This chapter considers depictions of the monstrous fungal in Weird fiction, particularly the New Weird, contrasting fungal horror with older Gothic and Weird tropes. It reads the New Weird “fungal turn” as an effort to reimagine our relationship with the nonhuman world and to accept our intertwinement with it, an intertwinement apprehended both with horror and with awe. The fungal conjures both ecophobia and ecognosis, capturing the anxieties and hopes of a society experiencing overlapping social and ecological crises. The chapter focuses particularly on fungal tropes in William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (1907), Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris cycle (2001–2009), Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty (2014), and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020). Drawing on a new materialist framework, it contrasts the mycelial eco-weird with the “tentacular” Weird of Lovecraft and his contemporaries, arguing that the New Weird attempts to rewrite and subvert the old to repudiate reactionary imaginaries and imagine more positive, posthuman futures.

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Fungal Fictions: New Weird Materialism and Mycelial Biohorror

  • Jonathan Newell

摘要

This chapter considers depictions of the monstrous fungal in Weird fiction, particularly the New Weird, contrasting fungal horror with older Gothic and Weird tropes. It reads the New Weird “fungal turn” as an effort to reimagine our relationship with the nonhuman world and to accept our intertwinement with it, an intertwinement apprehended both with horror and with awe. The fungal conjures both ecophobia and ecognosis, capturing the anxieties and hopes of a society experiencing overlapping social and ecological crises. The chapter focuses particularly on fungal tropes in William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (1907), Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris cycle (2001–2009), Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty (2014), and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020). Drawing on a new materialist framework, it contrasts the mycelial eco-weird with the “tentacular” Weird of Lovecraft and his contemporaries, arguing that the New Weird attempts to rewrite and subvert the old to repudiate reactionary imaginaries and imagine more positive, posthuman futures.