#weirdlit

[creamcitywriter]

Excerpt, from finished short story The Watch, The Watched.

Brief: The Watch, The Watched, follows a nondescript person looking for a sense of identity by breaking into peoples homes and observing them as they go about their daily lives. They are a hundred different aspects of a hundred people and none of them are authentic or organic.

T begins to sweat. It’s not good, it’s not enough. The mimicked body language is pulled primarily from a four minute observation waiting in line. When T watched the house, there was no studying of body language and movement. It was watching the cars leave and who drove what. There was no glint at intimacy and hidden traits.

T needs to be able to see them, and so they spend the rest of the day in the garage going through tool boxes. Nothing taken, just seeing what’s there and writing it down before making one last lap of the home, putting back anything that was moved, grabbing a yogurt and four granola bars, and returning to the attic.

They sit in the corner above the entrance from the garage, wait until 4:17 when the husband comes home, and draw a circle. Listening to him navigate the home, mapping out high traffic areas. Above the bedrooms, the bathroom, and the shower. The kitchen and living room. All of it. The wife comes home at 4:57 and they order takeout. T pays no attention to them for the rest of the night and struggles to fall asleep. If only T knew how the husband slept, in what position and how rigid his limbs laid, sleep and comfort would be found, but in these new plastic molded pre-fab developments no hidden rooms or passageways exist. Nothing that would allow them to observe the residents in full yet remain unseen like there are in older parts of the city. Everything built in the exurbs can only be seen as it allows itself to be seen, and to demand that there is more is an unthinkable perversion.

It is a big risk, drilling tiny holes to peer through, but necessary. How can T understand and embody this man without seeing him? All the white shavings from the drywall on the ceiling are vacuumed up and the vacuum is put away precisely where it was found, with the cord dangling precisely in the same manner it was found. T grabs a cheese stick, granola bar, and a handful of snap peas before returning to their lair and peering through.

T squared the drawn circles and put a hole in each corner and center, five separate vantage points. They sit in the corner above the garage entrance. When the husband returns T lays on their stomach and shoves an eye to the hole, positioning the head just right until they can make out the shoulder and head of the husband's high-vis sweatshirt. Rotating their awkward body 90 degrees to the hole to their left and peering and T makes out the front of the husband’s body.

From each of these pov’s T sees a fraction of a body, never the whole man at once. But still T adds the individual to the whole; the right shoulder moves and rests like this no matter what the left shoulder and arm are doing, and vice versa.

The Wife comes home and T does the same. Gleaning the essence of this man and woman from drawn and quartered movements.

#creative writing #excerpts #short story #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing #my writing #litblr #lit fic #literary fiction #idk what genre this is #fuck it it's weird fiction idc #weird fiction #weirdlit #probably not weird lit #not quite horror #horror fiction

[emptynowhere]

"I thought about the denigrated dialectics of nature. I thought about the falling rate of prophecy. The house continued its interrupted collapse." -China Mieville, The Dusty Hat in Three Moments of an Explosion

#china mieville #quotes #weirdlit

[liketheflamereadsthewood]

#ecological weird #weirdlit #sci fi #cli fi #eco-fiction

[gortash]

pacing around my room at 2am like I have got to make my ocs more fucked up and weirder

#etxt #woe cannibalism be upon ye. or something #idk man i just want to make my writing weirder in general. i got too into weirdlit and splatterpunk at some point

[lastparty]

paradise rot is enjoyable and well executed but i just dont actually think im the target audience for weirdlit. all i can do is meet it where its at and nod respectfully

[americaneldritch]

Arkham Community College: American Literature 101: The King in Yellow is a Fool 

In the first episode of Arkham Community College, professor Aladdin Collar explores the original design of the King in Yellow, as envisioned by illustrator and author Robert W. Chambers, and how the original design was Xeroxed into oblivion as it was reprinted. 

#The King in Yellow #Robert W. Chambers #american literature #arkham #miskatonic university #lovecraft #horror #weirdlit #aladdin collar

[aladdin]

New Arkham Community College just dropped! 

I cover the spread from Blake rioting and setting shit on fire to his fisticuffs with a royal Dragoon to his pre-development of the Superhero genre. 

#William Blake #spiritualism #revolution #marvel comics #graphic novels #Namor #bill everett #America a Prophecy #europe a prophecy #weirdlit #Gothic Fantasy #cosmic horror #superheroes

[darrenhopes]

A strange encounter with a fly begins a spiralling series of ever more distressing and hallucinatory experiences for an alcoholic father trying to come to terms with the loss of his wife many years earlier. As he tries to make sense of the time that has passed since her death and the strange and terrifying apparitions his world begins to unravel. Is it his drinking? Lack of sleep? Is this madness? Or something else?

Bzzzzzz

First of a series of illustrations to accompany a short I am writing.

