Shows
The Left Page & Here Be MediaEpisode 48 - I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird of R Murray Gilchrist. W/ Daniel PietersenIn this episode I have on Daniel Pietersen, editor of the collection "I am Stone", part of the British Library Tales of the Weird series. In this series of tales by R. Murray Gilchrist, we talked about the editing process, this fascinating author and his quite weird and fun tales, along with questions of writing, violence and relating to place and time. It was a brilliantly fun and in-depth chat, on an author I had frankly never heard of, but I am better off knowing now, I hope you enjoy it and find it a good discovery...
2021-11-231h 01
2020-08-3108 min
WeirdwardsJenni Fagan - When Words Change the Molecular Composition of WaterJenni Fagan - When Words Change the Molecular Composition of Water by Pietersender
2020-08-1723 min
2020-08-1012 min
2020-08-0211 min
2020-07-2507 min
WeirdwardsBuried by the Dead - Jen McGregorA bit of a different reading this week with a blend of gothic horror and dark humour. What I love about this story is the way it gets the feel of the remote countryside in Western Scotland, the persistent and petrichorean sensation of not-quite-rain on dense vegetation. The character's voice is also wonderfully rendered; she's self-absorbed but also very self-aware, conscious of the absurdity of her position. A wonderful story to read.
Buried by the Dead was read from Haunted Voices, which can be bought directly from the publisher here - https://www.hauntpublishing.com/books/haunted-voices
2020-07-1207 min
WeirdwardsDaniel Pietersen - Balehouse, A FragmentDaniel Pietersen - Balehouse, A Fragment by Pietersender
2020-07-0505 min
2020-06-2814 min
2020-06-2109 min
WeirdwardsWilliam Hope Hodgson - The Voice in the NightWilliam Hope Hodgson - The Voice in the Night by Pietersender
2020-06-1400 min
WeirdwardsMichael Cisco - The Watchful Eyes of CopsThe Watchful Eyes of Cops is another very short piece, more a work of flash rather than short fiction. Like a number of Weirdwards readings, I was flicking through books to try and find something suitable when the pages of Hexus almost fell open at this very apposite story of police state surveillance and brutality. It's tempting to call this speculative fiction because of its presentation but, of course, it's neither speculative nor fiction.
More info here - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/weirdwards-the-watchful-eyes-of-cops-michael-cisco/
2020-06-0703 min
WeirdwardsKirsty Logan - We Can Make Something Grow Between The Mushrooms And The SnowI love the way the three different voices work in this piece, each concerned with their own goals. Even though there’s no actual dialogue there’s still a conversation happening, even if it feels like neither is really listening to the others. As interesting as this is narratively, it makes it really fun to read aloud.
More info here - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/06/06/weirdwards-we-can-make-something-grow-between-the-mushrooms-and-the-snow-kirsty-logan/
2020-05-3109 min
WeirdwardsKristi DeMeester - Like Feather, Like BoneI first read this story in the first volume of Year's Best Weird Fiction from Undertow Publications. It's one of those pieces that is almost non-existant, barely three pages long, yet which glows with poetic imagery. The delicate bones and feathers that the story's built from contrast sharply with the dense, sharp-edged sense of grief at its heart.
More info here - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/05/29/readings-like-feather-like-bone-kristi-demeester/
2020-05-2405 min
WeirdwardsFrancis Stevens - Unseen UnfearedIn this short story, Stevens introduces us to her narrator Blaisdale who, after dining with a detective friend, encounters the strange Dr Frederick Holt. Holt, as part of his researches into colour microphotography, has unveiled a previously unseen world of “centipedish things, with yard-long bodies, detestable, furry spiders that lurked in shadows, and sausage-shaped translucent horrors”. In fact, at face value, the plot reads very similar to Lovecraft’s From Beyond. Indeed, it’s not a huge assumption to believe that Stevens was inspired by Lovecraft’s tale when she wrote hers.
Yet, like many assumptions, it’s completely incorrect.
More info he...
2020-05-1740 min
WeirdwardsCamilla Grudova - RhinocerosI first came across Camilla Grudova's work at the Edinburgh Book Festival, when I attended a joint reading between her and Helen McClory (whose A Voice Spoke To Me At Night I have also read for this series). I was instantly captivated by her claustrophobically intimate tales of a vague Mitteleuropa that seemed to summon up both Kafka and Beckett, by way of Orwell's steamed-cabbage tenements, with a very unique voice.
