Finding Escapism in the Weird
In a world that somehow manages to be boring and scary at the same time, weird fiction provides a refuge
I’m sure you’ve heard the maxim that art disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed.
This helps explain why speculative fiction, as a genre, exists: high fantasy provides an engrossing escape from mundane life, horror confronts us with taboo topics and fears, and thrillers provide us with a rush. Many types of speculative fiction are places where we can safely experiment with things that are either impossible or quite dangerous in real life.
In real life, we want our relationships to be stable and healthy. In dark romance, we explore the nuances of toxic relationships, without having to subject ourselves to it. Fiction is a safe place to either explore darkness to find refuge from it—whichever you’re craving, there’s a book for you.
In this way, even very ordinary fiction can offer escape. Cozy books, too, provide a sort of escapism. “Legends & Lattes” by Travis Baldree, for example, is “high fantasy with low stakes”. When real life drowns us in bills, work, and stress, such books offer delicious cafe treats and cute, slow burn romance.
In times like these, many of us feel the urge to escape all the more.
As a kid, my favorite form of literary escapism was something called “portal fantasy”. It’s pretty self-explanatory: the protagonist by accident or design stumbles from ordinary life to an extraordinary other world.
After discovering the podcast “Welcome To Night Vale”, though, my escapist tastes broadened with one common theme: downright weird fiction.
Weird fiction is not, of course, a definable genre. It’s fiction defined by the unexpected, the strange, the unexplainable, and the whimsical.
It’s “Welcome To Night Vale” and the matter-of-fact local radio delivery of bizarre happenings.
When the world is somehow both scary and boring at once, weird fiction offers inspiration, fascination, and even horror. It disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed.
Everything is boring, but the stakes are so high
That’s kind of how life feels right now. I thought it was just me until I read a recent, very well worded post by J.P. Hill1. He wrote about how culture has been homogenized and even the ways we express ourselves tend to come in trends.
It’s so boring! Social media is full of the same trends, the same info, yet also injected with dread from the latest news. The real world isn’t much better: as J.P. pointed out all our towns have begun to look the same. You can take off for the vacation of your life and touch down in an exciting new place just to be greeted with a Starbucks.
At the same time, the stakes are so high. As we speak, Republicans continue to advance a bill that slashes health care and gives tax cuts to the wealthy. A bill that will quite literally endanger the lives of those who rely on Medicaid and Medicare.
That’s just one headline from dozens of frightening news stories.
It’s a dystopia unfolding around us, but it isn’t even interesting. This is because fascism seek to flatten anything and everything that sticks out. Fascist ideology calls for sameness of ideas, beliefs, and appearances.
That’s why we have the “clean girl” aesthetic, the return of diet culture, and so many more harmful, but frankly empty and boring trends.
But where there is an oppressive main culture, there must arise a counterculture.
So, if you’re anything like me, your love of weird fiction bubbles back up. I’m listening to podcasts again: revisiting old favorites as well as checking out some new ones. I’m reading short stories online, where writers upload their passion projects for the love of it.
I’m on the hunt for fiction that isn’t particularly commercial. Fiction that doesn’t sit fully in one genre. Fiction that confuses, excites, inspires, fascinates, horrifies, and entertains.
Because it’s easy to forget: just because things are the way they are, doesn’t mean they have to be.
Part of why we tell fictional stories is to imagine—plain and simple.
Authors like Ray Bradbury and Suzanne Collin’s write dystopian fiction, not just to demonstrate where the wrong path could take us, but to show how positive change remains possible even in the darkest timelines.
It’s easy to sink into the numbness of modern life and reject all hints of magic, wonder, beauty, and uniqueness. But fiction invites you to throw yourself into these things, wholesale.
There could be a desert town with a faceless old woman in every home, a multi-headed dragon, and killer librarians. There could be a secret world beneath London where those who “fall through the cracks” live in factions. Mundane actions could have paranormal consequences, shadows could have eyes, and theme parks could have dinosaurs.
When the world is boring and scary, find comfort in the weird. Being normal, fitting in, and hanging onto the ever hanging trends with white knuckles while unaddressed dread builds inside you is no way to live your life.
Enough trends. Enough aesthetics. Enough sameness and repression. There’s not enough weird in the world. There’s not enough you in the world.
So I’m logging out of Netflix, closing out TikTok. I’m finding inspiration in strange little corners, reigniting the thirst to know and learn in the face of anti-intellectualism, and reading my weird little stories because, come what may, we stay whimsical.
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In search of the weird
Podcasts:
I’m currently getting back into Welcome To Night Vale, the podcast that got me into fiction podcasts all those years ago. It’s a radio broadcast from a strange little town.
I’d also like to go back and relisten to some other old favorites at some point: Wolf 359 and King Falls AM particularly.
My gateway drug back into fiction podcasts is Old Gods of Appalachia, a short fiction anthology podcast about folk horror set in the Appalachian mountains.
I’ve also started one called The Left/Right Game, which reminded me of a podcast I started years ago and ver finished listening to called Rabbits. They’re both paranormal fiction podcasts about games that lead to mysterious occurrences.
Books:
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree is a cozy tale of a retired adventurer starting a coffee shop. Don’t be fooled by “low stakes”, you’ll still be desperately rooting for the heroes to succeed and get the cozy life of their dreams.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman is an urban fantasy novel about an ordinary guy falling through the cracks and discovering a strange underworld called London Below.
One of my all time favorite books also happens to be an excellent example of weird fiction: What Moves The Dead by T. Kingfisher. It’s an imaginative retelling of The Fall of The House of Usher featuring parasitic fungi and reanimated corpses. It’s spooky and a quick read.
Suzanne Collins, of course, wrote the Hunger Games trilogy and its two prequels. In my opinion, these books will some day be venerated classics. Besides just being good stories, they have so many layers the reflect the human condition so well.
Ray Bradbury is the king of weird fiction and well-known for the prophetic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. He also offers a unique take on sci-fi with The Martian Chronicles and a vivid rumination on aging through the lens of horror with Something Wicked This Way Comes.
I’m currently reading “The Spirit Bares Its Teeth” by Andrew Joseph White, a horror novel about violet-eyed mediums being married off. The ones who fail at being obedient wives get sent to a sanatorium.
Weird music:
I, of course, have to mention the love of my life, music. While popular songs tend to follow formulas (and if you’ve read my post on song structure, you’d know I actually don’t hate that), there’s also plenty of weird music out there. I’ve been falling further down the Ethel Cain rabbit hole, revisiting her experimental EP “Perverts”, and listening to some similar artists like Sofia Isella, Nicole Dollenganger, and Rivi Palomino.
Writing:
I’m also getting back into writing fiction myself to further stoke my own weird. I just finished a short story that I’m rather proud of, so stay tuned because I might post it online sometime.
The internet:
Speaking of online writing, that’s where you can find some of the purest weird fiction. Published books tend to require commercial appeal to get that far. But in the wild corners of the internet, writers can post whatever they want just because they want to. Explore AO3, Wattpad, Fictionpress, and other sites to unearth your own strange gems.
Find the “weird” accounts on otherwise normal platforms. If you thirst for knowledge, maybe check out “Etymologynerd” on YouTube or
here on substack. Scroll past all the copy-past trends and influencer ads in search of well-written skits, unexpected short films, beautiful animations, and more.Tumblr. That’s the whole recommendation.
Go forth and be weird :)