About

Welcome To Mortimer Monk’s

Stories of the Strange and Peculiar 

This blog began life as a scrapbook of ideas, influences and personal preponderances that share a common theme: a collection of factual snippets and fictional stories whose strangeness – in some way – defies categorization. It’s purpose is not so much to unsettle (although the unfamiliar often presses against our fears, triggering our anxieties) as to question human assumptions about what is ‘normal’, and in particular, what is ‘human’.

My main preoccupation is where boundaries are blurred, for this is where that which appears strange or peculiar lurks. An indication of this is provided by  the various book reviews and further thinking connected to weird and speculative fiction that the reader will find here, as well as forays into experimental writing. For too long, too much fiction has been strait-jacketed into genres that are tired and formulaic from all that straining. When you consider how adept the human mind is at linking many diverse ideas and subjects, the necessity of a genre must seem almost perverse. But the tide looks to be changing. Art, especially through the early to mid twentieth century, was once constrained by its rash of ‘-isms’, but is now largely broken free into an ether of interdisciplinary dialogues. Writing can do the same, and there are many examples floating out there.

The peculiarity of the blurred boundary shall also be explored through the extension of collected titbits indicative of cross-overs between humanness and animality (and vice versa). Consider playwright Samuel Beckett’s references towards his inner ‘creature’ and you may gain some measure of to what I am referring: the innate beast in all of us. Even more unnerving than this, however, is where the aforementioned beast displays some qualities of humanness. Where the borders merge, that’s where this blog intends to go.

You are all invited to follow!

Copyright © 2015 Donna Rae Jones. All rights reserved.