Best of
New-Weird

2004

The Wavering Knife


Brian Evenson - 2004
    Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to readers of his earlier works, Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it. In the title story an obsessive consciousness folds back on itself, creating a vertiginous mélange of Poe and Borges, both horrific and metaphysical. Here, as in "Moran's Mexico," and "Greenhouse," the solitary nature of reading and writing leads characters beyond human limits, making the act of putting words to paper a monstrous violation opening onto madness. In "White Square" the representation of humans by dimly colored shapes confirms our feeling that something lies behind these words, while seeming to mock us with the futility of seeking it. Evenson's enigmatic names-Thurm, Bein, Hatcher, Burlun-placeable landscapes, and barren rooms all combine to create a semblance of conceptual abstraction, as though the material universe had come to exist inside someone's head.Small wonder that Evenson's work has attracted so much attention among philosophers, literary critics, and other speculative intelligences, for it continuously projects a tantalizing absence, as though there were some key or code that, if only we knew it, would illuminate everything. However, the blade of discernment wavers, and we are left to our own groping interpretations.

Empty Streets


Michal Ajvaz - 2004
    As he begins to notice the object’s strange shape reproduced in various places around the city, he realizes that it holds the key to uncovering the truth about the recent disappearance of a young girl. His attempts to understand the meaning of the object bring him into contact with an array of characters, and the stories they tell him widen the vortex of uncertainty that the object has opened. Will the increasingly intricate web of clues eventually lead him to the truth? Empty Streets is both a thrilling fantasy and a philosophical meditation on the search for meaning in modern life.

The San Veneficio Canon


Michael Cisco - 2004
    He learns to pick the brains of corpses and gradually sacrifices his sanity on the altar of a dubious mission of espionage. Without ever understanding his own reasons, he moves toward destruction with steely determination. Eventually he find himself reduced to a walker between worlds - a creature neither of flesh nor spirit, stuffed with paper and preserved with formaldehyde - a zombie of his own devising. The line twixt clairvoyance and madness is thinner than a razor blade. In 1999, The Divinity Student captured the attention of fans of dark fantasy everywhere, eventually winning the International Horror Guild Award for best first novel. Now, The Divinity Student has been paired with its sequel, The Golem, for a must-have book - The San Veneficio Canon. Michael Cisco has created a city and a character that will live in the reader's imagination long after this book has been read...

Boneland


Jeffrey Thomas - 2004
    Families go mad. Parents commit suicide. A president is assassinated.By 1918, in the bleak boneland of the 20th Century, human assassins commit atrocities and global wars are waged to sate the appetites of the Guests. John Board is a crime scene photographer, whose nightmarish images of human destruction are used as titillating entertainment. Board's future is tied in with these unseen, unfathomable forces—and so is his past. America is drowning in a sea of blood as flashbulbs click and movie cameras roll. The Guests are here to stay.Boneland is a tale of a not-so-alternate history...a story of horror, science fiction, and the surreal by Jeffrey Thomas, acclaimed author of Letters From Hades, Punktown and Monstrocity.