Redbrick — Richard Gavin

  Eyes Exchange Bank — Scott Nicolay

  Fox into Lady — Anne-Sylvie Salzman

  Like Feather, Like Bone — Kristi DeMeester

  A Terror — Jeffrey Ford

  Success — Michael Blumlein

  Moonstruck — Karin Tidbeck

  The Key to Your Heart Is Made of Brass — John R. Fultz

  No Breather in the World But Thee — Jeff VanderMeer

  Other Notable Works of Weird Fiction

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Michael Kelly

  * * *

  FOREWORD

  Michael Kelly is the editor of Shadows & Tall Trees. His fiction has appeared in Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Weird Fiction Review, and others. As editor he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Fantasy Society Award.

  Welcome to the inaugural volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

  What is weird fiction?

  The simple answer is that it is speculative in nature, chiefly derived from pulp fiction in the early 20th century, whose remit includes ghost stories, the strange and macabre, the supernatural, fantasy, myth, philosophical ontology, ambiguity, and featuring a helping of the outré. Weird fiction, at its best, is an intersecting of themes and ideas that explore and subvert the laws of Nature. It counts among its proponents older and newer writers alike: Robert Aickman, Laird Barron, Charles Beaumont, Ambrose Bierce, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter, Neil Gaiman, Shirley Jackson, Kathe Koja, John Langan, Thomas Ligotti, Kelly Link, H. P. Lovecraft, and many others.

  Weird fiction is not specifically horror or fantasy. And weird fiction is not new. It has always been present. That’s because it isn’t a genre, as such. This makes the prospect of defining weird fiction difficult, and perhaps ill advised. Weird fiction is a mode of literature that is present in other genres. Weird tales were penned long before publishers codified and attached genre labels to fiction. You can find weird fiction in literary journals, in horror magazines, fantasy and science fiction periodicals, and various other genre and non-genre journals and anthologies that are welcoming to speculative fiction of the fantastique.

  There’s been renewed interest in weird fiction, spurred by the likes of Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Hand, Margo Lanagan, China Mieville, Reggie Oliver, Jeff VanderMeer, and Kaaron Warren, (to name a few), and by the publication of anthologies such as American Fantastic Tales, Black Water, Black Wings, The New Weird, The Uncanny, Strange Tales; and journals such as Black Static, ChiZine, Shadows & Tall Trees, and Weird Fiction Review.

  Weird fiction is here to stay. Once the purview of esoteric readers, it is enjoying wider popularity. Throughout its storied history there has not been a dedicated volume of the year’s best weird writing. There are a host of authors penning weird and strange tales that defy easy categorization. Tales that slip through genre cracks. A yearly anthology of the best of these writings was, in my estimation, long overdue.

  Each volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction will feature a different guest editor. This, I believe, gives the series a fresh and unique quality, as each editor will leave their indelible aesthetic on the book. After all, the weird, perhaps more so than any other mode of literature, invites fresh perspectives and is open to multiple interpretations. What’s weird for you isn’t necessarily what’s weird for me. Thus, the possibilities are exciting, and each volume will ring with a distinct voice.

  My short list for who I wanted to edit the inaugural volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction was really short. It had one name: Laird Barron. Barron is, in my estimation, (along with Caitlin R. Kiernan, and Ramsey Campbell), a current master of the weird mode. And he’s a student of the weird. His knowledge of both the past masters and the current up-and-comers made him the ideal candidate to helm this first volume. He is a sharp and inimitable critic, and a unique and powerful writer and editor. So, I was extremely pleased that Laird agreed to edit the inaugural edition. As you will soon note, it is a remarkably diverse, eclectic, and potent collection of tales.

  Laird, it must be said, is a true professional. I couldn’t have asked for a more gracious and patient co-editor. It was a joy working with him to shape this volume. I owe him a debt of thanks.

  It should be noted that I had initially planned on writing a summation of the year in weird fiction. While I did read upwards of 3,000 stories for this volume, there were several publishers who, despite several entreaties from me, did not respond to requests for material for consideration in the book. Thus, I felt a summation of the year, as lofty and admirable as that would have been, would feel incomplete.

  I sincerely hope that this inaugural edition is successful enough to warrant a second and subsequent volumes. Already, even before publication, we are getting push back from buyers who are ill-informed about the long and fine tradition of the weird tale. We are, dear reader, at your mercy. I’m confident you will enjoy this initial offering, and hope you will consider it an annual “must buy.”

  Finally, thank you to all the backers of the crowd-sourcing campaign. Truly, we could not have done this without you. You now hold the fruits of our labor in your hands. You did good! Thank you!

  So, without further ado . . . welcome to the weird!

  —Michael Kelly

  Pickering, Canada

  June 23, 2014

  Laird Barron

  * * *

  WE ARE FOR THE WEIRD

  Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Croning, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in Upstate New York.

  Morbid and fatally-curious primates that we are, we are for the weird.

 
Telling ghost stories was popular during my youth in Alaska. Whenever my family and friends gathered around the campfire, and as the shadows lengthened and the hour grew late, inevitably someone would begin a round robin tournament of eerie tales. My grandmother occasionally spoke about a fateful Thanksgiving, back in the late 1940s. While the assembled relatives kibitzed, she went down into the cellar to fetch a jar of preserves. The cellar wasn’t much more than a pit reinforced by rotting timbers. Raw earth lay exposed where Grandpa hadn’t gotten around to finishing the retaining wall. That hole in the ground was always cold, always damp, and dark, utterly dark but for the light from the kitchen that cast a feeble glow on the moldering shelves.

  As the story goes, Grandma reached for a jar and at the moment the cellar door slammed shut. She started up the steps, feeling her way in the pitch blackness. A hand, cold as meat from the locker, clamped around her ankle. She began screaming. Of course, within moments, family members flung open the door and came to her aid. As the kitchen entrance was the only way into or out of the cellar, no one took her story seriously. They attributed her claims of being accosted by a lurker beneath the stairs to panic and claustrophobia. Within a few minutes her ankle swelled and bruised into a recognizable pattern of black and blue fingerprints. Cue the Theremin.

  Doubtless there was a rational explanation, but Grandma never forgot that night, and neither did my mother, who retold the account on numerous occasions. It became something of a family legend that persisted for decades. Such is the power of the unknown upon our imaginations. Humans are pathologically obsessive creatures. We like bright things, such as fire and blood. We fear the dark. We invented cautionary tales to enhance our species’ survival rate, but also because we’re enraptured by questions of mortality and have been since one of our ancestors split his neighbor’s skull with a rock, since the shrieks of carrion birds and the moan of wind through night-cliffs caused us to wonder if the animating force of meat could manifest as spirits of vengeance or suffering. We don’t know, can’t know, so we tell stories to give shape to the black chaos that surrounds our specks of light, our tiny islands of stability.

  We are for the weird; its presence is ubiquitous in pop culture. Look at the folklore generated by its manifestation in the physical world: The Mary Celeste. Ourang Medan. Phineas Gage. Edgar Cayce. Judge Crater. MKULTRA. Cattle Mutilations. Satanic Murders. Hollow Earth. Little People. Poltergeists. Doppelgangers. Stigmata. Cult of the Comet. Campfire ghost stories. This stuff may well be imprinted on our DNA. Given our fascination with paranormal phenomena and unsolved mysteries, I am perplexed that it has taken this long to conclude there’s a need for a year’s best weird amidst similar catalogues of fantasy, science fiction, and horror.

  Someone recently asked me what I consider the greatest weird tale of them all and I said, “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood. But that’s from my limited perspective and it’s not entirely true. There are too many shades of weird, too many striations, and too many layers in the fossil record of this particular literary vein to proclaim “greatest” or “best” with any authority. I can only point and say, “Well, I like that a lot. It surprised me. It filled me with a sense of unease. I looked at the world differently, more suspiciously, after I read it.”

  Years of life on the range in Alaska biases me toward the starker, darker aspects of fantastic literature. I gravitate toward the cold and the violent, the notion that sentient life is fragile, impermanent, and possessed of a fragmentary piece of the big picture at best. Brutal wilderness-scapes and ominous pastorals make me happy. The darker side of the weird is where it’s at— the seam that intersects with the sinister styling of Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, and Robert Aickman.

  Blackwood’s story is precisely the kind of work that resonates with my own experiences. The story is simple. Two men traveling along a remote stretch of river share an inconclusive encounter with an ineffable force. In a handful of pages Blackwood transforms the bucolic and mundane countryside into a hostile and alien environment. Not unlike another quintessentially weird tale, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Blackwood’s “The Willows” sends the reader down the rabbit hole with expert finesse. Quietly, relentlessly, and inevitably, the facade of normalcy is stripped to reveal a sliver of the raw universe.

