The 'Confrontational Escapism' of the New Weird: Reading Challenging Fiction in Online Spaces

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Weird fiction has always entered into some kind of resurgence in a time of great, international tumult. Tim Lanzendör's Marxist analysis of the Neww Weird elaborates that it was at the 'concerete moment of economic crisis' that the New Weird reared its monstrous head again during the 2000s. Of course, the New Weird is only New in retrospect to its racist ancestor, The Weird, and through the process of what Thomas Ligotti calls Confrontational Escapism, I am arguing that the New Weird very much relies upon these racist, sexist, classist fictions in the same way that fungi might rely on that which decomposes and rots. The New Weird consistently subverts and challenges the old horrors that beset writers of the Weird in the 1920s, and argues that instead of horror being drawn from the unknown and the Other, the marginalised and the vulnerable, there is more dread and terror that comes from power structures, from white hegemonies and normalised, heteronormative conceptions of sex and gender. But what use is this imaginary hell to people trapped and made monstrous by racial, class, or gender discrimination, what does New Weird provide in its invocations of horrific realities? Employing Marxist, feminist, and critical race theories, I will develop a framework through which to understand 'confrontational escapism' and how New Weird's use of it challenges oppressive realities; I will also examine how readers are responding to the imaginary hells of New Weird literature, and why, as will be observed, this increase in engagement with the New Weird has taken place in online spaces such as Discord and Goodreads.The thesis will therefore focus both on critical readings of these texts and on reader's responses to these challenging fictions. By investigating why readers engage with troubling horrors that depict very real, lived-in realities, I will pair with the critical engagement of New Weird fiction to propose a theory of 'Confrontational Escapism', a way in which we might better understood what, if any, mental health benefits there are to engaging with traumatic realities through the communal space of the online book club.