Weird Nonfiction

Clayton Purdom situates nonfictional works designed “with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience,” in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”

By Clayton PurdomSeptember 27, 2024

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This essay is an excerpt from the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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THE FIRST TIME I tried to write this essay, I failed. It was the middle of the pandemic—a time in which uncountable numbers of introspective personal essays were written to no apparent end—and I watched Sans Soleil, director Chris Marker’s dreamlike 1983 travelogue. I was working at a marketing agency at the time, suffusing strategic briefs with literary ambition, and something about the way Marker’s film faded from documentary to sci-fi to philosophical reverie ignited long-dormant neurons in my brain. Sleeper cells dissatisfied with a life in service of internet content and client work assembled. They blew up access tunnels and sabotaged meeting preparation protocols. I wrote something big and haunted about my experience as a writer and intended to publish it, in an act of vainglorious career suicide, on LinkedIn.

This is not that essay, which I ended up storing in the cloud, untouched and perfect. Maybe I just lost the nerve. I came to view the entire months-long ordeal as merely a romantic obsession with Sans Soleil, the sort of honeymooning that occurs with a piece of art only a handful of times in life, in which old tastes are dramatically reordered and new, long-lasting obsessions emerge. That essay, that romance, hung over me as I logged back in to Slack. And yet something was different. The strategic briefs shifted beneath my gaze now. I saw Sans Soleil’s borderless spirit everywhere, and came to see it as representative of an aesthetic thread that named itself outside of my will, its name slowly infecting my thoughts over the years since.

I call it weird nonfiction: creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience. Works that are about the real world or some subject within it but also question their container or their ability to be about that thing—or which veer from the thing at hand toward the cosmic, horrifying, or absurd. Sometimes it is as if the element of unreality is chasing the author through the piece.

Early examples include the essays and essay-like fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, Orson Welles’s exasperated, exuberant F for Fake (1973), and of course Marker’s otherworldly documentaries. More recently, you can see it in internet videos by Conner O’Malley and alantutorial, which warp glib, servile YouTube content into frantic horror; Twitter accounts that suggest vast cosmos of deranged characters, like Horse_ebooks and Dril; the speculative football analysis of Jon Bois and the creepypasta narrative of Loab; Nathan Fielder’s increasingly reflexive documentary repertoire, particularly The Rehearsal (2022– ); Adult Swim experiments like Yule Log (2002) and Unedited Footage of a Bear (2014); W. G. Sebald’s ruined literary ruminations and the hours-long musical sagas by the Caretaker that echo them; the series finale of The Hills (2006–10), in which a high-stakes reality-show farewell is filmed, transparently, on a studio backlot; Carmen Maria Machado’s weird fiction novella about Law & Order: SVU; certain Lydia Davis stories, especially “French Lesson”; Room 237 (2012), as well as Rodney Ascher’s other deeply credulous documentaries; the cover of David Bowie’s The Next Day (2013); and video games like Cibele (2015), The Beginner’s Guide (2015), and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017).

More often than not, weird nonfiction is intended as either comedy or horror—sometimes both. Its natural home is the internet, where disinformation and pissant humor are architectural principles. The element of unreality in all of the titles listed above is not just a fib or a joke but also an outright structural provocation, daring the audience to follow it into an abyss. Like weird fiction, weird nonfiction is built around some unknowable terror, replacing the tentacled horrors of H. P. Lovecraft with the many-tentacled horrors of being online and alive in the 21st century. It also suggests, in the process, that there is something unfathomable at the heart of reality itself, and that it is the duty of journalism to circumnavigate this terror if never speak it aloud. I humbly submit that weird nonfiction seems particularly well suited to reporting on climate change, but have not seen it done with the vigor that subject deserves.

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I spent my last year or so on staff at a once-great pop culture website working on a column about the simulation theory, which I had begun to see as a sort of source code for my main beat of internet culture. The idea that we are all living in a simulation had crept from the fringes of nerd culture to pop up in everything from rap lyrics to prestige fiction, and it struck me as a cultural response to the evolution of the internet. Were that website now not a Cronenbergian flesh puppet made of scabs and celebrity chum, this essay might have functioned as that column’s final installment. That is to say, a bullet through its head.

Weird nonfiction is related to the almost overwhelming surplus of simulation theory yarns from the past couple decades—including not just The Matrix and its ilk but also the nested narratives of Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and Emily St. John Mandel—in that it asks the reader to question the very design of the reality presented to them. However, I see weird nonfiction more as an evolution of speculative fiction itself. Weird nonfiction shirks fantasy for the real world in much the same way that modern leftists have dropped the sloganeering of the 1960s in favor of concrete action. For those attuned to the occult and unreal aspects of being alive, “genre” fiction is no longer adequate. Creative world-building must be applied more violently to our own reality. Weird nonfiction is dreamlike, but urgent, cutting in its humor and suggestion. Even Philip K. Dick died believing his books were coming true.

