Hello.

What is the most bizzare weird story you ever read? I know, it is almost impossible to pick up just one thing in cases like these but one of the strangest weird tales I have read so far is "Lamb To The Slaughter" by Roal Dahl. It is about a wife who beats her husband to death by a big chop of frozen meat. After committing the murder, she sets the frozen meat aside to defrost it, then goes out for a long walk and when she comes home again, she calls police to inform them her husband was killed in her absence. The meat is defosted so she makes a meal of it and when the police officers who are her friends by the way arrive at the scene of crime, she serves them the meat she just prepared. While they enjoy it, one of cops says something like, "I am sure the proof is somewhere around here, under our very nose." What a bizzare denouement for a story ... :-)

"Who Goes Down This Dark Road?", by Joan Aiken, is quite bizarre.

Dunno about "most bizarre ever" though. That's a tall order.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 16 Jul 22 | 03:40PM by Platypus.

I do like stories with a dream-like surreality to them. HP Lovecraft's "The Evil Clergyman" is supposed to be literally the write-up of a dream.

What is the difference between "bizarre" and "weird"? I think there is a difference, but I'm not sure I can define it.

Platypus Wrote:
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> What is the difference between "bizarre" and
> "weird"? I think there is a difference, but I'm
> not sure I can define it.


Good question...

Maybe when using the modifiers "bizarre" and "weird", I'd think of weird as an established genre of literature. It tells you what kind of story, into which genre (or sub-genre) it can be placed for general classification.

But I think that bizarre in the way we're maybe using it is a modifier of the story within a given genre, so that there might be a weird story that has bizarre elements. Or a crime story with bizarre elements.

Too, weird connotes some element of supernatural, and bizarre can be simply grotesque strangeness devoid of the supernatural.

Not sure, though.

What do others think?

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Well, I can think of a lot more bizarre stories, like "The Lost Traveler" by Ruthven Todd.

You can't get much more bizarre than "Revenge of the Calico Cat," by Stepan Chapman. The afterlife is Plush City, c.1931, where everyone is some sort of stuffed animal or toy. Every night the Gingham Dog and Calico Cat fight and wreck the city, and every day it is remade, along with the inhabitants. There is violence, organized crime, and organic mutations, and when people are hurt, they bleed literal red ribbons. Sample text: "The faded blue silk of the daytime sky was peeling itself free from the ceiling of the world. It was beginning to creep west, wrinkling a little as it went, drawn toward the western horizon by unseen hands — the hard wrinkled hands of the Washerwoman Who Lives Beneath the Table Land. As the day sky was pulled down for a good scrubbing, the night sky was revealed, its star sequins glittering in all colors."
And none of that is metaphor...