Saga Reads
Subgenres/Horror/Weird Fiction

Weird Fiction

Weird fiction mixes horror, fantasy and science fiction into something strange that resists labels. Its signature is unease rather than shock.

Parent genre: HorrorPopularised by Weird Tales in the 1920s, renewed as the New Weird around 20002,503 books classified in Saga

Where weird fiction came from

The label was popularised by the pulp magazine Weird Tales, founded in 1923, which published H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard alongside a great deal of uncategorisable strangeness. Its roots were older: Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany and Robert W. Chambers had all written stories that fit neither the ordinary ghost story nor the adventure romance.

Through the twentieth century the weird survived at the edges, in writers such as Robert Aickman, who called his tales “strange stories,” and Thomas Ligotti. Then China Miéville's Perdido Street Station (2000) helped start the New Weird, a name taken up in a 2003 online discussion begun by M. John Harrison, for fiction that mixed genres in grotesque, politically engaged secondary worlds.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's anthologies The New Weird (2008) and The Weird (2011) gathered the tradition together, and Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation (2014) brought it to a wide audience. Since then it has become one of the most active corners of speculative fiction.

What separates it from neighbouring subgenres

Weird fiction is defined by a feeling more than a formula. It's the sense that the world is stranger than it looks, and that the strangeness can't be explained, fixed or entirely escaped.

Cosmic Horror

Cosmic horror is one strand of the weird, built around vast, indifferent forces. Weird fiction is broader: its strangeness can be beautiful, funny or political as well as terrifying.

Occult / Demonic

Occult horror's forbidden knowledge comes with rules: demons, rituals, damnation. Weird fiction's strangeness rarely has a system, and that's part of its unease.

Supernatural Horror

Supernatural horror usually has a recognisable threat, such as a ghost or a curse. Weird fiction's threat is often impossible to name, and sometimes it isn't a threat at all.

Magical Realism

Both put the impossible next to the ordinary. Magical realism treats it calmly, as part of life. Weird fiction treats it as wrong.

Horror tells you what to be afraid of. Weird fiction leaves you unsure what you just saw.

How it reads

Expect strange premises left partly unexplained, shifting tones, and endings that open more than they close. Settings range from ordinary towns with one impossible detail to vast, grotesque invented cities. Many books blend genres freely.

Weird fiction rewards readers who enjoy ambiguity. If you want every mystery solved, it can frustrate. If you like the feeling of a world that doesn't add up, there's nothing else quite like it.

Frequently asked

What is the New Weird?+

A label from the early 2000s for fiction, led by China Miéville, that mixed fantasy, science fiction and horror in strange, often grotesque worlds. It renewed interest in the older weird tradition.

Is weird fiction a kind of horror?+

Partly. It began on horror's side of the shelf and often frightens, but it also overlaps with fantasy and science fiction. Its focus is strangeness rather than fear.

Where should a new reader start?+

Annihilation is short, eerie and the most popular way in. For the classic tradition, try a collection of Lovecraft or Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows", and for the New Weird, Perdido Street Station.

What does weird mean in weird fiction?+

It uses the older sense of the word: uncanny, unearthly, touched by the supernatural. Lovecraft used "weird tale" for stories that evoke a sense of unknown forces.

Keep track of the long ones

Saga Reads follows your place across sprawling series and universes, remembers reading order, and asks Sage what to read next. Free to use.

Download for iOSGet it on Android