*Jaws soundtrack plays* A colomber is the very incarnation of thalassaphobia, the fear of the sea. A shark that is said to follow a sailor his whole life, the colomber eventually slays and eats those to whom they are bound. …

The perfect date keeps her biggest secret until just before marriage “Same Time, Same Place” by Mervyn Peake (1963) bears similarities with William Sansom’s “A Woman Seldom Found” and, as the editors suggest, Lenora Carrington’s “White Rabbit.” …

A chilling tale in which monks gaslight the protagonist about the existence of a suffering man “The Howling Man” by Charles Beaumont presents two sides of a story: a man who has been detained in a small cell by German monks may either be an innocent victim who experiences dehumanizing…

In which the perfect tryst comes with a twist William Sansom’s “A Woman Seldom Found” is the second Sansom story to appear in the The Weird, but it couldn’t be more different from “The Winding Sheet.” …

In which memes meet Surrealism In Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl,” a man develops an unexpected bond with an amphibian at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, to the point where he becomes — and realizes he has always been — an axolotl. The axolotl has eyes that tell the narrator of…

A story about cannibalism — oh, I mean capitalism During my Master’s degree, I researched what certain critics have said about how surreal, fantastic, imaginative fiction can more effectually capture the absurdity and contradictions of economic reality under capitalism than strict realism can. …

In which a creepy child sits on a flickering TV set and everyone pretends it’s fine A child with haunting eyes sits of a flickering television screen before a crowd of adults and you don’t know what he’ll do next. If this image is even vaguely familiar to you, you’ve likely come across a reference to Jerome Bixby’s “‘It’s a Good Life.’” Anthony is a child…

Amos Tutuola’s “The Complete Gentleman” borrows from the tradition of Yoruba folktales to tell the story of a “beautiful” man who borrows his ‘complete’ body-feet, neck, skin, and all — from their owners. Surreal like the best folktales, it made me think of some of Italo Calvino’s more grotesque Italian…

A fun, short read — if you have a sick mind “The dead man lay alone and naked on a white cloth in a wide room, surrounded by depressing white walls, in the cruel sobriety of a dissection room that seemed to shiver with the screams of an endless torture.” …