A magazine of the New Weird
The scary, the sci-fi, the queer, the ecological, the good
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The scary, the sci-fi, the queer, the ecological, the good 〰️
About Bizarrchitecture
“You come upon a magazine, lone and ruinous in the wastes. You scale its MC Escher stairs, past walls of breathing genre, through hallways like gullets that whisper read me, submit to me, enjoy me.”
Hi! Welcome to Bizarrchitecture, a quarterly magazine of weird fiction and all its genre-bending sisters. Don’t know what that means? Keep scrolling! Then, when you have scrolled and been scrolled, please consider submitting your weird writing to us here!
What is New Weird?
“New Weird is a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy . . . a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects” (Jeff VanderMeer, Intro to the New Weird Anthology)
“The New Weird movement is a post-modernist take on certain kinds of literary genre fiction” (TV Tropes)
“Weirdness is a confrontation with the nonhuman. Weird knowledge does not deny the capacity of the human mind and body to produce knowledge, but it does not reduce the world to human subject experience either . . . This makes New Weird something of an anti-genre, a genre whose uniting factor is paradoxically in remaining outside categorization.” (Elvia Wilk, Toward a Theory of the New Weird)
“The New Weird engages audiences in ways that are dark, terrifying, speculative and fantastic . . . largely Gothic in style, particularly through its bleak and terrifying atmospheres, its violence, its extravagance and its suspicion of predominant social and cultural institutions . . . suggesting that common-sense notions of reality are unstable, that human beings are not the centre of everything and that human cosmology is fatally flawed.” (Carl H. Sederholm, The New Weird)
“Rebecca Giggs has likewise described the Ecological Uncanny in terms of the dissolution of the boundaries between the inner world of the self and the outer world engendered by climate change, suggesting that ‘the Ecological Uncanny is perhaps best encapsulated as the experience of ourselves as foreign bodies’.” (James Bradley, Made Things: Jeff VanderMeer's Borne)
“That is to say that we who live in the Anthropocene no longer find ourselves capable of believing in the innocence of the sensual world that surrounds us. Our world has become weird, our reality horrifying.” (Brad Tabas, Dark Places: Ecology, Place, and the Metaphysics of Horror Fiction)