The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
Language: English
Pages: 1152
ISBN: 0765333627
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.
Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled.
The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon.
The Weird is the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology
ones, small ones, ones hard to distinguish. With each of them the same thing happened. One kept thinking that now the Inscriber must surely be already empty, but then a new cluster with lots of parts would move up, fall down, roll in the sand, and lie still. With all this going on, the Condemned Man totally forgot the Traveller’s order. The gear wheels completely delighted him. He kept wanting to grab one, and at the same time he was urging the Soldier to help him. But he kept pulling his hand
the mirrors. Powdering, searching for wrinkles, tinting and curling her long hair. Smiling, fluttering eyelashes, making deliciously delicate little moves. Swirling daintily, posturing before her own perfection. Sometimes, when the callers came, she sent word that she was not at home. It seemed silly, somehow, to leave the mirrors. And after a while, there weren’t many callers to worry about. Servants came and went, some of them died, but there were always new ones. Laura and the mirrors
allowed his eyes to close and his head to sink back into the headrest. At last. The first thing he noticed was the quiet. It was deafening. His ears literally began to ring, with the high-pitched whine of a late-night TV test pattern. The second thing he noticed was a tingling at the tip of his tongue. It brought to mind a picture of a snake’s tongue. Picking up electricity from the air, he thought. The third was the rustling awake of his wife, in back. She pulled herself up. ‘Are we
the Rhinoceros Beetle really capable of being amused by something? For a moment I felt I might have been mistaken in regard to him, as if his dullness might veil completely different characteristics which he hid for who knew what reason. I tried to find the light again, but his gaze extinguished, as normal. Perhaps the fleeting impression was caused merely by the lighting or by my own state of mind. ‘Will you go to a memorial service in one of the temples? What religion do you belong to?’ I
afternoon. Justice appeared at my door and waited while I put on jeweled dark spectacles and a velvet biretta like Morgan Yates’s. ‘Very nice, Wendy,’ he commented, amused. I smiled. When I wore the black glasses he was not afraid to look me in the face. ‘I don’t want the others to see my bandeau. Anna will steal it back,’ I explained, lifting the hat so he could see the feathered riband beneath. He laughed at that. I don’t hear the aides laugh very often: when I was small, their voices