Strange delights

In the same literary/artistic tradition as Wrong are two anthologies of the strange and the unsettling that you can pick up on Kindle.

The Café Irreal first went online in 1998 with the intention of publishing a type of fantastic fiction most often associated with writers such as Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe, and Jorge Luis Borges. To this end, it has published more than 250 authors from over 30 countries. In the course of the past fifteen years, it has also seen its editors nominated for a World Fantasy Award and been named by Writer’s Digest as one of the Top 30 Short Story Markets.

The Rabbit Hole asserts that "weird can be funny, weird can be sad, weird can be thoughtful, weird can be mad, but the one thing in common is that weird shares experiences you have, thankfully, never had."

The Rabbit Hole volume 5

The Irreal Reader

Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature

Distorted dreams

I've been playing around with Bing Image Creator to see if it can come up with some suitably strange images for Wrong. But wait, before you get out the pillory, I know many people are bothered by generative AI models training on content that's in copyright. In fact that's how all writers and artists learn their craft; I remember in art lessons at school consciously swiping hands from Bernie Wrightson and facial profiles from Barry Windsor-Smith. The AI generators aren't storing any work in memory like a photograph, cut-n-paste style. They learn patterns. But to put your mind at rest, I made a point of only asking the AI to use the styles of dead artists like (above) Franz von Stuck.

As Bing doesn't know anything about Wrong, I asked for "a Weird Tales cover painting in the style of..." Not a perfect fit, Weird Tales being rather more in-your-face fantasy than Wrong stories typically are, but the results are interesting. How about this one in the style of Edward Hopper:

AI art generators have a lot of trouble with hands. Not surprising, as they only learn about the world from 2D images. But in this case the demented digits work to create a disturbing effect.

This next one is in the tradition of Tullio Crali:

There's a definite Weird Tales vibe there, but I'm not sure it knows Crali's work at all. The lettering makes no sense because, to the AI, text is just part of design. I've also seen human artists make a right mess of spelling, though, so let's not mock the machine's efforts too much.

The AI does a little better at getting the feel of an authentic Hannes Bok cover:

And it seems to be familiar with Ensor:

Asked to pastiche Dulac, it opts for a grim fairytale style that I think Guillermo del Toro would like:

And it even seems to have latched onto the weirdly wonderful whimsy of Sidney Sime:

I specifically asked for no text in that one, but I should have realized it probably wouldn't take any notice because it doesn't realize that letters are "text".

This cover in the style of Andrew Loomis isn't right for Weird Tales, but I could easily imagine it on the front of an issue of Unknown in the early '40s:

And this last one is supposedly in the style of a living author, the great Posy Simmonds, but it looks so unlike anything I'd associate with her that the AI must not have known her work. Instead it cooked up something quite nightmarish from whatever scraps in had in the mental larder:

Not lascivious enough to satisfy Farnsworth Wright, but I reckon Dorothy McIlwraith and Lamont Buchanan would have jumped at it.