Weird genre was a very interesting reading experience to me because they certainly reminded me of a collection of short stories I wrote on my own during high-school (when I haven’t even come across the existence of this particular genre). What’s even more remarkable was the fact that I could sympathize with writers’ writing mentality more clearly than I could understand the messages they tried to convey. And that also make a lot of sense to me as I realized from my own experience that this style so called weird is highly personal point of view based, which could be quite idiosyncratic to individual authors.
I read The Snow Child, The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter, Souvenir of Japan and The Unnamable. Essentially they all prioritized the delivery of an interesting or clever point of view of metaphysics, humanity and perceptions over telling clean stories. In fact, enigmatic uses of languages stirred up the sensibility and force readers to think harder to uncoded there message. The Unnamable for example might contain an element of horror but to it’s core it was an attempt to bring up question about our perceptions. Materialistic elements and theme were used only as a tool to form an unspoken question about aspects of life. Sometimes the theme could be as mundane as a caption of ordinary events like in Souvenir of Japan or could be one without specific meaning to it’s background like The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter, though the story still works because these are treated as fragments of mind rather than an external world.
I read The Snow Child, The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter, Souvenir of Japan and The Unnamable. Essentially they all prioritized the delivery of an interesting or clever point of view of metaphysics, humanity and perceptions over telling clean stories. In fact, enigmatic uses of languages stirred up the sensibility and force readers to think harder to uncoded there message. The Unnamable for example might contain an element of horror but to it’s core it was an attempt to bring up question about our perceptions. Materialistic elements and theme were used only as a tool to form an unspoken question about aspects of life. Sometimes the theme could be as mundane as a caption of ordinary events like in Souvenir of Japan or could be one without specific meaning to it’s background like The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter, though the story still works because these are treated as fragments of mind rather than an external world.
I considered worlds in weird genre metaphoric and symbolic in multiple layers. In Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter, almost everything from the existence and appearance of each characters to the rule of the universe they live in are metaphors. It is in fact weird an unnatural for the executioner to wear mask all the time but it make a complete sense if it’s being view as a symbolic representation of dictated law.
There were a few weird short story I wrote during high school that are worth mentioning. One of them used both events and time as metaphors. It was a story about a boy who was walking back home behind his father’s coldhearted and fearsome shoulder that never look back. The boy not so kind opinion about his father were use as a main narrative throughout the journey home. The time passing during the short walk were use as a metaphor for a life span and what one learn. That aspect keep reflecting through the development of the boys chain of thoughts. When his mind finally decided to become independent the father turned back to him and reveal his tough parenting intention that shook the boy point of view and maturity and leave him with a little fear of losing his fatherly guardian. From this experience I think that an unspoken conclusion and realization is a charm of weird genre.
Another story I wrote that worth mentioning as an example of a possible characteristic of weird is a short story that I used a scenario from a classic cartoon as a reference but twisted it’s point of view to create am impactful message. This is similar to the story Snow Child where the author use a famous fairy tale as a theme then twist the role and relationship between each characters and let audiences contemplate on that unfamiliar point of view which could be absurd or can be optimistic.
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