The oldest and strongest emotion of humankind, as H.P. Lovecraft said, is fear. And of all fears, the oldest and strongest is our fear of the unknown. In our culture, the strange and the eerie are primal sources of terror, and anything possessing either of these qualities is by definition a mystery, a secret not fully deciphered, and that is why it provokes unease and dread. What exactly is the strange, and what is the eerie? For Mark Fisher, although they may seem the same, they are categories of the supernatural, the strange, and the horrifying. The strange corresponds to the realm of subjectivity: it is a perception of a distorted reality—something familiar to us, yet frightening because it doesn't conform to our nature—while the eerie corresponds to the absolutely unknown, which is the pure and intense form of terror. Mark Fisher argues that the most unsettling and anomalous fictions of the 20th century fall into one of these two categories, and that is precisely what his book explores: primal terrors channeled through film and literature. Through a collection of interconnected essays, divided into two main sections—one on the strange and the other on the eerie—Fisher examines, from the perspectives of cultural critique and contemporary philosophy, the work of seminal authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Daphne du Maurier, and Margaret Atwood, as well as the cinematic works of Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer, and Christopher Nolan, among many others. It is an orgy of thought and pop culture references fueled by nihilistic thinking, a fascination with technology and futuristic imagery, psychology, and a critique of capitalism. A profound and courageous essay that attempts to explain, through its reflection in art, why this world provokes so much terror, and why the strange and the eerie are essences that accompany us from the day we are born until the day we die.