  The protagonist and his companion make guesses as to the provenance of the malign presence, or presences, within the river and the willows. But they cannot apprehend its nature, for it is beyond their reckoning. All they know is that for them, true north is no longer true. They have glimpsed something much larger than themselves, and it is frightening. Frightening because it is inexplicable and also because man is an animal not far removed from the cave. The human brain for all its adaptability doesn’t react well when its reliance upon a codified set of assumptions is challenged. Held in thrall by this immense and apparently malevolent entity, the travelers are reduced to the most primitive roots of our species. The men cower and speculate, even broach the notion of supplication via human sacrifice. Same as it ever was—we venture into terra incognita in trousers and shoes instead of animal pelts, bearing machined knives and compasses instead of flint spearheads and relying upon the direction of the setting sun for navigation. The unreasoning fear of the dark and the unknown, of the other and of othering effects, remains lodged in the heart of modern Homo sapiens. Blackwood’s story speaks to that deeper part of us like an animal handler coaxing some wild beast from its den, and it has done so for many decades.

  Of course, the weird informs a great deal of genre literature, especially pulp era material. Take a closer look at the John Carter series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Robert E. Howard’s Conan saga and you’ll find yourself in as similarly strange territory as the poor bastards caught on Blackwood’s nightmare vision of the Danube. It’s simply that Burroughs and Howard hew from a radically different narrative angle. John Carter and Conan meet the weird and the ineffable head-on with a bloodthirsty gusto. Anything can be hacked with an ax or a sword or dominated by the will of a strong man.

  Burroughs work exemplifies the Sir Arthur C. Clarke maxim that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. In Burroughs’ John Carter series, Barsoom (Mars) habitability is maintained by ancient machinery, its inhabitants fight wars in the name of old traditions and older gods aboard vessels equipped with anti-gravity devices. He gives a bizarre and baroque pageant of sensory excess—alien customs, alien mores, and aliens, all of it a hair’s breadth from good old Terran reality, a madman’s counterfactual odyssey. Howard gave us Conan, a Wildman from the north whose freebooting journey across Hyboria is equal to Carter’s in its expression of the baroque and the alien. Lizard-loving sorcerers; effete, cannibalistic underground civilizations; dinosaurs and demonic powers; and creatures from beyond the grave add up to equal parts fantasy, pulp, horror, and weirdness. The upshot of these comparisons being that the weird isn’t confined to a narrow spectrum. Much like horror and fantasy, its remit is remarkably broad and overlapping. Certain stories from Lord Dunsany and MR James to Shirley Jackson, Jack Vance, or Stephen Graham Jones qualify.

  I knew what I was in for when series editor Michael Kelly tapped me for the job of assembling this inaugural volume. Genre definitions are often nebulous, if not useless, and none moreso than the weird. Ask buyers for bookstore chains. Some of them will protest it doesn’t even exist. That’s all right—we know it exists, you and I. It’s related to, yet palpably separate from, other genres. Neither fish nor fowl, the weird is either a subset of horror and fantasy literature, or it’s the fathermother, or you’re going to disagree entirely. As with any genre, the parameters of the weird are shaped and defined by the participants—editor and writer alike. In some respects, grappling with a serviceable definition is akin to the three blind men describing an elephant. Perhaps in this case, it’s a diver in murky depths who spies the last meter of a trailing tentacle and innocently supposes he’s ap
prehended a common specimen of octopi. The rest of the mighty Kraken, coiled within its lair, waiting. We catch mere glimpses of this beast called the weird and think we know it, can safely catalogue it.

  Happily, there’s a built in mechanism to deal with such difficulties. Among the more remarkable aspects of this year’s best series, is the fact that it will evolve with each new volume and develop not unlike a sequence of snapshots. Every editor that rides herd on this series is going to brand it with his or her unique perspective. As I said at the top, I’m a horror guy, a connoisseur of the bleakly fantastic, the gothic, and the macabre. My choices reflect those predilections. Next year will feature a new guest editor with a wholly different slant on the subject. It will be, as they say, a completely different story.

  That leads directly to another question I’ve received: What did I look for when selecting the stories of Volume One? My sense of a weird tale is that it contravenes reality in some essential manner; that it possesses at least a hint of the alien; and that it emanates disquiet or disorientation. If I may quote the answer from an interview I did with Weird Tales about what kind of story fulfills the weird criteria:

  “When there’s a sense of dislocation from mundane reality; the suspension of the laws of physics, an inversion or subversion of order, a hint of the alien. Weird stories hit a different register than other genres. There’s the experience of frisson, but it’s a different thrill than the variety I receive from a good horror tale. Which is all to say, it’s personal. I perceive the weird as a distinct literary tradition—one intimately related to fantasy and horror, and that relationship is fluid, maybe a little complicated.”