More info here - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/05/10/readings-rhinoceros-camilla-grudova/
More info - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/05/10/readings-rhinoceros-camilla-grudova/
The Doll's Alphabet is available her - https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-dolls-alphabet
2020-05-0914 min
WeirdwardsFranz Kafka - A Report to an AcademyLike a lot of the readings in this series, the contemporary relevance of A Report to an Academy only really came to me as I read the story. Red Peter the ape is trapped, after having been captured by hunters, and wants to find "a way out". That way out comes, however, not through fleeing (either literally or metaphorically through death) but due to a personal change. Red Peter doesn't want to be an ape in a cage so he stops being an ape and, due to that, he finds that "if the terms are met, later on the promises...
2020-05-0200 min
WeirdwardsLaura Mauro - PtichkaPtichka, which means “little bird” in Russian, is not an easy story to read. It talks powerfully about the structural violence that pervades our society, about how women and immigrants and the poor are at best ignored, at worst actively reviled. It talks about, to quote myself again, “hope and loss, and of how sorrow is boiled into madness by the friction between them”.
More info available here - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/04/26/readings-ptichka-laura-mauro/
Sing Your Sadness Deep is available here - https://undertowpublications.com/shop/sing-your-sadness-deep-paperback
2020-04-2500 min
WeirdwardsR Murray Gilchrist - The ReturnThe Return is an interesting story. Taken at face value it is a story of abandonment and hubris, where a somewhat self-centred suitor returns from an over-long quest to make their fortune only to find his beloved dead from grief. Yet, as I argue in “I No Longer Live In This House – The liminality of undeath in the works of R Murray Gilchrist", there is enough subtle imagery to create a more sinister subtext. As with some of his other tales, most prominently The Crimson Weaver, Gilchrist delights in using plant symbolism to add depth and meaning to The Return; yarr...
2020-04-1800 min
WeirdwardsHelen McClory - A Voice Spoke To Me At Night,Helen McClory’s Mayhem & Death is one of my favourite books from the past few years. You can read my more in-depth thoughts in the review I wrote for Sublime Horror but the way McClory takes a selection of short works and flash fiction, all ostensibly unlinked, and build something quite remarkable from them is mesmerising. A Voice Spoke To Me At Night is a longer example of the pieces of flash fiction that sit between the short story Souterrain and the novella-length Powdered Milk.
More info here - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/04/10/readings-a-voice-spoke-to-me-at-night-helen-mcclory/
2020-04-1000 min
WeirdwardsShirley Jackson - The LotteryThe Lottery is a taut, short work about how even (perhaps especially) people who consider themselves normal can quite easily perpetrate atrocities if they consider those atrocities to also be normal. It shows how tradition and repetition - unthinkingly doing the things we have always done - are ways to distance ourselves from responsibility and accountability, from blame. The story's bleak, abrupt finale reminded me very strongly of a phrase in Helen McClory's Bound to Be: "community means all ignoring the same cruelty".
More info here - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/readings-the-lottery-shirley-jackson/
2020-04-0500 min
WeirdwardsClark Ashton Smith - A Night In MalnéantThis story tells, like Lovecraft's The Outsider, of a nameless narrator's wanderings, this time to the "dim and dubious" city of Malnéant where bells "tolled recurrently, sometimes faint and far off, and sometimes with a loud and startling clangor that seemed to come almost from overhead". Here the narrator comes across funeral preparations for someone he may once have known...
More info here - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/readings-a-night-in-malneant/
2020-03-2900 min
WeirdwardsHP Lovecraft - The OutsiderIn opposition to his more openly bigoted work where the noble protagonist is elevated above what Lovecraft sees as the wretched morass of daily life, ‘The Outsider’ shows the outside world as normal and happy. The scene that the Outsider stumbles across, and eventually disrupts, is described as “gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry”. It is the narrator, Lovecraft himself, that is an abject, pathetic being – “a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape”.
More info here - https://pietersender.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/readings-the-outsider-hp-lovecraft/
2020-03-2700 min