Ann and I are not quite ready to announce the table of contents for The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Fictions, but it is interesting to compare our almost-final list of stories to two anthologies with a similar scope and overlapping focus.

Just to recap, we’re covering 100 years of weird/the weird, starting in 1908 with an excerpt from Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side, Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows”, and F. Marion Crawford’s “The Screaming Skull.” In addition to wanting to cover a century, we felt 1908 worked well because Kubin is such an interesting bridge between old and new, with connections to the Decadents and to Kafka, and because the Blackwood and Crawford stories represent interesting and important approaches to weird fiction in the twentieth century. We are including 114 stories. Although our focus means we are including many UK/US authors, 18 nationalities are represented.

That said, here are some points of comparison/contrast with other anthologies…

Peter Straub’s American Fantastic Tales (Library of America)—in two volumes covering more than a century, contents here and here—covers United States authors. Straub’s definition of “fantastical” is almost exclusively toward dark fantasy and horror.

We share six stories and twenty authors in common. Factors against commonality:
—Straub is only covering the US.
—Straub is not covering solely “the weird,” although he clearly is attracted to it.
—Straub is not constrained by our 1908 start date.

John Pelan’s The Century’s Best Horror Fiction, apparently still coming out this year, covers all of horror fiction, with one story chosen for each year from 1901 to 2000. The TOC is here.

We share eight stories and twenty-one authors in common. Factors against commonality:
—Pelan could only pick one story per year.
—Pelan was covering horror, not the weird.
—Pelan’s start date is a decade before ours and his end date is a decade before ours.
—Pelan can include contemporary naturalistic stories that have no supernatural elements (we can, too, but in the context of SF horror/weird).
—Pelan has clearly decided to stick to a very traditional definition of “horror” and the horror field.

What does this mean? Not much without you knowing our table of contents, but we’re happy that there is the expected overlap between the volumes, without there being undue overlap. It also confirms the results of our investigations: that there is an impulse in weird/the weird that only sometimes intersects with dark fantasy and horror. At least, as we have defined it.

As China Mieville writes in his afterword to our book: “These are strange aeons. These texts, dead and/or not, burrow, and we cannot predict everything they will infect or eat their path through. But certainly your brain, and they will eat the books you read from today on, too. That is how the Weird recruits. This is a worm farm. These stories are worms.”