Brave New Weird: The Best New Weird Horror, Vol. 2 is a unique collection of speculative horror stories, each of which explores a varied universe of fear, anxiety, and terror. The horror of many of these stories comes from their close connection with concerns in the real modern world—even when they’re seemingly set in very different realities. Horrors like abusive families, school shootings, environmental degradation, and other social ills give these stories their framework and impact. Other stories in the collection explore smaller terrors, and some even use humor mixed with horror to build their narrative. Ultimately, all of the stories in the collection celebrate what makes us human—and what makes us humans afraid.
As editor Alex Woodroe says in an introduction to the volume entitled “The Underrated Art of Giving a Crap,” “… during a year where machine-generation software—if I have to call that thing AI, you have to call my blender Gordon Ramsay—seemed to take over our collective consciousness, as well as many of our commissions, artists of every kind stood their ground and kept screaming” (p. i). The stories in this collection all contribute to that very human screaming.
An example of using speculative horror to explore contemporary reality can be found in Thomas Ha’s story “In That Crumbling Home,” which is about a family living in a remote settlement. The family is growing a Bloodtree, a mysterious entity that sprouts gory fruit after being fed trespassers captured and dismembered by the family’s father. We hear casually about the narrator’s father “breaking down bodies” (p. 6) near the beginning of the story, and we learn about a pilot who’s being kept in the basement before presumably facing the same grim fate as other trespassers. The narrator is fascinated by the pilot—and also by the promise of escape that he offers.
The gruesomeness of the Bloodtree functions as a metaphor for various unspoken or unspeakable horrors that could exist at the center of any family, and the trope serves as a stand-in for other potential horrors: the father’s mannerisms and speech are reminiscent of those of a more garden-variety abusive father; the mother—a monstrous figure herself now called Kun-Mother—is no protection for her children. The story functions on a metaphorical, emotional, and visceral level, with the central horror being children trapped in a violent reality from which they must engineer their own escape and survival. It’s a creative use of speculative horror to explore the dynamics of a broken and frightening family.
In “The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones, the real and present fear of school shootings blends with speculative fiction to create a strange and gripping tale. The story is divided into sections related to various characters and tropes, such as “The Gun,” “The Shooter,” and “The Teacher.” It takes a speculative turn, however, when it introduces unexpected tropes, such as “The Portal,” “The Mouse,” and “Castle Rowland.” The slow-motion horror of a teacher named Michelle guiding her class in the midst of a school shooting simultaneously explores a fantasy realm that echoes children’s stories. In this case, though, the children’s stories are just as twisted and frightening as the reality.
The story takes an askance look at a horrific topic normally explored only by factual news reports, and in that way—as with “In That Crumbling Home”—the story opens itself up to emotional and metaphorical exploration. Children’s fantasy often involves going through a portal to another world, but in this story the portal offers not so much an escape as a journey into a world with horrors directly parallel to those in the real world
The Portal has been exhibiting itself at gun shows recently, a gleaming bullet-proof vault in which to store kids when the shooter comes. The Portal has been installed in every classroom, funded by bake sales and cereal box tops, bought at the expense of pencils and math books and a music teacher. (p. 117)
Once the children enter the portal, they go on a kind of adventure with militarized, fantastical mice. This adventure seems to promise power for the children, but ultimately, in the last lines of the story, all of that is lost:
The Portal door bursts open upon the classroom at Thurman Elementary just as the doorknob turns, Michelle at the forefront and eight kids in crowns behind her, confronting the Gun with the bones of children, the bitter magic only children have the right to wield, asking the question that answers itself, damning the Gun with their bodies, their flesh, with the sound of children screaming. (p. 128)
The ending is particularly horrific because, for a brief moment in the story, it seems like the children and their teacher might be able to rewrite the narrative. There is, however, a sense of inevitability to US school shootings that comes, as the story says early on, from a “failure of policy” (p. 117). This story effectively uses the tools of speculative fiction to explore the emotional ramifications of that policy failure.
“Everything You Dump Here Ends Up in the Ocean” by Anemone Moss, meanwhile, explores the effects of plastics on the ocean environment, via a speculative fiction tale reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The narrator visits the research site of a woman ostensibly working on a “plastic-mitigation project” (p. 153). Instead of getting rid of plastics, however, the narrator gradually realizes—with a combination of horror and fascination—that the project involves plastics absorbing humans and becoming “[a] new form of life” (p. 158). The story is also a romance of sorts, with the narrator and the researcher reaching a kind of plastic-based underwater consummation.
Like those other two stories that I’ve examined, Moss’s explores the emotional landscape of the real and present threat in our world of environmental apocalypse—in this case, caused by the proliferation of plastic in the oceans—through the tools and techniques of speculative horror. The narrator, at one time an environmental activist, finds herself absorbed into this new plastic organism, ending on a thought that reveals how much she has become a part of it: “At last, I think, the world is waking up” (p. 160).
A number of others in this collection also use speculative horror to explore the outer reaches of contemporary social, cultural, and political issues. The genre is especially suited to such explorations because it allows writers to peel back layers of convention and look at topics in new and surprising ways. This helps shift the discourse around these topics, turning them this way and that to see what new truths—and new questions—might be revealed.
At the same time, other stories in the collection explore everyday objects or experiences in a new or surprising way. Eirik Gumeny’s humorous “A Balanced Breakfast,” for instance, uses the trope of the genie story to explore life in a late-capitalist world shaped by marketing and “[c]orporate evil” (p. 45). The narrator, Dylan, is a struggling immunocompromised breakfast blogger, and would-be podcaster, who loses her job at FoodMart for using her health insurance. She saves plastic toys from cereal boxes—eventually to bring to life a monstrous version of one of them, Hayo the Hyena, whom she hopes might be a guest on her podcast.
It turns out that Hayo, in addition to being unspeakably monstrous, is also a bit overly dramatic about the consequences of bringing him to life: “As breakfast perishes,” he tells Dylan, “so too will other meals and deeply held digestive beliefs. People, swimming before waiting an hour, will drown by the score” (p. 41). He continues to unleash a torrent of blistering condemnation aimed both at Dylan and at the corporate world that’s imprisoned him. Gradually, however, he calms down, and by the end of the story asks only for a bowl of cereal with oat milk—since, he admits, he’s lactose intolerant (p. 45).
It’s a humorous ending to a lighthearted story that ultimately feels both real and contemporary. We believe in the reality of this breakfast blogger and monstrous hyena, and we also understand how sometimes—despite modern capitalism, health challenges, and lost jobs—all that’s left to do is settle down and enjoy a bowl of cereal with oat milk.
One of this volume’s introductory pieces—written by the book’s publisher, Matt Blairstone of Tenebrous Press—is entitled “Front Toward Enemy.” In it, Blairstone writes that “[t]his book is a weapon. It is a political charged incendiary device” (p. iii). Perhaps one way of dealing with difficult and emotional topics is by bringing them into a speculative realm, where the everyday rules governing existence don’t apply. In this way, stories using what Blairstone calls the “weapon of the Weird” (p. iii) can see the world with fresh eyes, create new paths, and discover new vistas. The stories in this collection all give glimpses into the ways that horror and speculative fiction can be used to explore contemporary topics, themes, and issues. In this volume, the genre becomes a way to understand the world differently, and in that way, perhaps, to enact change.