One of the key moments in weird nonfiction history is William Gibson’s abdication of cyberpunk for the modern world as a response to 9/11. He got halfway there. Gibson’s first present-day, real-world novel, Pattern Recognition, came out in early 2003, only a few months after a film by Olivier Assayas called Demonlover. The two works function as eerie twins, following high-powered marketing professionals on voyages into the seductive dreamworlds of online video, whether toward aesthetic ends (for Gibson) or lurid ones (for Assayas). Gibson rushes almost romantically toward a tidy conclusion, while Assayas’s story eventually dissolves into nightmarish torture porn. Two decades later, it’s obvious that they were both onto something: that the experience of watching people on the internet is simultaneously horrifying, transcendent, and boring. I sometimes think weird nonfiction is merely a cultural response to the prevalence of videography—the existence of a camera, and the question of who gets to wield one. Of course weird nonfiction would multiply as videography became democratized, as the means of production and consumption slipped into everyone’s pocket and distribution became a click away.

This era represents a turning point for weird nonfiction, when it seeped from the worlds of literature and experimental film into the emergent, lowbrow culture of the pre-social internet. The lonelygirl15 saga (2006–08), which originally presented itself as the bored vlogging of a teenage girl, evolved over the course of hundreds of minutes-long episodes to track her initiation into a bizarre cult. Viewed today, it is absurd, but it created many of the conventions around video thumbnails, including salacious (and misleading) episode titles like “4 Girls, 2 Guys.” The 66-episode saga of alantutorial has held up better. In them, a bland content series (“How to Eat a Bag of Chips”) frays violently, moving from a messy room to the woods nearby to, finally, some sort of white-walled prison. Both video series exploit the credibility of the streaming-video player, using titles, descriptions, comments, and other conventions to further the narrative. Like Demonlover and many subsequent Adult Swim weird nonfictions, they end in hell: the thrill is watching digital and narrative noise burst through otherwise normal content.

A lot of writers hate that word—“content”—which grew in use by marketers and media organizations beginning around this time. But I’m not sure how else to describe a category that must encompass social posts, responses, long-form copy, video, podcasts, multichannel experiences, apps, and so on. Weird nonfiction thrives on this precise ambiguity. It simultaneously critiques the tendency to view the internet as a series of funnels leading to a series of mouths and exploits the grade of those funnels and the gag reflexes of those mouths. I will admit to a sort of resigned appreciation of content as a concept. I have worked, extensively, as a content strategist, after many ill-fated “pivots to video” precipitated a frantic rerouting of my professional ambitions over the years. I am built almost exclusively to write; everything else is ornamentation. When I lost my marketing job in 2022, I began evaluating the market value of different types of words; the indicators, as they say, were not good. The best-paying SEO work will disappear within years thanks to AI, which is already writing credible copy for bots to scrape and reuse as training materials for yet more AI. Perhaps this is why I began to see weird nonfiction everywhere, sprouting like deep-dreamed eyes from each object I focused on in digital space. The content is eating itself alive.

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I am starting to sense that old, failed essay in the room, each hit of the space bar a drumbeat that summons it. Am I losing the thread? Have I gone too broad? Weird nonfiction lives on uncertainty; it is always a mess. You should see my notes for this piece: sprawling across various cloud-based platforms for years, with detailed scraps about anime (not applicable), the concept of control in video games (not applicable), a clearinghouse for failed essay concepts (not applicable). Every section, I start on solid ground and end in some darkened hallway wondering, like a dementia patient at night, how I got there, who moved the rooms around.

Let’s try something different. More breaks, more air. Here are some things I know for sure about weird nonfiction:

1. The earliest example is Orson Welles’s 1938 radio play “The War of the Worlds,” which famously inspired widespread real-world panic. When one broadcaster attempted to assure his listeners that there was no actual alien invasion, he was accused of being part of the conspiracy. Weird nonfiction is an infection.
   
   
2. Weird nonfiction frequently breaks its own boundaries, infecting the real world by design, but it should not rely on extratextual understanding to function as weird nonfiction. If the method by which something was made is germane to its understanding, weird nonfiction should talk about that method. The method, the container, is often the subject.
   
   
3. If you are wondering whether or not something counts as weird nonfiction, consider its weirdness. Modern mockumentaries do not work because there is no uncertainty; the documentary element is used to advance the plot, mug at the camera, key the viewer in. Much new journalism and the unfortunately named “creative nonfiction” attempt primarily to tell the reader a story, to convey a mood, using literary techniques drawn from fiction to heighten these effects. But they do not unsettle the reader. Weird nonfiction takes the “how much of this is real?” question threaded throughout the reader’s mind as they read new journalism and uses it as a bridge to an otherwise unreachable aesthetic destination.
   
