A review of "All Your Friends Are Here" by M. Shaw

Prose Over PlotWhat is Weird Fiction? What is New Weird Fiction? What is New Weird Horror? What is New Weird Lit or New Weird Science Fiction or New Weird Other and do any of these distinctions mean anything and/or is that the whole point of the genre?There are some types of weird fiction that we call weird because they truly are kind of incomprehensible (M. John Harrison) or at least wildly strange (China Miéville). But not every beautifully incomprehensible work gets called Weird-with-a-capital-W, because if it did that’s how we’d label our trio of great Irish modernists: Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien. We don’t, alas, but you know those three reveled in their incomprehensibility and their weirdness.A lot of weird fiction is a form of speculative horror that isn’t quite scary enough to be straight horror and isn’t quite rule-based enough to be science fiction. This often has an eco-horror tilt (Jeff VanderMeer), it might earn the label because of a cosmic…