When characters realize the world they know is in fact “something else,” they have permanently crossed a threshold. The thin membrane they might otherwise call normality has been punctured, and the air of stability drains out. There is some attempt to clutch their worlds close, to grab something pinned down. But it is, inevitably, too late: there is no putting normal back when it never existed in the first place.Outer Range Season 1 Download.
Almost all fiction involves characters trying to fix or improve their world. But only one genre targets literally the world, the universe and existence: “weird fiction” or “new weird fiction.” This genre involves stories about the everyday, the normal, being infused with an otherworldy, abnormal, strange aspect at its core that reverberates to conclude nothing is as it seems. The realization unravels everything around the object or space, taking in the world and, therefore, the characters.
A modern classic is Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, about a bordered off coastal area called “Area X” that threatens the whole world (it moves, see?). Caitlín R. Kiernan pits bureaucracy against otherworldliness that calls out to Earth in her Agents of Dreamland. Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves is about what happens when the borders of your home actually expand into parts of the world or universe that shouldn’t exist. H.P. Lovecraft’s characters realized they were insignificant entities in a universe ruled by unfathomable eldritch entities. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks slowly stripped the reality of small-town America into a cosmically nightmarish place. N.K. Jemisin pushes the boundaries of what cities are in The City We Became.In essence, the (new) weird is about infusing what we take for granted and showing how, at its very essence, that which is normal is, in fact, not. When you can’t trust a house to be a house, how can you trust reality to be true?