Why “Weird”? (A Note from Joe)

For years, I struggled with a question that kept me up at night: What kind of writer am I?

My editor would ask, “Is this a mystery?”

I’d say, “Well, there’s a murder, but also a ghost.”

My agent would ask, “Is this fantasy?”

I’d say, “Well, there’s magic, but it’s set in the real New York City from the 1970s.”

The local booksellers who hand-sell my books would ask, “Where do we shelve this?”

And I’d have no answer.

The magazine editors who bought my short stories would sometimes reject one saying, “It’s not really the kind of story we publish.”

One of my writer friends finally shared with me that he thought that my books were “too cross-genre.”

That meant that they didn’t fit the neat little boxes the industry relies on.

Hey, it happens. For the record, I do sometimes write “pure” mysteries and “pure” fantasies. But the stories I really wanted to tell—the ones that kept me up at night, the ones that felt true—refused to stay in one lane.

They wanted to be weird.

They wanted to be about a detective who gets clues from an unplugged radio. They wanted to be about a world-renowned rat exterminator who discovers a colony of rat athletes—rathletes?—training for the Olympics. They wanted to be about a woman who becomes Santa Claus, or a Beat poet/cop who hunts giant, murderous vegetables.

I finally realized that I wasn’t exactly failing to fit into a genre. I was just writing in a genre that doesn’t get enough love: Weird Fiction.

I figured I’m in good company. This is the domain of Kafka, Ray Bradbury, and The Twilight Zone. It’s the place where, when the impossible happens, the main character accepts it, and the reader goes along for the ride. It’s where the mundane turns monstrous, and the absurd becomes the only logical conclusion.

At this point in my career, I’ve stopped trying to fit in. I’ve embraced the weird. I’m snuggling the darkness. The readers who love these stories—the ones who crave the strange, the magical, and the unexplainable—are out there. They are just waiting for a home. To which I can only say: welcome home.

The books in this collection are for readers who know that the best stories don’t follow the rules. Readers who understand that a story about a ghost who appears only when you’re sucking down a plate of pot roast is just as valid as a story about a serial killer.

Sometimes, you just have to go weird, go dark, or go home. Thank you for being here. Thank you for embracing the weird with me.

— Joe