Catching Up

If I can offer a critique of my just completed sixteen-part series on "the New Weird," I would say that it's overlong, a little repetitive, and not very tightly written in a lot of places. I guess I abandoned it in 2017 because of its many problems. One of its problems is that I haven't read any of the stories in The New Weird, published in 2008. I also admit to a bias against one of its chief authors and one of its chief theorists, the first because of his infantile politics, the second mostly because of his theorizing and his obscure, ponderous, and overly intellectualized and academic prose. But I wanted to provide some content in this blog during these past couple of months, and using some previously unfinished postings seemed like the quickest way to do it. I still have some draft postings, as well as some unfinished series from the past. I hope to get to those soon. My series of four series on "the New Weird" wasn't and isn't very fun. I would like to get back to things that are fun.

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In my series on the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales, Number 367 from 2023, I noted how many of the authors in that issue have written for television and how much of their writing is like TV writing, including commercial messages in the form of product placement and the inclusion of brandnames in their stories. What they write is not really prose. It lacks the form, style, approach, objectives, and so on of prose. Their writing is more like a plot summary or a treatment for a proposed TV show. Well, now I know that there is a term for what afflicts writers who think in television terms rather than in terms of prose. It's called "TV brain," and I read about it in two connected essays by Lincoln Michel, posted on the Substack Counter Craft. The two parts are:

• "Turning Off the TV in Your Mind: Thoughts on flipping from 'TV brain' to 'prose brain' when writing fiction" by Lincoln Michel, December 12, 2024, here.

• "What Not Reading Does to Your Writing: More thoughts on 'TV brain prose' and why reading is, yes, useful for your writing" by Lincoln Michel, February 22, 2026, here.

Mr. Michel's essays are just about perfect in describing the problem I saw in the Cosmic Horror Issue and that I have seen in other writing that is now out there in the world. Too many writers have forgotten that they write in prose and not for the screen. Or maybe they have never learned that reading a book is not the same as watching a TV show, or that writing a story is not the same as writing a script. Whatever the source of their problem, they all ought to be horsewhipped. Okay, maybe that's a little extreme. Anyway, here is a quote from Mr. Michel in which he refers to some of his ideas from outside of this quote:

While I won't rehash the debate, one post reminded me of a favorite topic of mine. Namely, the ways that "TV brain" creates a particular kind of bad fiction that's prominent these days. This "TV brain" prose is influenced primarily by narrative visual media--TV, film, TikToks, video game cut scenes, etc.--without engaging in the narrative possibilities and limitations of prose fiction. We live in a visual culture and writers who don't read widely tend to absorb their understanding of narrative from visual media. This is not a critique of film or TV or anything else. The point is that artistic mediums have different possibilities and limitations and if you try to make your novel a series of transcriptions of imagined TV scenes, it will fail at being either good TV or a good novel.

I would really recommend that writers read Lincoln Michel's two essays and that they think on these ideas, after which they should resolve not to write that way ever again. Bad writing is a scourge. No one should want to be a part of it. My short advice to writers: if you want to be a good writer, turn off your TV brain and open your book-mind, better yet your human life-mind.

By the way, Lincoln Michel is an author of genre fiction. The illustration used in his first essay (shown below) is from Science Wonder Stories and was created by Frank R. Paul. Paul will be a minor character in the series to come.

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That was in February. In March I read about the reissue of The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, originally published in 1973 but since suppressed like the original King in Yellow in its serpent-skin binding. I have never read The Camp of the Saints. When I first learned about it years ago, it was an exceedingly rare book. Fortunately that has changed, and Raspail's prophetic, dystopian, and apocalyptic novel is now available again for reading, even if it may be too late for the world--Europe at least--to heed its warnings. But then we don't need a book to tell us what goes on in this world as long as we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

I read about the reissue of The Camp of the Saints in an essay called "The Camp of the Living Dead" by a pseudonymous author, John Carter. Mr. Carter's essay is on the website American Greatness, is dated March 6, 2026, and can be accessed by clicking here. The metaphor of Mr. Carter's title refers to masses of men as like a zombie horde. In his essay is a lot of the imagery that I have used in my own blog. Not that that means anything in particular. We could both be right, or we could both be wrong. I might be biased, but I would wager on the first possibility. Anyway, I would encourage you to read John Carter's essay, and we should perhaps all read The Camp of the Saints, if only as an act of rebellion against the current regime.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley