The New Weird: How modern horror writers are mapping our existential dread with tales of cosmic terror

I needed a good scare, but I wanted the terror seasoned with a generous dose of unease, dread, and the unknowable—a fictional mirror image of an unprecedented life under a global lockdown.

So, I started searching out writers of the so-called “New Weird", a term that includes a loose galaxy of Gen X writers who have been taking horror and weird fiction in thrillingly strange new directions over the past 15 years or so; deconstructing genre tropes, and mixing them with other pulp genres like noir to significant effect.

Structurally, the fondness this generation of writers has for shorter fiction forms like the short story, the novella, and the novelette has brought unexpected pleasures. Before I started on novels from some of the best writers of the ‘New Weird’, I devoured their short story collections, in collected volumes as well as anthologies.

But first, some definitions: what is weird fiction? As far as explanations go, I cannot do better than the introduction to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s monumental doorstopper of an anthology from 2011, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.

They start their introduction with the highly influential cosmic horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote in 1927 that the weird tale “…has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains". Instead, as the famously paranoid and racist American put it, expect a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread" and a “malign and particular suspension or defeat of…fixed laws of nature".

The VanderMeers expand on this to write, “With unease and temporary abolition of the rational, can also come the strangely beautiful, intertwined with terror. Reverie or epiphany, yes, but dark reverie or epiphany". This dark reverie and epiphany was pretty much what I was looking for when I stumbled upon the works of Laird Barron, John Langan, Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, and many others. Five years on, the dark visions of these writers still sustain me.

Horror as existential trauma

What struck me while reading Stephen Graham Jones’ 2025 tour de force novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, is that apart from being a deeply haunting and ferociously violent story, it is also a study of how the creation of nation-states also causes collective trauma—on people, animals, ecologies, and entire biospheres. And when existing orders of life and nature are blown to smithereens by colonial projects, horror seeps out of the cracks of the broken mirror to re-traumatise an already devastated people.

Jones knows this only too well, as a Blackfeet Native American author. Prolific and critically acclaimed, Jones started writing in 2000, crafting what has been called ‘Indigenous Gothic’, employing horror’s vocabulary to examine colonialism’s lasting trauma while celebrating Indigenous resilience and cultural continuity.

He burst into wider prominence with his 2020 novel, The Only Good Indians. I read the book soon after it came out, and was blown away by the way he deepened, broadened, and thoroughly upended mainstream depictions of Indigenous Americans with a harrowing yarn about four Blackfeet men haunted by an elk spirit after violating sacred hunting traditions. The horror derives from the slow, grinding tragedy of the characters’ displacement from tradition, and their attempts to assimilate into white America. Jones paints a vivid picture of contemporary reservation life, depicting basketball games and sweat lodges with equal specificity, resisting romanticisation.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter represents perhaps his most ambitious anti-colonial statement, a dream-like supernatural Western crossed with American Gothic, centred on two men in 1912 Montana—Blackfeet man Good Stab and an old white pastor with a dubious past, Arthur Beaucarne. Good Stab claims to be nearly a century old and a ‘People Eater’, seeking revenge against those who slaughtered the vast bison herds of the American Great Plains to starve his people. “What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had," Good Stab tells Beaucarne.

The novel turns on the historical Marias Massacre of 1870, where American soldiers killed 217 Blackfeet (mostly women, children and old people, who were suffering from small pox and sheltering from the winter snows), and Jones transforms vampire mythology into Indigenous folklore, making Good Stab’s predation a response to the US’s genocidal corralling of Indigenous Americans and the destruction of entire ecologies. The novel’s epistolary structure, conveyed through the pastor’s diary, creates deliberate friction between Indigenous and colonial perspectives, with Good Stab’s voice interrupting and correcting the pastor’s assumptions. Both are gripping and sympathetic characters in their own right, further increasing the sense of frisson.

In these novels, as well as in his short fiction, Jones deftly uses humour to acknowledge the absurdity of the Indigenous experience, his narrators often commenting wryly on stereotypes. Jones revels in the split consciousness of the modern Indigenous Americans, and his tales are all the richer for it.

A malevolent, indifferent universe

If Jones’s style is relatively straightforward, then Laird Barron’s is elliptical, deeply strange and seemingly constantly on the verge of narrative breakdown. It demands attention, and I must say that Barron has made me a more attentive reader.

His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007), is an all-time classic that established him as an heir to the Lovecraftian tradition while simultaneously subverting its conventions. His working-class protagonists—loggers, private investigators, outdoorsmen—couldn’t be more different from Lovecraft’s gentleman amateurs, and Barron’s characters’ encounters with the weird are all the more effective because of their contemporary settings.

In Barron’s universe, humans are but insignificant ants in the cosmic scheme of things. It’s better to court the universe’s indifference than its malevolence. I remember reading bravura stories such as Mysterium Tremendum and The Broadsword and feeling utterly transported, expecting a gaping maw to open in reality any second. “Remember the Golden Rules. Action equals reaction. The Crack that runs through everything stares into you. Big fish eats little fish. Night’s agents watch you, ape," the protagonist of Mysterium Tremendum is warned in a drunken vision. He ignores it. Horrific things happen.

