Weird Tales

The 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 face it: math isn’t just confounding and painful for many of us word nerds — it’s downright weird. Nobody captured the weirdness of geometry and spacetime more viscerally, or rendered it more fantastically, than M.C. ESCHER (1898–1972). He took abstract notions of physical transformation and made them real places to see, touch and get lost in, complete with dimensionally transcendent staircases. But what lurks just beyond the walls? In Escher’s worlds, what he left out is brain food of the weirdest kind.

The 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!

That brain you see hanging out in a ThinkGeek ad owes its existence to FRIDA KAHLO (1907-1954), whose stark self-portraits eliminated the boundaries of the body and put the four-chambered hearts, fetuses, and internal organs where we can see them. Frida’s work is weird at its most personal. She wore her inner pain on the outside, beautifully rendered and impossible to ignore. Her paintings will make you flinch, but just try to look away. Go on, we dare you.