Name: Some weird fiction history
Item: The Other Side
Author: steerpike

The Other Side →

by Alfred Kubin

Some weird fiction history

steerpike

Jan 22, 2025 1:58 AM

The Other Side is the first piece in the Vandermeers' wonderful Weird Compendium, where they published an excerpt about a strange sleeping sickness that comes over the town of Pearl (a sort of amalgamation of Central European cities), and gives the town over to the animals for a time while all of the characters sleep. It is a wonderfully bizarre little fantasy, but it left me expecting something very different from the rest of the novel, which I finally just read...

So "Pearl" is not a fictionalized Vienna or something, it is actually deep in Central Asia where the unnamed narrator's friend from high school has purchased some pristine high altitude wilderness upon which to construct an artist's utopia called Dreamland. There is some unnecessary and kind of stupid detail about how the guy originally came upon the insane fortune of land and money (by saving a Chinese noble's kid from drowning), which I guess is how people had to justify their fantastical stories back in the day before Lovecraft finally told everyone to "never explain anything".

The Other Side has some gripping ideas, and it was fun to read though it if only to see their development through the history of weird fiction. We have:

a proto-kafkaesque bureaucracy

various post-colonial things going on which I think were just of-the-time racist but maybe someone more educated could tell me were actually self-conscious or something.. entire buildings are shipped from central europe to be erected in Pearl, there is a tribe of people native to the area who coincidentally look exactly like europeans, there is a french quarter filled with gypsies and prostitutes, etc.

All that said I think I was reading this more for the historical interest than for its own enjoyment--not yet allowing itself to do anything too crazy, the book forces a traditional narrative structure on itself that adds a tedious justification for (and journey to) Dreamland, and culminates in a heavy-handed climax where the tyrant of Pearl kinda redeems himself by defeating a herald of change literally named The American. Also the old-timey racism is lowkey very funny (such as a line about how any Hungarian from outside Budapest is "basically Asiatic").

mrfahrenheit

11 months ago

I remember reading somewhere that the illustrations came first, being intended for Meyrink's Golem, but the contract fizzled out, and so Kubin decided to write a story to justify the images instead. Inclined to think it's true. Interesting novel for specific parts, as you say, but I do agree, not the strongest on the whole as a living text.

yarb

11 months ago

I discovered Robert Aickman, Lucius Shepard and a bunch of others thanks to The Weird which is possibly the greatest short story anthology ever anthologized. I don’t think I remember The Other Side though. Pre-Lovecraft weird fiction, I haven’t read much that I liked. What I do like is that art by Kubin, holy Mary mother of god.