Good Weird vs. Bad Weird
It goes without saying that I am into weird stuff but what do I really mean when I say "weird" and how do I decide which weird things I like?
So almost a year ago now, I was on the Weird Book panel at Booknet Fest 2024 and just having a ton of fun throwing out weird recs to folks with the other panelist, Grapie and StarrySteph. At the end of the panel we had some extra time so we let the audience ask questions and this one funny, smart, great person raised their hand and asked a question I honestly had never given any thought to: What makes a book good weird or bad weird and how to you go about deciding?
I don’t remember my answer because I was stumped. As I said, I had never thought about this before so how could I then explain it to someone else? I couldn’t really so I just stumbled through an answer and then… haven’t stopped thinking about the question for 11 months :P
It was a great question and I felt like if I sat with it for a bit, it would make a great script for a future episode. Good weird. Bad weird. Who decides and how? So I started working on this script after I got back home. I brainstormed it, made unhinged random scribblings in my notes app, I chatted with friends and then, the whole thing kinda stalled out. I moved onto other projects, got distracted with life things and just didn’t come back to this idea… until last month.
I had a comment bring me back to life, evanescence style but more on that in a bit. For now, let’s just get into weirdness in media and how I go about determining whether something is the good or bad kind of weird.
So with a name like Weirdo Book Club it goes without saying that I’m into weird stuff, especially when it comes to the kinds of media I consume. I enjoy all forms of strange media too like video games, movies, art, etc. but for the sake of flow, let’s stick to books for this chat. It’s why you’re here after all.
Some of my favorite books include ghost sex, sentient doors being both dreamboats and descendants of Greek gods, cannibal travelers, plague surviving children who can speak to angels, government sanctioned human livestock breeding and even a young woman who wants to be a mermaid so badly she sews her legs together.
Basically, if something is considered weird, I will give it a shot. However, just because it’s weird doesn’t guarantee that I will enjoy it. There is a little more that goes into that aside from “it weird, me like” and there are plenty of weird things out there that I have tried and ultimately disliked and that is because ::deep breath::
Not everything appeals to everyone.
Now, I didn’t think this was a revolutionary concept or something that would need to be explained until a wild man appeared in my comments last month trying to talk some shit to the tune of “why is a channel called weirdo book club complaining that a book is too weird lmao”
Lmao indeed, sir, thank you so much for bringing that up Diane, thank you.
After I blocked him, I realized something insane: amidst those dumb as dirt words, this fool might be onto something. I guess this is what people mean when they say “there are no stupid questions.” I mean, it was stupid and not very funny despite the lmao BUT it did shift my attention back to this whole idea and inspire some entirely new talking points and now, here we are. We are together and we are going to have a discussion about books - specifically weird books - consuming books with your brain on and how that ultimately can help you figure out whether a specific book is for you or not.
Of course this chat can be applied to anything, not just books, not just weird stuff, but books are what I do. Hello, I’m Natalie Meagan.
Also, speaking of weird, don’t feel weird if you’ve also never stopped to think about or consider the process behind forming your opinions on things. I think most of us who have been alive for a decade or two consider that process involuntary at this stage. You know you better than anyone, you’ve lived inside your brain and body for your entire life. You know how to breathe without giving me a step by step guide to the process and you know what you like and what you don’t like. I, however, was asked this question a few times so I’ve now decided to make the answer everyone’s problem :P Also keep in mind that this podcast could have been moved to the recycling bin if people could collectively agree to understand things like nuance and subjectivity but clearly that is not the case so onward we trudge.
So after sitting and thinking on it for a bit, I have broken my qualifiers down into 4:
quality
intention
enjoyability
timing
I broke them down even further on a flowchart that I’ve linked in the show notes but for now, let’s just stick with the main 4 factors and go from there. You can also use these factors for pretty much anything really, they aren’t specific to weird books. You form opinions on everything and media comes in many forms. Use it don’t use it, this is just what I came up with when it comes to me and the weird things I read!
First things first, please know that these qualifiers are complimentary and codependent. All of them bleed into and influence one another. I do not require a weird book to get a perfect score in all 4 categories but I do take them all into account when forming an opinion. Usually as long as some of these things are done well, I can have a good time.
Something can be well written but I just don’t enjoy it.
Something can have the best intentions but I didn’t have fun reading it.
Something can be so fun that I don’t care if it’s terrible quality with zero intention.
Or something great can find me at the wrong time and be completely wiped off the board.
However, sometimes you encounter a book that leaves you unsure of where it falls on the good/bad weird scale. The quality was good, the intention was there, I was invested enough to finish the book but did I enjoy it..? I don’t know!
The recent book that had me feeling this way (and the review that brought this rogue male into my comments) was Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, a Japanese literary horror novel. In this novel, the young FMC is going through a lot of neglect/abuse and to cope, she crafts this bizarre world/backstory for herself in order to “survive, no matter what.” It was well written and translated but at the end of it, I found myself feeling unsure.
After sitting with it for a few hours, I was unable to shake the book off and I still wasn’t sure if I enjoyed it or not, so I sat down and recorded the review. For those who don’t want to listen to the whole review, I rated the book 3 stars and I meant it. 3 stars is not a bad rating, it is middle of the road, still something I would recommend to folks but with caveats.
If you want to know more, you will have to listen to the podcast but for the sake of flow, I am going to zoom out and go back to the factors: quality, intention, enjoyability and timing.
