Overall, not a bad anthology, mixing elements of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. Most of the stories are not original to this book, so if you're a fan of the authors, it's likely you've read them before. They tend toward the dark, extreme and often grotesque and disgusting, so if that's not your scene, you probably won't enjoy.My main issue with the book is its tendency toward navel-gazing. It should have just stuck with presenting the work, rather than going on and on about how to define the term "...

I enjoy Lovecraft, Mieville, pulp sci-fi, so I thought I would love this volume and was eagerly awaiting its publication. Alas, I am somewhat disappointed. Though I appreciate (on an intellectual level) the tortuous hand-wringing that accompanies the authors' attempts to define or simply talk about a genre that could be called "New Weird" (there is an entire section of the book devoted solely to a discussion among various authors about what New Weird is, whether it needs a name, and why), the st...

As with any collection, the stories are somewhat hit or miss. The precursor stories were actually weaker than the current examples; Watson's Boy was my favorite, though At Reparata was the most emotional. New Weird as a style is the fever dream of Fantasy and Science Fiction, focused on grotesque organics and oppressive places. A large section of the book is devoted to defining the style, which devolves to arguments about whether or not it's worth it to even try, but getting past that and you ge...

I’ve been reading The New Weird lately, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s recent Tachyon collection of the sort of bizarre, visceral, urban fantasy that’s had the placard card reading “New Weird” hung about its neck for the past few years.If anything, this collection seems a younger sibling to the 2004 Thunder’s Mouth Press anthology New Worlds. New Weird certainly owes a debt to the New Wave (the inclusion of M. John Harrison’s “The Luck in the Head” makes this undeniably clear), and it is M. John Harr...

This is a very valuable endeavor, putting together this volume. I enjoyed it very little.That's a matter of taste, obviously. I certainly appreciate the VanderMeers work in editing this.There are sections. The contents are listed below.1) Short stories. I only really liked the first one, by M. John Harrison. Every time I read Harrison, I think, "This is great! I should read more Harrison!" But then I don't. Very well written, very weird. I had read most of these authors before liked several of t...

20 August 2010 - ****. The anthology is made up of four sections."Stimuli" contains short New Wave and New Horror fiction pieces which the anthologists consider precursors of New Weird. These are almost all quite good. * The Luck in the Head, by M. John Harrison * In the Hills, the Cities, by Clive Barker * Crossing into Cambodia, by Michael Moorcock * The Braining of Mother Lamprey, by Simon D. Ings * The Neglected Garden, by Kathe Koja * A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing, by Thomas Ligotti"Evidenc...

Ever since reading Perdido Street Station, I've been a sucker for anything described as New Weirdish. Sometimes my enthusiasm for the sub-genre/style/movement/whatever-the-hell-you-call-it has been more fervent than my appreciation for the examples of it I read. So it was nice to find that even the stories by authors whose novels I disliked (ah screw it, I'm referring to K.J.Bishop and The Etched City) I liked in this anthology. That said, none of the stories really quite reached the levels that...

This book is split into sections and this review focuses solely on the sections containing the short stories. What I can tell about this "genre" from the sampling here is that it gorges itself on bizarre details. These authors are shaping worlds and introduce so many new ideas often in so rapid a succession it all comes as much too much. Silly, futuristic sounding words and names are almost mandatory in these stories and become comical and predictable, like some sort of random generator was bein...

The VanderMeers have become deeply annoying to me. Who made these untalented people authorities on anything? Is there literally a worse genre name than "The New Weird"? Will Jeff ever manage to write a book as semi-decent as Area X again, or will he just keep publishing landfill? Can someone explain to me why Ann's fantasy anthology included stories by Tolstoy and Nabokov? Also, what is this shit?

I like the book as a project but the stories in the book were not always very memorable. I liked them while I read them and I am glad that I read them but they were a mixed bag. Again, not mixed in terms of uneven quality because they all were very well-written. Just some of the stories didn't do much for me. I am changing my rating from three stars to four stars. I liked the two new features of the book-- the selection of essays that ask "What is the New Weird" and includes authors and editors

Favorite stories in here:“At Reparata” by Jeffrey Ford - A self-declared royal, rich from inherited pirate treasure creates a court of misfit wanders. Everyone has bizarre titles and plays castle until their leader loses the love of his life and falls into a deep depression. The healer they employ to cure the king takes them down a bizarre pathway that pulls in elements of Gormenghast and Perdido Street Station. But the tone is still dark comedy?“The Lizard of Ooze” by Jay Lake - Trippy and does...

I've never cared much for the horror genre*, and perhaps that's why I started reading each of the first four stories in this book and gave up and skipped to the next one before deciding to abandon the volume entirely. The intro informed me that one of the things that distinguishes New Weird from slipstream and interstitial fiction is influence from the horror genre, along with an eschewing of "postmodern techniques that undermine the surface reality of the text (or point out its artificiality)."...

DNF. You say "new weird", I say "dreary urban fantasy", let's call the whole thing off.

I didn't quite finish every piece of this but certainly enough to make a fair assessment. I consider myself a fan of the New Weird in general, though I guess in retrospect I've only read a few novels I would class as such. A surprisingly small fraction of this book is actually dedicated to presenting a wider palette in that genre beyond Mieville, Swainston, and VanderMeer. Only one of five parts is composed of New Weird shorts, and while some of these are plenty good, I just found the selection

I rate the thirty items in this anthology a total of 93 points to give the book a 3.1 GR rating which rounds to a three. If I rated only the fiction stories, it still comes out at 2.7, which also rounds to a three. There were two great stories in the collection: Michael Moorcock's “Crossing into Cambodia”, and Clive Barker's “In the Hills, the Cities." There were only three more stories I liked: Kathe Koja's “The Neglected Garden,” Thomas Ligotti's “A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing,” and China Miev...

I'm going to read this, Interfictions, and Feeling Very Strange back-to-back and write a longer review for all three, but I will say about this one that it seems to focus on genre stories that have eccentricities that tilt them into the literary realm. Yes, the characters and plots are very odd, often with no connection to any human reality, but the prose itself is very pulpy, intentionally and self-consciously so. Most of these are not much more capital-w Weird than the stories I grew up with i...

I tried to read the whole anthology, I really did. However, I found the introduction to be less educational than condecending. I attempted to start several stories, but could finish none but China Mieville's Jack [which was the story that drew my attention to the anthology in the first place]. Perhaps I don't "get" the sub-genre, but I just couldn't engage with this material.

So far this anthology has some very interesting and disturbing stories in it. But here's the most disturbing thing: there are no significant women characters. None. There's even a story of a pair of lovers traveling through eastern Europe but, guess what? They are both MEN. What is up with that?=============Finished reading. This collection of stories is unique in my experience. Bizarre. Strange. Weird. New. It takes some getting used to but is well worth it. There are even a couple of stories a...

This may be the best collection I've read in a decade.I'd been through Mieville and Vandermeer, cut my teeth on Lovecraft, a pile of slipstream, Barker, but I didn't feel as though I had much of a handle on what "New Weird" was or why I was drawn to it. Boy, I loved every story in this volume, including the oddly vulgar Rennie story at the end. Perhaps if slipstream makes you feel 'a little strange' (and the _Feeling Very Strange_ anthology would make a nice companion to this book), New Weird ma...