There’s a power and weight to this type of fiction, which fascinates by presenting a dark mystery beyond our ken and engaging the subconscious. Just as in real life, things don’t always quite add up, the narrative isn’t quite what we expected, and in that space we discover some of the most powerful evocations of what it means to be human or inhuman.

I thought I understood the world of weird, surreal fiction long before I co-edited the anthology The Weird with my wife Ann from 2010-11. I thought I knew, but didn’t, because creating a thousand-page tome covering one hundred years required my reading over four million words of fiction. The experience changed me fundamentally, in ways I’m only now beginning to understand.

For a fiction writer, editing an anthology offers multiple lessons. You learn directly from the stories, but also from the lives of the writers and from the process of acquiring the stories. The information you gather seems more like intelligence, because you’re often a detective trying to solve an inexplicable case. Estates degrade; obscure stories are hard to track down; authors, wounded by the past, mislead. To be told that an estate representative is in a coma and must expire or recover before reprint permissions can be granted is to discover the Kafkaesque in what you assumed would be boringly contractual. To contemplate sending a friend from a Mexican circus on horseback down the coast to Leonora Carrington’s house to secure story rights makes you wonder if the worldview of the writer whose work you covet has begun to colonize the editorial process.

The intel begins to take on an almost luminous quality—hidden linkage and lineage interwoven with literary resonance to reveal a greater, deeper sense of the complexity of the world. Confusions of writer and work become inevitable and can even be clarifying. Sidetracked by Angela Carter’s nonfiction, I found the same fierce intelligence and sense of humor that inhabits the sentences and paragraphs of her fiction. In that confluence, I cannot separate one thing from the other, nor do I want to. Sometimes you need the life entire.

Many weird writers, especially before our modern era of the ultra-professional, were indeed odd, and sometimes akin to outsider artists. The stories that surround them are fraught with eccentricity, the disreputable, and tragedy. The great Belgian writer Jean Ray, convicted of embezzlement, needed the catalyst of a prison stint to craft two of the twentieth-century’s greatest tales of the unknown, “The Shadowy Street” and “The Mainz Psalter.” Austrian writer and artist Alfred Kubin, whose 1909 novel The Other Side features a whole city transported to Central Asia and a dissolving of the border between the real and the unreal, was forever being re-made by his hatred of his father and the aftershocks of an early seduction by an older woman. Even Franz Kafka, staid by comparison, was described by his friend Max Brod as a shy, seldom-seen moon-blue mouse.