Fellow seekers, I need your help as I seek the grail of great, original and independently-published fiction in ebooks and on the web

People have been telling weird stories for as long as we've been huddling around fires attempting to keep the dark at bay. Our earliest stories overflow with the weird. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey, the heroic saga of Beowulf - all are rich with fantasy. Dante, Shakespeare, Milton: give the western literary canon a good shake and weird stories come tumbling out from every direction. And today the fantasy franchise dominates the popular imagination, with tales of boy wizards, magic rings and teenage vampire romances filling page and screen as far as the eye can see.

How our stories come to us, however, has changed and evolved over time. For some decades those of us who love books have placed our trust in publishers to search out new and imaginative stories and bring them to our attention. But 2012 may well be remembered as the year publishers had their role as gatekeepers of the human subconscious prised from their cold, dead hands by a veritable legion of self-published authors. The Amazon Kindle and Apple iBook stores are at the leading edge of a wave of digital technologies that give any writer who wants it the chance to publish their own work to the world. But whether the world is listening is another question. Those of us who love a good book are being posed an interesting challenge; just how do we choose what to read amid the sea of self-published work flooding the internet?

Weird stories are proving to be as popular in the age of the Kindle as in all previous ages of storytelling. You can barely chuck a magically enchanted spear at the Kindle bestseller lists without hit hitting a multi-volume fantasy epic or the kick-ass heroine of a paranormal romance. Before we know it the number of self-published SF space operas will outnumber all the stars in all the galaxies they chart. It seems that after decades of being trained to follow the expectations of generic commercial fiction by publishers, our enfeebled human imaginations can do little more than churn out the same old stories we've all read before.

However – and you are quite welcome to call me a naive fool for thinking this – I believe that in this festering compost heap of discarded dreams, the fertile seeds of human imagination must lie buried. In the thousands upon thousands of stories being independently published today there must surely be some worth reading, and at least a handful with the potential to be truly great. And so I'm taking up the gauntlet and heading forth on a quest, descending into the new digital underworld of the human imagination to see what I can find.

Over the next four weeks I will be scouring the internet for the best independently-published weird stories. I genuinely have no idea what to expect. I'm hoping I might stumble upon a new Angela Carter, Mervyn Peake or China Miéville; a weird and fantastically baroque masterpiece from a unique imagination. Maybe even a few of them. On the other hand, I might end up destroying my mind with a steady diet of third-rate Stephen King clones and Harry Potter rip-offs. So to avoid the latter I'm turning to the wisdom of the crowd, and asking you, the readers of theguardian.com/books, for your help. And here is how you can give it.

1. Nominate your weird stories.

Make your nominations for weird stories in the comments below. Please let me know the title, author and where I can read more. That might be a link to a website or blog, or a listing on the Kindle or iBook store. Only add one link or your comment will be filtered as spam. You can include the opening sentence of the story as well if you like, but no more than that. And if you want to include your own review of the story, please do.

2. Help spread the word.

You can link back to this article from your blog or website. Or mention it on Facebook or other social networks and on Twitter using the #weirdthings hashtag.

3. Follow my quest for weird stories on Twitter.

I'll be tweeting my thoughts on the stories I read over the next four weeks on @damiengwalter and using the #weirdthings hashtag.

These instructions may leave a few questions unanswered. I've done my best to answer some below, but if you have any others please leave comments and I will endeavour to respond to them.

1. What qualifies as weird?

This is really for you to decide. SF, fantasy and horror stories certainly do, but I'm also looking for stories that are far weirder than commercial genre fiction. If you think it's a weird story, then go ahead and nominate it.

2. What do you mean by independently published?

Ideally published either by the author or an independent publisher. Books from major publishers already get a lot of attention, and this is a search for books that might otherwise go unseen. But if you think there is a neglected masterpiece from a major publisher then please go ahead and nominate it.

3. Can I nominate my own story?

Yes. In fact I hope you will.

My quest for weird stories starts today and will carry on for the next four weeks. We'll be keeping the comments open on this post for some of that time, but the sooner you make your nomination, the more likely I'll get to your story in a timely fashion. I'll be reporting back on what I find in a future Weird Things column that will include a review of each of the best stories I find.

So. Please make your nominations, and wish me luck!