The tentacle horrors of 'weird' literature: things as strange and monstrous as the world we have lived in

The oil platforms have come to life and move on their pillars (now legs) at great paces through the sea, in search of new deposits where they can quench their infinite thirst.

They have no qualms about destroying any puny human who gets in their way.

Governments and armies cannot explain what could have happened, but the uncomfortable truth is that the situation has gotten out of hand.

What's more, the oil rigs that have come to life... now have babies, in the form of little oil rigs that scamper along the coasts!

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'Notebook of ideas', the germ of evil by HP Lovecraft

It is a very strange thing, that is why it falls within the

(

could be translated as something between the strange, the strange, the disturbing), which in this story, entitled

, cultivates the British author China Miéville, a benchmark of the genre.

It is the text that opens the anthology

(Holobionte Ediciones), which addresses this area in some of its most recent expressions, both on the international and Ibero-American scene, both in the

and in the

.

The use of the word

to define this type of fiction comes from the American magazine

, where HP Lovecraft published a not inconsiderable part of his work at the end of the twenties (for example, the famous long story

) .

.

The figure of Lovecraft is essential in the creation of the genre, which comes to twist the traditional Gothic tale, to which some immediate predecessors of the American, such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, had already given a twist that related it to the cosmic or the natural;

new, more fundamental places to find the horror.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

In other words, terror was no longer so much related to ghosts, abandoned mansions, curses, werewolves or vampires, but to incomprehensible forces of nature or unimaginable cosmic gods (many times with horrendous tentacles) that hide enormous and unbearable truths before which humans are insignificant.

“There are very scattered previous currents, which include science fiction, folklore or classic Victorian horror, which come together in Lovecraft and from there take on a new look, a materialist and abstract component, as in a mixture of horror and science. fiction”, explains Federico Fernández Giordano, director of Holobionte and anthologist of the work along with Ramiro Sanchiz.

strangest things

The

"is not necessarily a visceral terror or a horror at the imminence of something terrible, but rather a sensation of the disturbing, which disturbs not necessarily our physical well-being, but above all - as is clearly seen in Lovecraft's texts ― our relationship with reason and sanity”, explains Sanchiz.

The essayist Mark Fisher saw it in a similar way, who described it as that which puts us in contact with what we consider impossible, but which, nevertheless, occurs before our eyes, thus generating a cognitive dissonance that makes us doubt all our actions. beliefs and the world under our feet.

On this side of the time spectrum, already in the nineties and the beginning of the current century, there is the phenomenon of the

, an update of the genre in more urban and contemporary environments, with the possible inclusion of technological facets, although not necessarily. .

It had a strong presence in Latin America.

“As a specific movement it was fully assimilated, but what ended up happening is that as Spanish translations of the most obvious referents (VanderMeer and Miéville) began to appear, a large number of Latin American science fiction writers, especially in Buenos Aires and Bogotá began to incorporate their influence,” explains Sanchiz, who points to the Vestigio publishing house, created in 2018 in Bogotá, as an example, which made science fiction

Latin America one of its axes.

Cover of the book 'Weird World'.

In addition to the aforementioned oil platforms (with children) that rebel against humans, in

other strange things come together: layers of mold that cover everything leading to madness, techno-drug addicted parallel dimensions, immanent voices that incite suicide, beings that use the bodies of others to perpetuate themselves or infinite and labyrinthine museums of curiosities in which visitors are lost forever.

It is divided into different sections: one dedicated to the

(China Miéville, Michael Cisco or Joe Koch), another to the fruitful

(Luis Carlos Barragán, Maximiliano Barrientos, Cynthia Matayoshi or Ana Llurba), another to the

influences in literature

(Edmundo Paz Soldán, Jorge Carrión, Agustín Fernández Mallo or Liliana Colanzi) and another to experimentation (Germán Sierra, David J. Roden or Amy Ireland).

Influence on contemporary philosophical thought

“There has been a resurgence of a strong interest in recent years for the

and the Lovecraftian, as can be seen in contemporary culture, where it manifests itself in different ways,” says Fernández Giordano.

There are many traces, not only in literature, but in audiovisual products such as the

series (HBO), the film

(Richard Stanley, 2019), starring Nicholas Cage, or various chapters of

(Netflix).

But the most curious thing is that the

and the Lovecraftian have also had a profound imprint on recent schools of philosophical thought such as the seminal Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the British University of Warwick, a breeding ground for accelerationisms in which thinkers such as Sadie Plant, Nick Land or Mark Fisher, or the currents of speculative realism, for example in the essay

(Holobiont), by Graham Harman, or in

(Dark Matter), by Eugene Thacker.

Still from 'Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities', a Netflix series with 'weird' influences.

In this sense, “the thinker Nick Land found in Lovecraft a way of thinking about the thing-in-itself, the Kantian noumenon, as something threatening, with jaws and fangs, capable of destroying everything we think makes us 'human'”. notes the anthologist.

The problems on how to represent the unrepresentable in Lovecraft also served to support Harman's so-called Object-Oriented Ontology, which was subsumed in the current of speculative realism (or postcontinental realism, as the philosopher Ernesto Castro called it).

“It is also a tool to deepen the decentering of that ghostly category of the human, to explore a post-humanist, post-anthropocentric thought, and this is something urgent in these strange days”, Sanchiz points out.

That is, to think of a world without us.

The current enhancement of the

genre , according to Sanchiz's story, has a lot to do with some of the events that put humanity in check at this time, such as the pandemic and climate change.

Nature, as the philosopher Timothy Morton has observed, has ceased to be conceived as something at the service of the human being (as was thought since the Neolithic agricultural revolution) to be an uncontrollable, violent, incomprehensible entity, definitely weird and Lovecraftian

a kind of "return of the great ancients", as it would appear in the work of the American).

Morton regards climate change as a "hyperobject" that totally transcends human temporality and spatiality, a notion that also resonates with terrifying echoes of the

.

The same can be applied to the coronavirus, a non-living being that from the microscopic, and evidencing the uncertainty and lack of control in which we are immersed, has turned the macroscopic world upside down;

a world, on the other hand, increasingly post-human and post-anthropocentric, in which human beings seem to paint less and less.

's toolbox

helps us a great deal to find fresh notions”.

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