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megapolisomancy.bsky.social
After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest,
@megapolisomancy.bsky.social
2.8K followers 1.9K following 4.5K posts
Nonfiction about weird fiction at Seize the Press, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Los Angeles Review of Books, Nightmare, and Ancillary Review of Books, where I am also an editor. Also jazz, metal, leftism. he/him

https://doomsdayer.wordpress.com/writings/
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megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Welp
November 11, 2025 at 1:57 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Homer, grinning smugly and stupidly, tells Mr Burns, who looks worried, I THINK WE CAN TRUST THE GOP. Homer is labeled The Democrats and Mr Burns, The American Public
November 10, 2025 at 12:55 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
November 9, 2025 at 5:13 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
November 9, 2025 at 2:48 AM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Homer with a blank look saying I SLEEP IN A BIG BED WITH MY WIFE
November 8, 2025 at 5:32 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
November 6, 2025 at 12:33 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Various badly drawn memes of needing more weird fiction
November 5, 2025 at 7:40 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Calvin looking up from a book, maybe containing the NYC election results, with devilish glee
November 5, 2025 at 2:27 AM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Radioactive Man chained up and labeled “MAGA assholes” about to be engulfed by a tidal wave of acid labeled “everyone sick of their shit”
November 5, 2025 at 2:12 AM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
All eyes on NYC today
Calvin’s mom saying “LIFE COULD BE WORSE, CALVIN” and Calvin yelling “LIFE COULD BE A LOT BETTER, TOO”
November 4, 2025 at 12:42 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Well, people, a very enthusiastic “people who like the kind of thing I like will find this is the kind of thing they like” round of applause for this incredibly weird/artful book. Promised myself I’d just write a short review but there are so many threads/contexts to tease out… we’ll see.
The colorful, verminful cover of Hiron Ennes’s THE WORKS OF VERMIN
November 3, 2025 at 9:05 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Includes a link to and kind words for my Schweblin review - please read! - but also a fascinating discussion between Due, Ruff and Martinez on religion and horror, which means it’s time for me to recommend RELIGION OF FEAR again. Jason was a very important mentor for me.
November 1, 2025 at 6:20 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
I did not know that’s where D&G pulled “a body without organs”!
November 1, 2025 at 6:01 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium

M. JOHN HARRISON
"What would it be really like to live in the world of..?" is an inappropriate question, a category error. You understand this immediately you ask it of the inscape of, say, Samuel Beckett or Wyndham Lewis. I didn't want it asked (and I certainly didn't want it answered) of Viriconium, so I made that world increasingly shifting and complex. You can not learn its rules. More importantly, Viriconium is never the same place twice. That is because - like Middle-Earth - it is not a place. It is an attempt to animate the bill of goods on offer. Those goods, as in Tolkien or Moorcock, Disney or Kafka, Le Guin or Wolfe, are ideological. "Viriconium" is a theory about the power-structures culture is designed to hide; an allegory of language, how it can only fail; the statement of a philosophical (not to say ethological) despair. At the same time it is an unashamed postmodern fiction of the heart, out of which all the values we yearn for most have been swept precisely so that we will try to put them back again (and, in that attempt, look at them afresh). Like all books, Viriconium is just some words.
November 1, 2025 at 5:23 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Once a historian, always a historian
Weirding: Towards a Weird/Critical Fiction/Theory On Sederholm and Woofter's The Weird and Michael Kelly's The Best Weird Fiction of the Year
November 1, 2025 at 1:43 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Frinkiac meme of the kids yelling STOP STOP HE’S ALREADY DEAD but the Krusty burglar is labeled ME and Homer as Krusty is labeled AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS and he’s crushing me with a massive pile of books
October 31, 2025 at 12:38 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Please don’t tell anyone how Lenny lives
October 28, 2025 at 7:24 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Thinking of Barthelme as speculative, or floating within the larger pool of irrealism, is syncing up nicely with some thoughts I’ve been working on with weird genre/canon formation, especially pulling on this excellent thought by Timothy Jarvis and Helen Marshall
Lovecraft is often imagined as a fountainhead for the Weird, with various tributaries springing forth from his tradition of cosmic horror. Yet what if the Weird should be described, not as a river, with waters flowing downward from a source, but as an estuary where freshwater and ocean mix to form a rich, brackish murk hiding many reefs and islands? Such a way of thinking about literary history emphasizes transmutation over transmission.
October 28, 2025 at 1:37 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Totally agreed
Drake meme but it’s Abe Simpson shunning “Choosing between realism and surrealism” and excitedly pointing at “destabilizing the concept of "real"”
October 28, 2025 at 2:15 AM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
This guy... this is not my kind of guy.
Electric Lit asking “What's a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?” And Brandon Taylor answering “Make it weird.” (With an annoying ad in between the two) EL: Realism or surrealism? BT: Realism all day long: Get that surrealism out of here. Get it out of here. Mm-mmm grow up. We're done with that! Realism.
October 27, 2025 at 8:04 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
A cartoon of Hitler hating jazz with the text: HITLER HATES JAZZ... ...and that suits us fine DUKE ELLINGTON and his famous orchestra https://thereisjazzbeforetrane.blogspot.com/2009/12/hitler-hates-jazz-and-that-suits-us.html?m=1
October 24, 2025 at 10:24 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
👻 BOO-ks 👻
Three books: The Writhing, Verdant End by Corey Farrenkopf, Tiffany Morris, and Eric Raglin The Maidens of Midnight by Rhiannon Rasmussen The Veldt Institute by Samuel M. Moss
October 23, 2025 at 10:34 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry
Calvin and Hobbes singing the Calvinball song, only Calvin is apologizing for not reading and/or writing the thing I was supposed to have read/written about
October 22, 2025 at 11:24 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Homer, labeled “Me”, shoveling all you can eat seafood into his mouth, labeled “A new column on New Weird novels” Homer (Me) being dragged away from the seafood (A new column on New Weird novels) by sailors labeled Sanity, Only 24 hours in a day, and Work
October 22, 2025 at 2:15 PM
megapolisomancy.bsky.social
Mark your calendars for Wednesday
Los Angeles Review of Books preview page: Parading Around Among the Living Like Nothing Happened Zachary Gillan explores Samanta Schweblin's "Good and Evil and Other Stories," translated by Megan McDowell. By Zachary Gillan • October 22, 2025
October 20, 2025 at 10:50 PM