This week in class was focused on the weird. Specifically, what has changed between the old weird (Lovecraft, Stoker) and the new weird (Mieville)? And what exactly makes either of them weird in the first place?
I read from the novel Kraken by China Mieville for class, and it has been my favorite reading so far in this course, and a great example of the "weird".
The story itself is as highly creative as they come, with a worker at the Darwin Museum finding their most prized exhibit missing, a giant quid. The quest to find out what exactly happened throws us as readers into some strange situations that play on the tropes of the genre and the moral questions we have as humans.
This novel helped me put a scope on what exactly it is that makes something weird, and I can only hope to sum it up with one word: Mystery. After reading this novel, I firmly believe that most weirdness in these stories we have been reading has been rooted in mystery or something unknown. In the case of this story, there are a lot of mysteries I gathered from my reading. There is the classic "where is it?", and then from there the mysteries unfold into "why?" and "how?" and "Are they right?" In other novels from this course, the weirdness stems from other mysteries, like "How is Frankenstein going to find the monster?" or "How will the interview end?"
I think the fun thing about the mysterious qualities of these horror stories is truly what makes them so unnerving. The importance of horror, in my mind's eye, is to reflect on the questions we are afraid to ask in a normal way. Questions like "Can science go too far?" or "What if a giant squid actually could bring about the end of days?"
And what better way to ask these questions than with a good mystery?
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