Over the past couple decades, the dominance of realist fiction in the literary landscape has been challenged by the rise of weird fiction. Prominent examples include the steampunk fairy tales of Kelly Link, Karen Russell’s swamp-gothic surrealism, and Jeff VanderMeer’s eco-sci-fi Southern Reach trilogy. What links these writers is not a singular, driving aesthetic so much as a disregard for the strictures of mainstream realism. Weird fiction is a genre of possibility and exploration, of fantasy and philosophy, and although its boundaries as a genre are somewhat slippery, it has a deep-rooted history, reaching back to writers such as Silvina Ocampo, H.P. Lovecraft, and Bruno Schulz, among others. Lincoln Michel’s decidedly weird debut collection of stories, Upright Beasts, offers an example of the genre’s possibilities and the scope of its heritage. Though influenced by pop culture fixtures such as horror movies and stand-up comedy, Michel’s work also takes many cues from modernist writers, especially the sense of puzzling whimsy found in the writing of Clarice Lispector and Kobo Abe. In their omnivorous approach to genre and form, these twenty-four stories testify to literary fiction’s continued shift into the strange.
