Image: Canva.
Experimental and strange fiction is often viewed as a niche of the literary world, reserved for audacious writers who dare push the boundaries of storytelling and their open-minded readerships. Unconventional stories are frequently subjected to mixed reception—some ardent, some bamboozled—and then, more often than not, face a subsequent relegation to the obscure recesses of the literary landscape. Lyrical realism dominates, or as William Skidelsky remarks in the Guardian: ‘The well-made realist novel, inherited from the 19th century, is what we are stuck with now.’
Theoretically, this leaves at least a small subsect of renegade readers utterly unsatisfied, myself included, since I’ve always been attracted to anything containing a mere modicum of radical innovation or incongruence—the odd, the haunted, the surreal. At university, I was drawn to the formally daring writers—Woolf, Kafka and Stein—but tended to ignore my ‘Great Books’ reading list in favour of authors like Kathy Acker and Haruki Murakami. I searched fervently for authors who were sequestered to the shadowy nooks of bookstores for anything that would excite, disturb or inspire me. Like most frenetic, aspiring writers I’ve harboured the conviction that I’ve been alone in my literary nonconformity. But of course, I underestimated the insatiable, eclectic appetites of generations of voracious readers and writers shaking the canon and calling for something different.
I searched fervently for authors who were sequestered to the shadowy nooks of bookstores.
Frankly, there are far more buck-wild stories out there than I could have ever dreamt of, so many that there aren’t enough genres and subgenres to hold them. Genres like ‘post-grunge lit’, ‘new-weird fiction’, ‘slipstream’, ‘bizarro fiction’ and tons more—a lot of which are resistant to labelling—are among a bunch of new-wave subgenres creating subversive, strange and entertaining works. These genres appear to have a lot in common with post-modernism and early avant-garde movements, with self-reflexive tendencies towards satire, irony and pastiche. These stories have the unwavering ability to playfully comment on their own artifice while challenging readers by posing bold questions that nag at you for years to come.
Australia’s budding eclecticism is a wonderful contrast to what has been, up until recently, a fairly cohesive literary aesthetic, largely coloured by the ‘bush and beach’. I’ve been calling a lot of local literary fiction ‘urban existentialism’, most of which is wonderful, much of which is bleak. The Euro-centric branch of Australian literature has gained a reputation for weaving together a character’s multi-faceted relationship with their country—how it’s threatening and how it’s beautiful, notions with complex colonial implications. While undoubtedly significant in its own right, this brand of storytelling has also had a homogenising effect that creates the ‘illusion of a cohesive national voice’, which undermines the demand and presence of a diverse literary scene.
This is not to say that this country hasn’t fostered bold voices and innovation. Alexis Wright has defied genre categorisations with her formally innovative ‘Aboriginal realism’ that is ‘both magical and deeply political’. And then there’s Gerald Murnane, likely our closest national contender for the Nobel Prize, whose strange and brilliant writing Merve Emre at the New Yorker calls ‘both exhilarating and exhausting’. The seminal works of authors like Murray Bail, Helen Garner and Patrick White have also galvanised new ways of writing that could slide between genres, polarise readers and challenge the status quo. Notably, Helen Garner’s 1977 novel Monkey Grip found its inception under the auspices of the small publisher McPhee-Gribble. Later Garner, along with J.M. Coetzee and Murray Bail, returned to smaller publishers, emphasising the culturally significant role that small publishers play in shaping Australia’s literary landscape.
Small presses, literary magazines, anthologies and poetry collections have long since encouraged outlandish stories, experimentation and play, and we are now seeing more smaller publishing houses doing the same. Publishers like Spineless Wonders, SubbedIn, UQP, Transit Lounge and Giramondo are revolutionising Australia’s literary output by responding to an expanding readership that craves literary disobedience. The success of recent works like Michael Winkler’s self-published and Miles Franklin shortlisted experimental novel Grimmish, Evelyn Araluen’s Stella-winning poetry-essay hybrid Dropbear and Grace Chan’s soon-to-be-adapted dystopian Every Version of You speaks volumes about the kind of writing that readers are not only keen to read but also want to be able to find more easily on bookshop shelves. Likewise, writers like Elizabeth Tan, Robbie Arnott, Jamie Marina Lau, Wayne Marshall, Ceridwen Dovey and Ellen Van Neerven have been paving the way with their genre-bending and highly acclaimed works of fiction.
Images: Grimmish (2021), Dropbear (2021) and Every Version of You (2022).
