The New Weird: The Complete Guide to Uncanny Fiction

China Mieville's sprawling novel of New Crobuzon, a filthy, magnificent city of khepri and garuda and remade criminals, arrived like a detonation: a book that was fantasy, science fiction and horror at once and refused to apologize for any of it. Its grotesque invention, its political anger and its sheer imaginative density gave a scattered movement its flagship and its rulebook. After it, the boundaries between the speculative genres never looked quite so solid again.

Jeff VanderMeer's tale of a expedition into Area X, a stretch of coast where nature has been rewritten into something gorgeous and wrong, is the New Weird's purest expression of the sublime and the horrifying fused. It resists explanation on principle, trusting dread and wonder over answers, and Alex Garland's film adaptation translated that irreducible strangeness to the screen without blunting it. Few works make the unknowable feel this seductive.

Remedy's Control is set in the Oldest House, a shifting brutalist government building that contains impossible spaces and an invasive resonance called the Hiss, and it plays like a lovingly built homage to the whole tradition, part SCP Foundation, part Annihilation, part House of Leaves. Its bureaucratic dread, its reality-warping architecture and its refusal to fully explain itself make it the medium's finest new-weird statement. The building itself is the monster.

Robert Eggers's stark black-and-white two-hander about lighthouse keepers descending into madness, myth and drink is weird fiction by any measure: unstable reality, folkloric horror, bodies and minds coming apart, all rendered with hypnotic craft. That a film this strange found a wide audience shows how far the uncanny has crept into the mainstream. It is proof the New Weird sensibility now belongs to cinema as much as to the page.