The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
The atmospheric film Wings of Desire saw two angels wander the streets of Berlin, contemplating love, suicide, and Peter Falk. Then writer-director WIM WENDERS (1945- ) brought us Until the End of the World, the story of a falling nuclear satellite intersecting with the saga of a genius who can record human dreams. In The End of Violence, Edward Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks” comes to moving, breathing life while a surveillance agent probes Los Angeles from the digital ether. The soul and the machine: Wenders knows both well.
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS (1912–1997) was just another scion of the ruling class who shot his wife (and paint cans against canvases), did an enormous amount of drugs, appeared in both On the Road and a Nike commercial, declared that language was a virus from outer space, taught at a city college, wrote novels by typing up pages and then cutting them to ribbons, outlived virtually everyone he knew, and retired to Kansas a fine old-money gentleman. You know — one of those types.
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
The TV series based on CHARLES ADDAMS’s (1912–1988) life and odd creations brought weirdness to prime time, well before the term “goth” was but a bloody tear in a suburban teenager’s angst-filled eye. But The Addams Family show was just the most populist tip of the freakish iceberg; thanks to Addams’s 40-year career as a cartoonist for The New Yorker, not even the well-read and well-bred were safe from his dark visions. Legend has it that one of his cartoons was used to gauge lunacy levels in asylum patients.
What’s new: a Broadway musical version of The Addams Family is in the works!
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
DOUGLAS ADAMS (1952-2001) imagined a spaceship whose engine was powered by highly unlikely coincidences; a temporally bifurcated alien who convinced Leonardo to whip up six more copies of the Mona Lisa; and a bathrobe-clad hitchhiker who lamented to a friend, “You’re turning into an infinite number of penguins.” Across a multimedia array of novels, screenplays, and radio dramas, Adams was Grand Master of the absurd; we would weep over his premature evacuation from the planet, but we’re still too busy laughing at all he wrote.
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
If this were an “85 Awesomest Storytellers” list, it would certainly showcase Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; since it’s the “85 Weirdest,” we’ve got to honor STEVE DITKO (1927– ). As an artist, he gave us Spider-Man’s gallery of gruesome grotesques — the Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, et al. — as well as the comics medium’s greatest eldritch mystic, Dr. Strange, who faced a pantheon of Lovecraftian horrors. And let’s not forget the philosophical weirdness of Ditko’s most mysterious creation, The Question.
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
A painter turned theatrical designer turned novelist, MERVYN PEAKE’s (1911-1968) early success in the London art world was interrupted by the horrors of World War II. After a nervous breakdown in 1942, he was discharged from the army and began to produce the works for which he’d be remembered: fantastic illustrations for Lewis Carroll, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Brothers Grimm and more; books of strange poetry starting with Rhymes Without Reason; and the weird fantasy cycle of the Gormenghast novels, which have inspired generations of readers and authors. (Not to mention The Cure.)
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
The angelic techno-poet of the 21st century, blown backward into the 20th by a wind called tomorrow. LAURIE ANDERSON (1947– ) conjures the earthbound skeletons of prehistoric whales, writes odes to Hansel and Gretel, and builds digital audio triggers into her violin bows, all the while enchanting us to re-envision the moments of our lives. There’s no substitute for her ineffable stage performances, but listen anyway to The Ugly One With the Jewels and Mister Heartbreak, just for starters.
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
TERRY GILLIAM‘s (1940- ) marvelous and surreal animations for Monty Python featured cut-up Victorian photos and bulbous drawings of giant feet, but his movies are twice as unhinged. Gilliam’s jumbled films invite us into fantastical parallel dreamworlds where anything can happen and usually does, whether it includes time-traveling dwarves (Time Bandits), bureaucratic cities of documentation in triplicate (Brazil), an incomprehensible Dr. Gonzo (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), or Matt Damon with a goofy haircut (The Brothers Grimm).
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days! Let’s kick things off with one of the most indisputably weird storytellers of all time…
Somewhere, a parallel universe exists where FRANZ KAFKA (1883-1924) survived his illness, agreed to have his stories translated into English, and became Weird Tales’s second superstar alongside H.P. Lovecraft. As it is, he has to settle for posthumous recognition as one of the greatest authors of all time. In his works, a man turns into a giant cockroach; another starves himself to death for the amusement of onlookers; a third is held in endless thrall to a mysterious castle’s bureaucracy; and a fourth, deemed a criminal, must have the judge’s “sentence” carved into his flesh by a fiendish justice machine. But they are all the same man, and that man is Kafka.
Readers wrote us in record numbers when we asked you who, in your book, are the weirdest of the weird: the most influentially strange authors and artists and talespinners of all kinds to work their magic on the world in the 85 years since 1923, when Weird Tales was born. We asked that you not limit your suggestions to just fiction writers, and you responded enthusiastically, naming hordes of filmmakers, songwriters, cartoonists, and more. We took your ideas, added a few of our own, called some top fantasy professionals to put in their two cents, and then dove into the long and arduous process of winnowing the list down to a mere 85 names.
Our 85th anniversary issue — featuring fiction by Michael Moorcock, Sarah Monette, and Tanith Lee, nonfiction by Cherie Priest, and Jeff VanderMeer’s interview with China Míeville, and is still available for purchase online — introduced the 85 Weirdest Storytellers individually. If one of your favorite weirdos didn’t make the list, you can share your weird and let us know! Our 90th anniversary isn’t that far away…
Meanwhile:
WEIRD TALES presents: The 85 Weirdest Storytellers 1923-2005
Kudos to them all: creative geniuses whose work, in whatever form and flavor, has shown an affinity of spirit with the brilliantly freaky storytelling that’s been the hallmark of Weird Tales since the magazine was born 85 years ago this very month.
(Don’t see one of your favorites here? Help us compile more weirdness! Go to the Share the Weird page and tell your fellow readers about the weird storytellers you love the most!)
The Uncanny Beauty Issue! “Secretario” by Catherynne M. Valente; Amal El-Mohtar presents Le Tarot de Gaga; Theodora Goss explores strange faces...and much more!
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