Noys, Benjamin (2016) Full Spectrum Offense:Savoy’s Reverbstorm and the Weirding of Modernity. Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, 49 (2). pp. 231-253. ISSN 0016-6928

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Abstract

The “Old Weird,” weird fiction written between 1890 and 1940, was often reactionary and in the figure of H. P. Lovecraft, racist. Contemporary New Weird writing is characterized by a contrasting politics, which stresses the weird as the destabilization of normative conceptions of the human. In the work of the UK-based publisher Savoy we find a different strategy: confrontation with and replication of the racist and anti-Semitic strategies of the Old Weird. Their work is centered on the character Lord Horror, a fictionalized reworking of the wartime broadcaster for the Nazi’s William Joyce, who was nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw and executed for treason in 1946. Lord Horror is a multimedia production, appearing in novels, comic books and graphic novels, music, and film. Focusing on the graphic novel, Reverbstorm (2012), this article explores the dense visual and textual “universe” of Lord Horror as a form of weird fiction. This universe is visually indebted to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, develops a visual weird architecture, exacerbates the form of pulp modernism, and intensifies the disintegration of narrative. The neo-weird of Reverbstorm develops a new form of weird fiction in which the instability of the weird becomes problematic and is not simply to be celebrated as a site of liberation.

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