What is "The Weird Zone"?

Image from the Lovecraftian game, "The Sinking City"

 

Welcome to the "Writng from the Weird Zone" Blog. In this post, I explain what the Weird Zone is; in a later post, I will explain why I have chosen to write from this particular territory.

The Weird Zone is a category, not a genre. It encompasses all the things one might encounter in a day that starts out strolling down Normal Road and then, perhaps subtly, perhaps suddenly, turns off into territory that is decidedly Not Normal. You start off walking downtown past the folks you pass everyday on the street, you take a turn at a corner you don't usually take, and every once in a while you notice people in yeah-I'm-a-spy trenchcoats. Sometimes these people take a scan of your face with something like a highway cop's radar gun, and they say to themselves, "not the one we're looking for." Sometimes these people have green skin, or compound eyes like an insect. Instead of storefronts advertising "Fortunes Told," you pass places with signs that promise "Alchemical Transformation Therapy--Ascensions Extra." The churches on some streetcorners bear upside-down crosses. Now and then you see a poster proclaiming that "Rosemary's Baby Loves You." You see that the Church of the Starry Wisdom has "Game Night" on Thursday, and it occurs to you blocks later that they might mean "Game" as in "Big," but there are no elephants, lions, or tigers about. As the night comes on, you see people looking at you through the blinds on their windows; they smile, and you think to yourself, gee, gramma, what big incisors you have. You decide to go home. But which way is that?  

Good luck, kiddo.

The Weird Zone is where spies lurk, sometimes the CIA conducting more mind control experiments, sometimes aliens doing early reconnaissance for an invasion. H.P. Lovecraft, the dark prince of cosmic horror literature, haunts the Weird Zone, along with all the creatures that he came up with, or channeled. Sure, vampires and werewolves and the little people who just might have fierce territorial instincts and the whole busload of traditional cultures' nightmare creatures have a place in the Weird Zone. The Baba Yaga whom my Polish grandmother warned me about lives there in her walking house. Angels and demons and everything in between, immortals and invisibles, mad scientists and mutants, age-old conspiracies and ancient secret societies, embassies from Shambhala and Atlantis. Do be careful whom you sit next to at the diner on a fine winter's night. 

You do know, right, that the typical person carries 60 to 70 genetic mutations that they did not receive from either parent? You never know what will activate one of those genes--or what happens when they are activated.

I'm sure you are aware that the CIA really did conduct experiments involving paranormal abilities, right? MK-ULTRA tried to create mind control, Project Stargate trained people to act as psychic spies, and other experiments tried to train people to exercise telekinesis ("moving things with the mind"). This is all in the public record of what you call "the Real World."

Those last two paragraphs are stone cold reality, but you probably weren't taught about these things in school. Maybe this is the first you're hearing about them. But that's the thing about the Weird Zone: it is quite educational, if you can be open to it. The Weird Zone teaches you that just under the surface of what is commonly accepted as the Real World is a Shadow World, where powerful forces are at work outside your ken, where reality shows aspects you did not suspect existed. Truly did Prince Hamlet say, in Shakespeare's telling, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

That is the Weird Zone. That is what I choose to write about; that is the territory I choose to write from.

If you would like to learn more about it, and why I choose to write about it--stick around.

I'll show you things.