The stories' horror derives not from sudden revelation but from the gradual recognition that meaning itself is a comforting illusion humanity constructs against an uncaring void. Barron’s prose style reinforces this nihilism through its juxtaposition of hardboiled terseness with moments of baroque, almost hallucinatory description. Barron’s most recent work, the 2024 short story collection Not a Speck of Light, continues his winning streak, with In a Cavern, In a Canyon, and Tiptoe introducing two of the scariest monsters I’ve ever come across.

Barron’s most obvious influence is Lovecraft, but he is equally indebted to Ramsey Campbell’s atmospheric style and Cormac McCarthy’s frontier prose, deftly mixing noir, weird tales, and the very American trope of tough characters surviving in unforgiving landscapes. A large part of the pleasure lies in watching him build these worlds, only to bring them methodically crashing down. Barron’s horror arises from the fact that a spectral, alien, and uncaring world constantly hums in the background, seeping out now and then to swallow people whole.

The dread of open spaces

If there’s one book I’ve read that exemplifies how a modern cosmic horror story should be told, it is John Langan’s 2017 novel The Fisherman. It begins as a simple tale of a widower seeking solace in angling before expanding into a nested sequence of stories-within-stories that gradually reveal the malevolent presence haunting Dutchman’s Creek in rural North Carolina.

I’m often read spellbound by Langan’s ability to deftly use an almost academic approach to literary techniques with unabashed genre traditions. His infinitely complex stories are metafictional, heightening the reader’s unease through almost boring, conventional dialogue.

Langan’s approach to folk horror emphasises how a tall tale accumulates heft in the telling, over generations, gaining meaning and power in the process. Until it becomes a portal into a strange universe, where a black ocean resides inside a decrepit house, and where a mad, sorcerous fisherman tries to capture a cosmic leviathan, unleashing monstrous versions of dead people into the ‘real’ world in the process. Langan knows how myth operates and how to create one by manipulating the balance between revelation and concealment.

Langan’s story collections, like The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (2013), demonstrate his commitment to fully realised cosmologies, with rigorous internal logic and histories. His prose is dense and demands attention, but he maintains a constant balance between accessibility and literary sophistication. Read him for the visceral horror, and be transported by moments of lyrical beauty.

The ambiguous and the unreliable

For the longest time, I resisted reading Paul Tremblay’s breakthrough 2015 novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, spooked by the reviews alone. Instead, I read his short stories, which further reinforced my anticipatory terror of the novel. I finally got around to doing so last year.

A Head Full of Ghosts is the story of the alleged demonic possession of a little girl in a Boston suburb, and Tremblay deconstructs the possession narrative through multiple frames—including a reality television show, a cultural commentary blog, and the memories of a deeply traumatised family member.

Through this Rashomon-esque structure of conflicting narratives of the same event, Tremblay examines how trauma metastasises under the media glare, and how popular narratives about the horrific can replace actual terror.

The Cabin at the End of the World (which was filmed by M. Night Shyamalan as Knock at the Cabin in 2023) employs similar techniques. It presents a vague global apocalypse but roots the horror in the claustrophobia of a family suffering a break-in and confronting an impossible choice.

The novel’s power derives from its narrative constraints; readers never receive verification that the apocalypse at the centre of the narrative is really happening, beyond what three menacing home invaders claim. This creates a taut tension based on questions of faith, sacrifice, and the stories we tell to justify violence—can you really save the world by taking the life of a person you love?

Tremblay’s other works, especially the 2019 collection Growing Things and Other Stories, as well as 2023’s The Beast You Are, also explore these themes, with the ingenious plots coming at them at unlikely tangents. His narrators frequently suffer trauma, grief, or mental illness, which might be compromising their perception, or sharpening it; the delicious fun is in not knowing for sure. The source of deep unease and terror comes from Tremblay’s depiction of the aftermath of acts of violence.

Much like Barron’s works, Tremblay favours repetition, with key images and moments circling back in unresolved echoes, building dread with every return. Tremblay refuses easy answers, constructing narratives that acknowledge that “the weird" is ultimately incomprehensible—which is the very source of the terror.

Ultimately, this could well be the key to understanding the writers of the New Weird. At a time when the world is in the grips of a polycrisis and old assurances of civilisation decay, these new horror masters paint a picture of our place in the universe as it probably is: accidental, fragile and teetering on the brink of a monstrous void.

A New Weird Reading List

-Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

-The New Weird edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

-The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer.

-Occultation and Other Stories by Laird Barron.

-The Fisherman by John Langan.

-A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay.

-The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher.

-The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle.

-The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones.

-Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors by Adam L.G. Nevill.

-Ashes and Entropy edited by Robert S. Wilson.

-Children of Lovecraft edited by Ellen Datlow.