144 ◾ Game Magic
or nonsensically bizarre, but in the sense of otherworldly and uncanny.
e most powerful fantastic literature oen aspires to the condition
of the weird, to the point that fantasist Je Van Der Meer has dubbed
a group of writers “the New Weird,” gesturing back at the original
Weird Fiction that included Lovecra’s Cthulhu mythos and Robert
E. Howard’s Conan (both of which have also exerted a powerful
inuence on game magic). Gaiman, Patricia McKillip, China Miéville,
and the new Weird all owe a debt of inuence to Lovecra’s Dream
Cycle, a series of interconnected stories about protagonist Randolph
Carter’s nocturnal visits to the Dream Lands, where he encounters an
eerie andsurrealworld. e earliest literature of ...