Weird Tales of a Bangalorean by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

You will start to see the weird around you and within yourself. You will look at paintings and sculptures and artifacts.Īnd a strange and wondrous and terrible thing will happen. Slowly you will discard genre trappings, hunting in books by decadents, romantics, modernists, post-modernists, Oulipoists and magic realists for that elusive rush. You, the weird fiction reader, will become an acolyte, an addict to that indescribable frisson only a really good weird tale can give you. That man never lived, those battles never happened, that drop of semen never fell on that leaf and floated down that river.īut in the midst of lies, truth can shelter, unmolested. Insofar as they claim to tell the truth, they may be debunked and dismissed.

Thus, scriptures, myths and legends, anything intended to be construed as veracious, none of these are weird. Lulled by the knowledge that this is ‘only a dream’, the reader relaxes her mental barriers and a seed of unrest, of anamnesis may be sown. There are many roads to the weird, in life and in death.īut the optimal vector of the weird is fiction. My theory is that the weird is a thing, it is a phenomenon that lurks in every corner, that hides in every heart. Thus: the airy, well-peopled fictions of Jonathan Carroll partake as fully of the weird as the stark, inimical cosmos evoked by Ligotti or the cryptic, secretive universe of Aickman. The weird can also be the wonderful there is no reason to exclude the miraculous, save for a matter of taste and weird fiction’s origins in the underworld of pulp horror. My theory is that the weird is simply reality with blinkers removed. Discomfort and dismay at the scale of reality, the shapelessness of it, the formlessness of fate and the implacability of doom. It is a ritual in which moments of unease are summoned. My theory is that weird fiction is an oblation, an invocation. Speak the phrase ‘bad numinous’ or merely mouth choice words such as ‘eldritch’ ‘awesome’ or ‘uncanny’ and he will appear in a flash of lightning and a whiff of brimstone, his obsidian wings curled around his emaciated body in delicious anticipation. My theory is that the weird fiction critic is a zealot.

Weird Tales of a Bangalorean by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy