The Machine Book of Weird
This brilliant compendium of old short stories was brought together in order to explore what life is like when it is lived indoors. The Machine Book of Weird is a collection of lockdown literature before it happened: a series of unheimlich tales by which we may judge the strange experience that began in February 2020 and which somehow feels like it is not fully over. The Machine Book of Weird gives insight into how narratives of the interior become narratives of the mind, available here as one awesome but unsettling print compendium.
It brings you these late Victorian and Edwardian fables that will beguile, intrigue and scare you, by writers who, influenced by new theories and ideas suddenly became aware of the bars on their cage. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper is a brilliant example; the very wallpaper the means of a woman’s enslavement. HG Wells writes in The Door in the Wall, of a man restrained by expectations who dreams (or does he?) of passing into a life of intoxicating freedom. Chekhov imagines the revelations of a man who has lived inside for his entire life to win a bet.
These tales shed light on how we think about interiors and about our recent history, particularly that strange period between 2020 and 2022, when we were often trapped indoors. Recommended by critics and experts, the stories explore incarceration and fear. Very often, they are disturbing; occasionally they are funny, but always they explore the relationship between us and the world that we impose on ourselves. The stories may be written over a century ago but they offer us an insight into a condition we have created and which we are still living with.
These are the people who wrote lockdown literature first: Saki, E. Nesbit, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anton Chekhov, E. F. Benson, O. Henry, G. K. Chesterton, H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, H. G. Wells, Guy de Maupassant and Kate Chopin.