QUALITY
This includes things like story structure, plot development, characterization, pacing, flow as well as things like typos, grammatical errors, repetitive language, etc. Admittedly, when it comes to quality, I am not as much of a stickler as some of my friends. My best friend and other half of WBC Hannah will take an entire star away if there are too many typos. I, on the other hand, recently DNF’d a book because it was so repetitive. No thanks. The quality does matter to me, especially when I’m reading a weird book. Anyone can sit down and write 300 pages of weird stuff happening but if the quality isn’t there, neither am I.
INTENTION
So intention can be broken down further into things like who is telling the story, why are they telling this story and did the impact and execution match their intention. We obviously can’t know a person’s intentions, right? Especially if we don’t actually know them. However, when you read as much as I do (or just read in general) you will start to notice that sometimes, people tell you who they are in their writing.
I will use The Hunger Games as an example which works perfectly because it’s all I can think about these days anyway, may as well lean in. Not the book by the way, I am just using the production, the spectacle that is the hunger games. The Hunger Games, a government sanctioned event wherein which 2 children from each district of Panem are reaped as tributes and forced to fight to the death in a controlled arena, a televised event in order to punish the districts, maintain order and to prevent another uprising. This is written into a YA dystopian series where the commentary is very clear.
There is another book - you may have heard of it - Hunting Adeline - that has a similar event. The Hunger Games is even name dropped and a “may the odds be ever in your favor” tossed in. This one is called The Culling and it involves kidnapped young women being forced to run through a maze and be hunted down by people who intend to buy them as sex slaves… Hunting Adeline, however, is an erotic, dark romance novel that serves no other purpose but to be dark and edgy for dark and edgy sake. It’s some of the worst writing, worst structure, terrible story telling I’ve ever encountered. Plus, this “Culling” makes no sense.
You plan to buy these women to live out their days as your own personal sex slave but you want to… try to kill them first? What if you do? Then who do you buy? Are the culling girls different than the trafficked girls? No, no, that would make too much sense. They are all tossed in there together and for what? For edgy, that’s what. The entire series read like an unhinged version of edge lord mad libs with antisemitism and qanon bullshit sprinkled throughout.
The intention was shit and it read that way.
ENJOYABILITY
So this one is pretty self explanatory but let’s explain anyway. As said, all of these factors are complimentary and codependent but they are also a sum of their parts. This one especially because the quality and the intention of a weird book can absolutely affect my overall enjoyment. For the most part, I know when I’m having fun and I know when I’m not. For those other times where everything feels muddled and I’m not sure what I feel, I look to the previous 2 factors and figure it out.
TIMING
Now this one is an honorable mention but a very powerful one. Timing doesn’t always come into play so it isn’t always factored in but timing is everything, or so I’m told. Timing can come in and sweep the board, making all of the other factors obsolete. For example, after my grandfather passed away, I couldn’t read anything for a month or so. When I did start reading again, I couldn’t handle anything too lengthy or serious. I just wasn’t in a place to be able to fully commit to or appreciate things that required a lot of me. You could have served me the most lyrical, gorgeous, gothic ghost story on a silver platter and it wouldn’t have worked because timing is everything.
It can be the right book at the completely wrong time and that’s ok. I can usually tell when this is happening. I was in a reading slump earlier this year. There was just a lot on my mind, a lot going on with my family and I would start books, know full well that they were checking all of my usual boxes and still DNF because I just couldn’t. Graveyard Shift by ML Rio is one that I recently picked up, realized it wasn’t a good time to read it and put it back down. I’ve read If We Were Villains by the same author and it was really good but I couldn’t read that in a slump either.
Good books, bad time.
All of this to say that reading is subjective to your own personality, likes, dislikes, lived experiences and personal preferences. This isn’t a new idea, I am not reinventing the wheel when it comes to consuming media. I don’t think any point I made today is one that anyone couldn’t come up with on their own if they just thought on it for a minute. However, it is becoming more and more clear to me every day that some people just don’t think. We have a media literacy problem, people lack critical thinking skills or the ability to zoom out and see things outside of their own unique and very small perspectives. Not to mention we have idiots in powerful government positions who are simultaneously trying to eliminate and privatize things like education while saying things like “empathy is a weakness.” It’s a bleak time and it can feel very overwhelming, especially for people who do think and are paying attention.
This is where that whole “reading with your brain turned off” thing has always fallen flat for me. I, of course, have media that I reach for when I want to not think, when I need to pull back, when I can’t fully engage. I think that is healthy and necessary. However, people opting to keep their brain off when doing most things in their lives are what leads people like me to have to deal with dumbasses asking things like “if you like weird things why not this weird thing????” Because, Paul, everyone is different, reading is subjective and just because I enjoy a certain category doesn’t mean that I - by default - like EVERYTHING in that category. For example,
I like desserts but I don’t like coconut cake or pecan pie.
I like music but I’ve never really gotten into opera.
I like horror movies but I don’t like clowns or dolls so I don’t like Terrifier or Chucky.
I like men but I definitely do not like all of them.
This kind of black and white, simple thinking is so embarrassing, honestly. I like some things, I dislike others and here’s the real kicker: I reserve the right to change my mind and there’s nothing you can do about it.
So that’s about the size of it!
I challenge you to come up with your own qualifiers when you read books. What’s important to you when you enter into a new story? What are some things that matter but not enough to sway you one way or the other? Do any of your factors align with mine?
Thanks for reading/listening! I love you, you don’t have to say it back.