The Weird Time of Fossils: Irrational Ontologies

In its common usage, weird describes something strange or out of place, a break from the expected order of things. This disruption of order is also essential to the weird as a literary mode, creating a sense of disorientation in both characters and readers through encounters with the "irrational" and inexplicable. This article contemplates time as one form of order that weird fiction disrupts through two related figures—the fossil and the found manuscript—in texts by Caitlín R. Kiernan and Stephen King. Where the fossil represents an object-figure of temporal rupture, the found manuscript serves as both an object and a formal structure: a layered text whose metafictional irruptions suggest deeper ontological instability. Both the fossil and the found manuscript frustrate a linear sense of time, introducing alternate possibilities for reality that challenge dominant Western logics.