So, if Australian readers have an appetite for experimental and weird literature, why aren’t we seeing more of it? Julie Koh, author of the much-loved 2016 short story collection Portable Curiosities and co-founder of the absurdist lit collective Kanganoulipo, explained that it boils down to financial risk, which leaves it to small publishers and even authors themselves to take a chance on publishing unusual writing. ‘In 2015, I went to the Auckland Writers Festival to see Murakami speak,’ she tells me. ‘At the end of the session, I asked him what to do with weird fiction in a conservative publishing industry. His response: “It’s a hard life. Hang on.” He said that he created his own style and stuck with it for 35 years.’ According to Koh, it’s still perplexing that there’s hesitancy to invest in the promotion of weird and experimental work, despite the population’s demonstrated willingness to support recommended books from the publishing industry: ‘It makes me wonder if it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy for the industry to assume that strange fiction by Australian authors won’t sell.’
Australia’s budding eclecticism is a wonderful contrast to what has been, up until recently, a fairly cohesive literary aesthetic.
I also chatted via email with Dan Hogan from Subbed In, an indie publisher with the ethos ‘experimentation, disobedience and failure, intersectionality and innovation’. Subbed In’s recent successes include the short story collection Sexy Tales of Paleontology by Patrick Lenton, recently shortlisted for 2023 Russell Prize for Humour Writing. Hogan believes that the increasing homogeneity among the output of big publishers is related to an uptick in demand for commercially marginalised writing. The publisher is less forgiving of Australia’s mainstream publishing industry, lamenting that major publishers are driven by data-driven decision-making and trapped in an ouroboros-like cycle. ‘Major Australian book publishers are humourless enterprises, risk-averse, and beholden to capitalist gravity they claim is all-encompassing and inescapable [oh the market] and yet it is something they wholly impose on themselves…’ Hogan also questions the usage of the label ‘experimental’, believing it to only exist in relation to ruling class conceptions of literature and publishing and is applied to anything that ‘reads unlike whatever is selling the ‘most’ in [insert marketing category here] on Nielsen BookScan’.
Even if experimentation doesn’t always result in huge sales, it does guarantee the transformation and broadening of the local literary landscape. These writers are celebrating our expansive community and culture in ways that are innovative, thrilling and poetic. Kalem Murray, whose short story ‘In His Father’s Footsteps’ appears in This All Come Back Now—an anthology of speculative fiction by First Nations storytellers—is one such writer. His unpublished manuscript, which he describes as ‘weird fiction, crime and horror’, draws on the unique elements of his culture and folklore. Idiosyncrasy is vital to Murray: ‘A Koori writer from New South Wales, for example, isn’t going to have the same stories as a Bardi person from Western Australia.’ Kalem also goes on to note that the ‘weird’ stories coming out of the country are ‘surprisingly unique…smart and well written’.
If Australian readers have an appetite for boundary-pushing literature, why aren’t we seeing more of it?
Other writers like Chris Flynn and Julie Koh are exploring culturally relevant themes by tapping into humorous and satirical narrative techniques. These kinds of stories, punchy and politically charged, contain all of the heart and very little of the cynicism. Perhaps this is because unconventional stories can offer some stylistic protection, with more freedom to play with tone and be irreverent. I spoke to Flynn, who believes that strange fiction is a means to explore complex issues in a nuanced and original fashion. In his words: ‘It’s a sturdy desk on which we can proudly say, “Hey, this story about talking platypuses is a sly commentary on colonialism!” And honestly, I’d rather hear from anthropomorphic platypuses than a hall of European “settlers”.’ For Koh, this kind of writing is increasingly resonant with readers because of the times we live in. ‘The real world is getting stranger and more complex,’ she tells me. ‘Strange fiction is a good fit for this historical moment.’
Image: Portable Curiosities (2016), Sexy Tales of Paleontology (2022) and Here Be Leviathans (2022).
I am continuously in awe of the absurd and unusual stories, about lizards on vacation, potato vigilantes and space-travelling flies, from the wild imaginations of the young writers that I teach at Melbourne Young Writers’ Studio. Their unbridled creativity and spontaneity remind me of the tales, bonkers and audacious (yet also ubiquitous), that I adored as a child. Stories that kept me up at night, that haunted, delighted, and surprised me, which is perhaps the same magnetic pull we’re attracted to in strange literature. Flynn’s short story collection was described as ‘boundary pushing’ and he muses that kind of labelling is ‘an indication that the Australian literary scene has been beholden to a streak of misery realism for so long that it’s forgotten to…have fun.’
All of the incredibly gracious creatives I spoke to about strange lit for this article are living proof that we’re getting there, slowly but surely, and our literary scene is growing more eclectic. So, it’s impossible for me to resist speculating, a little excitedly, a little nervously about what the hell our next generation of storytellers will create. But in the words of Chris Flynn: ‘Strange fiction is more pervasive than we might think. By reading about the eccentricities of the world and its populace, we expand our understanding of who we are and where we might fit in.’ In the words of me, Nina Culley, aficionado of the strange and experimental, there are stories that hold the world tight and those that launch us, roaring and dizzy, from one place to the next. They’re all important. They’re all fantastic. But especially the weird ones.