His Window i

#Illustration #writing #artwork #short story #fly #ink #digital painting #art #weirdlit #drawing #writing and drawing #mixed media #tradigital

[christapagliei]

Call Your Saints

We thought they were crows as they swung low in the sky. Lula, Rose, Boy and I were coming home from an away game. Boy was driving. It was a long drive back, and the sun had set. The road had been bending next to the river for a while now. A mix of empty and active warehouses lined the waterfront. Like looming specters they hung in the January air; a few with windows winking with light. Trees were bare, if they were there at all.

The river banked, as rivers do. I had been staring out the window daydreaming- but movement caught my eye.

“Birds.” They were moving together in harmony. My mother says they vote sull'ala “on the wing” that’s how they know where to go next. And so the net of birds throbbed echoing each other's movements.

Then I looked again.

I’m a city boy but I’ve read a book, so I know that starlings are the ones who do this little psychic dance. They call it a murmur. Starlings are small birds, they look like black pools of oil spattered down carelessly. But these were not small birds. They were innumerable creatures of significant size- wingspans of five feet across dipping and darting I’m lazy formation over the cold, polluted river.

I looked behind us and in front of us. Why were we the only car on the road?  By this time even Boy had noticed the creatures as they seemed to sail above us. I made brief eye contact with my cousin, he feigned grit and I swallowed. Boy’s eyes darted back to the road just in time to swerve around a creature stopped and hulking on the asphalt. Our car’s tires smoked, and the thing heaved with heavy labored breaths in the road, as if we had stunned him. The girls yelled and they slammed their fists into the headrests to shake us from our shock. The creatures enourmous wings flapped and it rose, two legs like a man’s extended out of a dark cowl from which two red eyes gleamed. I grabbed the St. Christopher medal from behind the rearview mirror “Give us a hand here. We’re travelers. Or call St. Michael because I think this is the Devil.”

Boy shifted into gear and accelerated. “Well, either way hang on St. Christopher” I thought as the car pushed forward. The air was thick with with the dark creatures now, and they undulated in formation around us. They kept up with us too easily. The odometer climbed. The car did its best. It lurched and groaned. There was the sound of claw on metal issuing a high screech that echoed in your bones. I was sure that they’d be on us any minute, and my stomach soured, dropping against my spine. They were so near, reaching, their inky blackness and eyes like pools of rust and light. “When they reach us, maybe I can distract them enough that the others can get away...” But then, a minor Miracle, the old car lurched forward a little faster, and the spectres began to lag behind and slowly drop out of sight. Even after they had all been left far behind us and each beast had become a black dot and disappeared from view, Boy didn’t slow the car. The drive usually takes fourty minutes home but we made it in twenty and spent the night waiting for legions of black winged creatures to descend on the house or be reported on the news. But they never were. In fact we would have thought it was some kind of shared dream, if not for four long claw marks on the trunk of the car that we drove along the river that night.

#writing #shortstories #flashfiction #horror #weirdlit #christapagliei #other

[prisonofeden]

The Secret Message Behid William Blake’s “The Ancient of Days” 

A mini essay by Aladdin Collar

#William Blake #gnostic #weirdlit #fantasy #Urizen #Bible Studies

[liminaliacast]

‪Today's horror rec: "To Walk the Night" by William Sloane. Returning to their alma mater, two men are embroiled in a murder with cosmic implications. '30s pulpy goodness.

#shocktober #31daysofhorror #31daysofhalloween #weirdwriters #weirdlit #weirdfiction #weird #horror #americanlit #books #bookstagram #bookworm

[strangebookseye]

THE NEW MIKE RUSSELL BOOK IS OUT NOW!

The Exploding Book will take you on an extraordinary journey of cosmic proportions. Click on the link to find out more: viewbook.at/TheExplodingBook

#newbook #epic #surreal #strange #weirdlit #weird fiction #surreal book

[drewsof]

Book No. 56 "Fever Dream" by Samanta Schweblin #2017inreading . . . . #book #booksbooksbooks #books #bookphotography #booklover #bookish #bibliophile #bookstagram #booknerd #amreading #reading #feverdream #riverhead #riverheadbooks #samantaschweblin #translation #literatureintranslation #argentinianliterature #meganmcdowell #weirdlit #spooky #bookinaday

#translation #books #booknerd #reading #spooky #riverhead #feverdream #literatureintranslation #bibliophile #bookphotography #booksbooksbooks #book #samantaschweblin #argentinianliterature #bookinaday #weirdlit #2017inreading #meganmcdowell #bookstagram #booklover #bookish #amreading #riverheadbooks

[liketheflamereadsthewood]

#ecological weird #weirdlit #weird fiction #eco-fiction #cli fi #sci fi

[zarattec]

[macrolit]

Lesser known pride month recs: Crimson Empire Series by Alex Marshall (epic fantasy, various lgbt characters), The Only Way by Jamie Sullivan (dystopian, lesbian), Amatka by Karin Tidbeck (dystopian/sci-fi, lesbian), The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan (horror-ish weirdlit, lesbian & trans). You probably got a lot of these asks by now but I think these probably haven't been mentioned before.

Another Pride Month recommendation…