   
4. Weird nonfiction is never aloof. Even early, experimental works, like William Greaves’s many-layered Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) or Peter Greenaway’s mid-apocalyptic mockumentary The Falls (1980), are punchy, funny, profane.
   
   
5. The role of the author is critical in almost all weird nonfiction. Consider Welles in F for Fake, a knowing trickster monologizing wryly over wine-stained maps, or Borges, playfully implicating himself in his stories. More recently, consider rapper Tierra Whack coyly turning her hagiographic documentary Cypher (2023) into a paranoid psychodrama about celebrities and cults.
   
   
6. The roots for weird nonfiction exist in classic weird fiction. Lovecraft set his stories in the brains of learned men of science and letters, lending a credibility to their gradual derangement. At the Mountains of Madness (1931), his masterpiece, is framed as a geological survey. “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) presents itself as a work of investigative journalism. His stories follow gentleman intellectuals asking questions with no answers, like QAnon podcasters charting evidence into the void.
   
   
7. Other authors of weird nonfiction, on the other hand, seem lost in the fun house, so to speak. Consider Fielder, disappearing into his own house of mirrors at the end of The Rehearsal, or Ascher, who follows his interview subjects so far down their respective rabbit holes that the primary project of his work seems to be rendering the subjective as objective, the world of fiction as reality.
   
   
8. On the internet, the author is often a simpleton: think early Dril tweets, the hosts of On Cinema at the Cinema (2011– ), alantutorials. All exploit the common experience of watching some gormless dolt getting his or her personal brand off the ground. This lends a sense of wonderfully mean humor to the proceedings as well as added believability. People thought Horse_ebooks was some misfiring marketing bot for years.
   
   
9. It is helpful to consider the nature of the lie in a work of weird nonfiction. Who is lying to whom? How does it change the truth? For Marker, it is often a framework, like the game designer analyzing real-world archival footage in Level Five (1997). For game designer Davey Wreden, meanwhile, the lie is the nature of the thing being analyzed. His Beginner’s Guide is a career retrospective of a game designer who doesn’t exist. In still other works, the lie of weird nonfiction fizzes on the outside of the frame: more of a half-truth that gradually festers into something viler.
   
   
10. The way weird nonfiction works mirror each other suggests its own vast conspiracy. Probably my favorite example of weird nonfiction on YouTube is nana825763’s 12-minute video “My house walk-through,” which is an exactly correct description of its contents. You walk through someone’s house, a circuitous path of rotting wood that becomes increasingly fleshy with each new loop. Meanwhile, one of the best weird nonfiction video games is a 2023 mod of the classic computer game Doom (1993) called MyHouse.wad. Through repetition and careful perusal of extratextual elements like ReadMe files and even code analysis, the mod gradually reveals itself as a work of domestic horror, and then a metacommentary on its creator’s divorce. The best way to experience it, unless you have a particularly high fluency in Doom and its mod scene, is just watching a video of someone playing it online: “MyHouse walkthrough.”
    
    
11. I actually attempted to write a book about the simulation theory as a way of killing that old column, but as I wrote the book, I grew exhausted with the idea. The simulation theory strikes me, at this point, as a too-cute thought experiment for the most insufferable people alive—your Musks and Roilands and Wests. It is a half measure when what is called for is a fuller eradication of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, not toward ponderous self-discovery or narrative trickery but toward shock, stimulation, uncertainty.
    
    
12. On the other hand, perhaps weird nonfiction is merely, to quote the fascist Steve Bannon, “flooding the zone with shit.”
    
    
13. Weird nonfiction is an infection. The Rehearsal inspired a subreddit in which viewers of the show rehearsed their own real-life encounters. This subreddit inspired a separate subreddit called r/therehearsal1stdraft, in which users rehearsed the process of posting things on the larger rehearsal subreddit. This is not time-limited to recent works. Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) traces a vast conspiracy to create a new country complete with its own language, history, and culture. Borges cites countless sources in the essay, many of which are invented. Today, you cannot distinguish between which sources are real or not, because the zone has been flooded with so much shit. The entirely fictional character Silas Haslam has twice been cited in peer-reviewed scientific literature.
    
    
14. Even if #13 is not true, it does appear on the story’s Wikipedia page.
    
    
15. Sometimes I wonder if I wasted too many of my prime writing years producing internet slop rather than something more substantial.
    
    
16. Sebald was obsessed with Borges—The Rings of Saturn (1995) references the dream-nation Uqbar repeatedly. And yet Sebald’s sense of the otherworldly is baked into his books at a mitochondrial level. They read as if written by a ghost. It is almost impossible to spot the lie in Sebald. One of his final essays, “Campo Santo,” (2003) makes an unlikely pivot in its final moments to speak of the modern world, meditating on the place of the dead in an increasingly crowded physical world. He considers the existence of a memorial website, before concluding that “this virtual cemetery, too, will dissolve into the ether, and the whole past will flow into a formless, indistinct, silent mass.”
    
