New Delhi, Oct. 24 -- It was in the dog days of the first wave of covid-19 that I leaned heavily into reading horror. There was enough every day, real-life disease-terror, not to mention constant anxiety. So, it might seem a little odd when I say that my choice of escape from the dread of the pandemic was a dive into the pages of literary horror.

I needed a good scare, but I wanted the terror seasoned with a generous dose of unease, dread, and the unknowable-a fictional mirror image of an unprecedented life under a global lockdown.

So, I started searching out writers of the so-called "New Weird", a term that includes a loose galaxy of Gen X writers who have been taking horror and weird fiction in thrillingly strange new directions over ...