From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird , and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon. The Weird is the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology “What is good about the majority of these stories is precisely that they leave you with many more questions than answers, the mark, in my view, of a superior kind of fiction... It does, in fact, what most of our best fiction does, irrespective of category.” ― Award-winning author Michael Moorcock, from his introduction “These texts, dead and/or not, burrow, and we cannot predict everything they will infect or eat their path through. But certainly your brain, and they will eat the books you read from today on, too. That is how the Weird recruits.” ― China Miéville, bestselling and award-winning author of Embassytown, from his afterword “Studded with literary gems, it's a hefty, diligently assembled survey of a genre that manages to be at once unsettling, disorientating and bracing in its variety.” ― James Lovegrove, Financial Times “It's a tremendous experience to go through its 1,126 pages… there are so many delights in this that any reader will find something truly memorable.” ― Scotland on Sunday “Readers eager to explore a world beyond the ordinary need look no further.” ― Time Out “An anthology of writing so powerful it will leave your reality utterly shredded… Give yourself to the weird! Hurl your puny mortal body through the portal the VanderMeers have opened for you, join your lord the Miéville on the other side, give your heart and soul to the saints that stand at his feet, to the mad prophets that have prepared you for his coming. Open the pages of the new gospel of The Weird.” ― Guardian.co.uk “Unmissable!” ― The Guardian “The definitive collection of weird fiction… its success lies in its ability to lend coherence to a great number of stories that are so remarkable different and yet share the same theme.” ― TLS Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander , the Borne novels ( Borne , The Strange Bird , and Dead Astronauts ), and The Southern Reach Trilogy ( Annihilation , Authority , and Acceptance ), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding. ANN VANDERMEER is the Hugo Award–winning former editor of Weird Tales magazine and has worked with her husband, Hugo–nominated and World Fantasy Award–winning writer JEFF VANDERMEER on the genre-defining anthologies The New Weird , Steampunk , and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities , and the World Fantasy Award–winning The Weird . They live in Tallahassee, Florida. The Weird A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories By Jeff VanderMeer Tor Books Copyright © 2012 Jeff VanderMeer All right reserved. ISBN: 9780765333629 THE WEIRD: TABLE OF CONTENTS  Alfred Kubin, “The Other Side” (excerpt), 1908 F. Marion Crawford, “The Screaming Skull,” 1908 Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” 1907 Saki, “Sredni Vashtar,” 1910 M.R. James, “Casting the Runes,” 1911 Lord Dunsany, “How Nuth Would Have Practiced his Art,” 1912 Gustav Meyrink, “The Man in the Bottle,” 1912 Georg Heym, “The Dissection,” 1913 Hanns Heinz Ewers, “The Spider,” 1915 Rabindranath Tagore, “The Hungry Stones,” 1916 Luigi Ugolini, “The Vegetable Man,” 1917 A. Merritt, “The People of the Pit,” 1918 Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Hell Screen,” 1918 Francis Stevens, “Unseen---Unfeared,” 1919 Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919 Stefan Grabinski, “The White Weyrak,” 1921 H.F. Arnold, “The Night Wire,” 1926 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” 1929 Margaret Irwin, “The Book,” 1930 Jean Ray, “The Mainz Psalter ,” 1930 Jean Ray, “The Shadowy Street,” 1931 Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” 1933 Hagiwara Sakutoro, “The Town of Cats,” 1935 Hugh Walpole, “The Tarn,” 1936 Bruno Schulz, “Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass,” 1937 Robert Barbour Johnson, “Far Below,” 1939 Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost,” 194