A modern literary movement blending weird fiction with secondary-world fantasy, horror, and political consciousness.
New Weird emerged in the early 2000s as a conscious literary movement, taking the strangeness of classic weird fiction and combining it with the world-building ambition of secondary-world fantasy, the body horror of Clive Barker, and the political engagement of literary fiction. It rejects Tolkien's pastoral nostalgia and Lovecraft's reactionary fear of the other, building cities and ecosystems that are alien, unsettling, and politically charged.
New Weird demonstrates how genres evolve through conscious rejection of their predecessors' limitations. It's a case study in literary movements: writers explicitly defining what they're against (generic Tolkien-style fantasy) and what they're for (strangeness, ambiguity, political engagement). If your fantasy keeps being called 'weird,' this genre might be your home.
The movement's flagship novel: a secondary world that's industrial, grotesque, and politically complex rather than pastoral.
Often classified as New Weird for its refusal to explain its central mysteries or conform to genre expectations.
A secondary world presented through found documents, academic papers, and unreliable accounts, New Weird as experimental fiction.
Design a city that's genuinely alien: not medieval Europe, not modern America with magic, but something with its own logic, biology, and politics that don't map onto anything familiar. Write a 500-word walking tour of one neighborhood. Make it feel lived-in and strange simultaneously.