What is New Weird Lit?
by Alex Woodroe, Tenebrous Press Editor-in-Chief/Red Right Hand
Note: Although "New Weird" has been around since the '90s, blending elements of horror and SFF, "New Weird Horror" as a specific subgenre was coined by Tenebrous Press in 2021 as a way to highlight horror stories that embodied those chaotic genre blends and rampant social themes without straying too far from the Horror core.
New Weird Lit is our next logical step for expansion, the same focus as New Weird Horror but branching out even further into New Weird Dark SF, New Weird Dark Fantasy, and New Weird Dark Lit-Fic, as well as a host of other weird-adjacent genres we haven’t even heard of yet. There is no perfect term to encompass the entirety of the range of what we like, so we’re making this up as we go along.
We like to think of the range of these genres as the Progressive Metal of the literary world. It's a little brave, a little self-indulgent, and a lot of fun. The umbrella of New Weirdness is defined by a gut feeling more than a specific set of rules
New
We're looking for stories that are modern in themes, subtext, characters, techniques, and form. That's not to say we don't love a classic Creature Feature, but in order to fit our needs, it would have to speak to our modern fears and sensibilities the way Jaws did to those of the public in the '70s.
Not every single element of a story needs to be fresh and reinvented, but something about it should be. It should interact with the audience and push their boundaries. If at any point it makes us say "well, I haven't seen THAT before", you're on the right track.
That said: don't get hung up on reinventing the wheel. We find that Horror naturally tends to be one of the most progressive of speculative genres, and most stories—just by virtue of being written by someone who interacts with the world today—inherently meet this criteria.
Weird
Take this as literally as you can. Weird concepts, weird genre blends, weird characters, weird endings, weird backgrounds, weird stories that you can't quite imagine placing anywhere else.
If it can make us say "what the actual heck did I just read" right from the blurb, that's a winner.
Mostly, Weird is a feeling. It can come from anywhere, ranging from sporror to cosmic awe to psychological and philosophical speculation. It can come from big worlds in strange spaces, or big moods in familiar places.
Our main goal is always to provide an enjoyable experience where the reader is taken along for a wild ride. "Weird" is no excuse for prioritizing author hubris over reader enjoyment. If we can't understand the story, we can't enjoy the weirdness of it.
Horror/LIT
No matter what genres you blend and how weird the mixture is, the core of the story needs to remain dark and either fully-saturated in horror, or brushing against it with more than casual intent. Basically, paint the town any color you like as long as it's dark.
Our work is primarily aimed at an adult audience, so anything with an overly young voice or themes would be a hard sell.
That said: we tend to lean toward the excitingly dark, gloomy, and conceptually disturbing, rather than screamy extreme splattercore grimdark extravaganzas.
When in doubt
The best way to find out whether your story fits our vision is to send it in. This is a very broad umbrella, and we're asking authors and the audience to help us define it day by day through what we publish and how the readers respond to it. Progress means embracing change, so the definition of New Weird Horror and New Weird Lit isn't gonna be fixed, either.
Tenebrous Press' yearly “Best Of New Weird Horror” anthology, BRAVE NEW WEIRD, showcases the range of what New Weird Lit can be through short stories from publishers and authors spanning a range of genres and styles. What all of them have in common is the heart of New Weird Horror.
So hop on, and let's make it Weird.