Launch discount for The Weird: A Companion (featuring a new Mike Thorn essay)

Order The Weird: A Companion, co-edited by Kristopher Woofter and Carl Sederholm, at a 30% discount using the attached flyer (offer ends May 30, 2025). This collection features contributions from Thomas Ligotti, Eugene Thacker, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and many others (including a new Mike Thorn essay on Weird conventions in Darkest Hours).

 Featuring a comprehensive editors’ introduction to the Weird as a mode engaging with forms of knowledge, transcendence, and resistance, this collection offers a broad-reaching discussion of Weird fiction, film, art, and thought. Its 31 essays explore theoretical and philosophical applications of the Weird, such as Black Metal Theory, and key Weird themes and tropes such as cosmic horror, radical embodiment and sensation, dark ecological speculation, and forms of alterity. Essays are highly varied in period focus and subject matter, ranging from early Weird works by William Hope Hodgson and Conan creator Robert E. Howard, to the surrealist paintings of Leonora Carrington, to more recent works by David Lynch, Octavia Butler, and Yorgos Lanthimos.

Film International, “The Houses That Hooper Built – American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper”

“This juxtaposition between some admittedly cheesy films and their serious thematic undercurrents can be jarring, and nowhere is this effect more evident than in Mike Thorn’s ‘Lizard Brain Ouroboros: Human Antiexceptionalism in Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive and Crocodile.’ These films are not the director’s best by a longshot (although the former, his 1976 follow-up to Texas Chain Saw, has enjoyed a cult following), but Thorn skillfully dissects how they illustrate ‘the [triune brain] theory…that human cognition’s roots can be traced to the nonhuman animal world’ (106). The boundary separating these worlds dissolves, and viewers may find themselves rooting more for the so-called ‘monsters’ than the oblivious humans exploiting them.”

Read the full review.

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