You all know I love Weird Fiction, so I couldn’t help but click on this article title from the LARB. I honestly can’t tell whether or not this is a put on. And that maybe tells me this piece is actually doing the genre’s work.
More often than not, weird nonfiction is intended as either comedy or horror—sometimes both. Its natural home is the internet, where disinformation and pissant humor are architectural principles. The element of unreality in all of the titles listed above is not just a fib or a joke but also an outright structural provocation, daring the audience to follow it into an abyss. Like weird fiction, weird nonfiction is built around some unknowable terror, replacing the tentacled horrors of H. P. Lovecraft with the many-tentacled horrors of being online and alive in the 21st century. It also suggests, in the process, that there is something unfathomable at the heart of reality itself, and that it is the duty of journalism to circumnavigate this terror if never speak it aloud. I humbly submit that weird nonfiction seems particularly well suited to reporting on climate change, but have not seen it done with the vigor that subject deserves.