Rhizomatic Horror

Abstract

In March 201 1, Science Fiction Studies published a special issue on slipstream fiction. In it, Bruce Sterling, who coined the term in his 1989 article Slipstream, wrote a follow-up piece, Slipstream 2, noting:One thing that problematic for slipstream: being based in quote, Theory, unquote, it has a very hard time taking creative effort seriously. You can see this in certain pop-culture critics, like (say) Steve Beard or Mark Dery, who are pop music people, and culture studies people. Although you can see them straining to become fiction writers, and you can sense a potential literature behind the push there, they're just not ever going to become literateurs [...] They want to be analytical; they want to understand the structure of society on some higher, abstract level. (Sterling 10)Sterling's observation here fascinating in that he views fiction based in Theory as inherently inferior. Certainly, this kind of fiction can be, at worst, unbearably contrived. Why Sterling chooses two authors who have written successful and pleasurable literary experiments unclear. Perhaps he simply wishes to prohibit Beard and Dery from entering a possible slipstream canon. If this part of the motivation, it may be well founded in the case of Steve Beard. Consider Sterling's criteria for the genre in question: slipstream is a kind of writing which simply makes you very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain (Slipstream). Sterling's conceit regarding sensibility may be what excludes Beard's fiction from being considered works of slipstream writing. That is, slipstream makes the reader feel very strange, while with Beard's fiction, though unusual, the reader made to experience the of unknowing. Beard writes fiction that characterized by a constant fleeting away of narrative referent; a cohesive narrative intimated, oddly enough, through its absence. The effect not equal to feeling strange; it is, however, both consistent with, and an intervention into, a trajectory of Lovecraftian weird fiction.That Beard's novel relatively recent situates his work among those other innovators in the genre that has come to be called Weird Fiction. Jeff VanderMeer suggests that the New Weird began to materialize in the 1980s and 1990s in the work of Jeffrey Thomas, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco, Kathe Koja, Richard Calder, Jeffery Ford, K.J. Bishop, Alastair Reynolds, as well as in his own writings; however, the genre finds its first commercial success with China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (2000) (VanderMeer xixii). VanderMeer writes that Mieville had created just the right balance between pulp writing, visionary, surreal images, and literary influences to attract a wider audience (xii). Beard's work, on the other hand, difficult, and proceeds with an experimental aesthetic with little regard for accessibility. VanderMeer identifies two impulses that distinguish the New Weird from traditional Weird Fiction: first, the postmodern sensibility and genre blending of New Wave writers of the 1960s; secondly, a move away from the Lovecraftian coyness that characteristically refuses to reveal the (ixx); that is, part of the narrative momentum of the New Weird relies on transgressive horror. While Beard engages with both these impulses, there a marked emphasis on the first. Digital Leatherette shares much more in common with the formal experimentation of J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) than with the work of Clive Barker. While there are certainly unsettling scenes of violence in Beard's work, his fiction intersects with H.P. Lovecraft's insistence on emphasizing philosophical through processes of negation; Lovecraft achieves this by making horrors unknowable, Beard does so through formal narrative experimentation.Preeminent critic of weird fiction S.T. Joshi notes a crucial paradox at the heart of in literature: horror fiction not meant to horrify The Modern Weird Tale 2). …