The Weird and the Eerie was Mark Fisher’s final book - and a fitting eulogy to its author.
Mark and I both worked in two of the same institutions, and I knew him in passing - he also invited me to give a paper at the Lovecraft-themed Weird Theory symposium held at Goldsmiths back in (I think) 2007. I hope he didn’t regret that, as the paper I delivered was, frankly, fucking awful; even so, that event exposed me to an emergent body of academic philosophical theory in which Lovecraft was placed front and centre, and has led me to a far more mature and nuanced theoretical understanding of Lovecaft’s intersections with occultism and popular culture (a radically-revised version of my Weird Theory piece will, hopefully, be appearing in a volume on accelerationism and the occult next year).
In any case, The Weird and the Eerie is an outstanding set of bite-sized essays which pointedly analyse the categories of weird and eerie fiction, and trace the development of those categories in the work of classic authors of the genres such as Lovecaft and James, as well as in that of more contemporary artists such as Mark E. Smith and David Lynch.
Nice.
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