The Weird

This is a piece of promotional art I’ve done for The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genres, a two-day event taking place in London next month at the Horse Hospital and the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Organiser Tim Jarvis asked me to contribute an unspecified something; I suggested a poster but that idea proved to be too ambitious, somewhat fortuitously since I had an elaborate design in mind that the current workload would have compromised. This design is the distilled version. The five inset images are a result of having written this post at the beginning of the month. The bespectacled owl is an alchemical illustration from a book I’d found in a charity shop a couple of days earlier.

The event looks like a good one. In addition to the opportunity to see M. John Harrison and others reading on day one, there’s a host of talks on day two that push many of my cult buttons, including discussion of the works of Nigel Kneale and William Hope Hodgson. There’s also Dr Benjamin Noys on “Full Spectrum Offence: The Neo-Weird of Savoy” which I guess may touch on some of the work I’ve done for Savoy Books with David Britton. I’ve got a couple of deadlines looming at the moment so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to attend but I’ll certainly be there in spirit.