Profane Illuminations IV: Mariana Enriquez’s A Sunny Place for Shady People, Dan Coxon’s Come Sing for the Harrowing, and Charles Wilkinson’s The Water Bells

Zachary Gillan Intrusion is a cornerstone of weird fiction. The weird itself intrudes to unsettle a narrative, one genre intrudes into another, irrealism intrudes into the real. We might also think of metaphor and simile as forms of intrusion, of conceptual layering and intermixing in the poetics of weird fiction. Weird fiction is able to blend and layer metaphorized literalism and literalized metaphor, living in the spaces where one intrudes into the other. Rosemary Jackson, building on Tzvetan Todorov, has argued that the movement of fantastic narrative is one of metonymical rather than of metaphorical process: one object does not stand for another, but literally becomes that other, slides into it, metamorphosing from one shape to another in a permanent flux and instability. This permanent flux and instability is where the weird comes into play, fueled by tension between those metonymical and metaphorical processes. In Mariana Enriquez’s A Sunny Place for Shady People, this tension…