this is a very influential text

the first half bespeaks a terror in ecological and zoological disjunctions: of uncanny beings that straddle the limits of the human body, monstrously unfolding and morphing between psychical and physical realities, prefiguring explorations in later texts, such as silent hill 2 and annihilation, where materiality cannot be distinguished from hallucinations

the second half is a boring, happy corpse dragged clean from mud and slime: a reactionary retreat from the ontological ruptures the first half depicted — to daddy civilisation's campfires, and superstructures, and heteronormative trysts on the wrecks of decaying ships no longer operative by her majesty's army, yet still erect (!) and taut (!) against nature's sensuous flows (!)

this is the limitation of the old weird: its depiction of monstrosity is always an othering, a voyeuristic traversal into abjection for the purpose of reconstituting society's boundaries ever more categorically

while there are hints of a moreness beyond the status quo — a recurrence of mythical beings (such as kraken and mermen) in the age of enlightenment — this moreness is, ultimately, repelled or repressed. in stark contrast, later new weird writers depict bodily transgressions (of the biological, the psychological, and the political) as potentially productive, sites that may offer us joyous new configurations of becoming (even at the risk of old painful entanglements) — a new collective myth making that often involves non-human beings

despite my critiques, there's some interesting things going on in glen carrig. as with annihilation, it plays with our propensity to project humanness into environments we cannot comprehend — to bring the homely into the unhomely, like an inverted uncanny, constituting an unresolvable ambiguity in our experiences of novelty — hauntological loops connecting past and future into eerie spirals of fate and chance, necessity and contingency, death and birth (read: totality and freedom)

glen carrig similarly deals with themes of loneliness and disconnect. some passages feel like a 19th century variant on annihilation:

Anon, I would stare out across the immensity of the vast continent of weed and slime that stretched its incredible desolation out beyond the darkening horizon, and there would come the thought to me of the terror of men whose vessels had been entangled among its strange growths, and so my thoughts came to the lone derelict that lay out there in the dusk, and I fell to wondering what had been the end of her people, and at that I grew yet more solemn in my heart. For it seemed to me that they must have died at last by starvation, and if not by that, then by the act of some one of the devil-creatures which inhabited that lonely weed-world.

recommended for fans of mieville, melville, morrowind, pirates of the caribbean, and the odyssey