Richie Snowden-Leak

The ‘Confrontational Escapism’ of the New Weird: Reading Challenging Fiction in Online Spaces

Author Thomas Ligotti defined his kind of fiction as a form of ‘confrontational escapism’, a way of escaping from the horrors of reality by paradoxically reading or creating fiction about those said horrors. I will not only be examining New Weird literature that deliberately depicts these often sexist, racist, and classist realities so as to critique them, I will also be investigating why these horrors pervade the (New) Weird, and why, if at all, we read them in online spaces among a community of those who also seek out challenging fiction.