    
17. This is also true of almost all the writing I’ve ever produced in my life.
    
    
18. Chris Marker called his films “home movies,” which makes sense for two reasons. They were typically filmed over many years before being edited together, often piecing together scraps of half-finished projects. They also feel like home movies in a spatial sense: lived-in, as if we are wandering from room to room inside the POV of its owner. The working title of Sans Soleil was actually “my-house walkthrough.”
    
    
19. Music does not lend itself particularly well to weird nonfiction, even if musicians such as Bowie, Whack, and MF DOOM have dabbled in it. But the Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time (2016–19), ostensibly a six-part series portraying the progression of Alzheimer’s disease through a human mind, absolutely counts. This six-hour ambient record became an unlikely hit on TikTok and inspired a mod about dementia for the children’s video game Friday Night Funkin’ (2020). In it, the sassy cartoon character Boyfriend utters lines like “This house is familiar—my memories are burning,” his face gradually dissolving into white noise.
    
    
20. Increasingly, weird nonfiction is the lingua franca of the internet. I believe a generation of creators is emerging for whom weird nonfiction is a base-level tone. If you were born after lonelygirl15, you probably think stories should blend the real and unreal; you probably insist that doing so is at once funny and horrifying and normal. You probably create spontaneously for whatever platform is on hand and embrace its conventions and contradictions. I have watched an urban exploration TikTok pitch-shift into the Backrooms. I have played video games that emulate the bodycam footage of real-world police assassinations. I have seen fandoms pursue imagined numerological clues in their favorite musicians’ music. You can will weird nonfiction into being on works that are not explicitly designed to be read as such. This does not make them weird nonfiction; it proves the permeability of the concept itself. Like the conspiracy-born dream-country of Uqbar, it has colonized our world.

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For my more advanced readers, I would like to propose an additional category of weird nonfiction, which encompasses works that invert the fundamental structure. Rather than presenting as documentary or journalism and then introducing fictional elements to unsettle the reader, these fictional works suggest nonfiction elements to disturb the reader. Consider, for example, the way Werner Herzog’s movies seem less like movies about doomed conquistadores than documentaries about lunatics pretending to be doomed conquistadores. Consider the way the repeated surveillance footage in Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) ripples with uncertainty, feeling at once utilitarian and provocative. I suspect our most relentlessly modern filmmakers will push this technique more aggressively as film loses its grip on the culture. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) maps camera techniques popularized by reality television to actors working in the actual location of their historical counterparts; at the film’s conclusion, the lead is foisted along with the viewer into our own reality. He sees the aftermath of his actions along with us, then dodders off, astonished, into the darkness.

I hate to disappoint you, but I also just call this stuff “weird nonfiction.” It does not quite deserve an entirely distinct name. And anyway, as I have tried to tell you, weird nonfiction is an infection. It flows outward from uncertainty. Its definition, as much as I have tried to make clear in these notes, ought to be porous. You stalk a path through this Zone tossing one stone at a time into the fog. Toward what magic? If weird nonfiction has poisoned the past four years of my life, resulting in countless deranged half-starts, why would I put it out into the world? This essay is not magic. I need to tell you how terrified I was to realize that, by the definition I outlined in the opening section of this essay, all generative AI is weird nonfiction. All of it presents as real; all of it is composed of real-world materials. Even at its most obsequious and mundane, it is still designed to move its audience to action, which is to say, to purchase. It is the final content strategy. But why not add a couple teeth, a couple fingers, to that human body? These are the flourishes of insanity. That there is absolutely no artistic intent only makes it more credible. Where is the lie? What is the intention of the author? Weird nonfiction flows outward. Years later, I can’t quite remember which thread I am holding or how I got here. Much of this research appears suspect in the twilight—incomplete. New threads crawling out of the shadows of new hallways, over there—when finally the unreality tackles me deep in the bowels of this old house, its grin melting. It is the failed essay, of course. Always hiding between the letters here, along with all the others, real and unreal, published and unwritten, conspirators in the summoning. All content yearning to be rendered one in the fire. I realize as I am dragged into the darkness that Sebald was wrong in his final moments. The past flows into a formless and indistinct void but it is not silent. From the basement I hear it begin to speak.

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There is sometimes a reading of works like the ones I’ve mentioned above as fundamentally hopeless, as a response to a broader dimming of possibility in the world. But I feel no despair these days. When I experience artwork that sets out to explain a corner of reality and instead contorts itself to reflect the very unease I brought with me upon entry, I feel less alone. I feel how I hoped to feel when I began this essay eons ago: linked, at last, in.

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Featured image: Still from “My house walk-through,” nana825763, 2016.