Weirdness Magnet / Literature

"[W]hen two apparently impossible events and a sequence of highly peculiar ones all occur to the same person, and when that person suddenly becomes the suspect of a highly peculiar murder, then it seems to me that we should look for the solution in the connection between these events. You are the connection."

— Dirk Gently to Richard Macduff, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

• Kyle Griffin the protagonist of The Impairment, is described in the book's own synopsis as "just another ordinary freshman college student with an ordinary life and problems". That is of course when one particular night of heavy drinking, he returns to his dorm and finds his roommate murdered by an extra-terrestrial. From there, all hell breaks loose.
• Once Ida from Shaman of the Undead leaves her family house's magic wards, her Inner Eye starts working like a ghost lighthouse, bringing to her ghosts, demons, curious spirits and, by extensions, annoyed magical police officers.
• Douglas Adams:
  • Arthur Dent, in all incarnations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is perhaps the quintessential example.
  • Dirk Gently — in two and a fragment books, he encountered a ghost, a time machine, Thor, God of Thunder, had an eagle turn into a jet and fly out the front of his house, and narrowly avoided employment to track down the rear half of a cat named Gusty Winds. This isn't counting the minor difficulties with probability during his education. Dirk himself lives by the philosophy that everything is interconnected and there are no such things as coincidences; in the first book he lampshades that the weirdness surrounding Richard Macduff is noteworthy, as "I believe that all things are fundamentally interconnected, [but] some things are a great deal more interconnected than others."
• Half the time, Constance from the Constance Verity Trilogy isn't looking for unusual Speculative Fiction-style adventures, but she winds up stumbling into them and has to fight her way out. Being that she's Constance Verity, she's capable of doing just that, but having done it for so long, she begins to suffer from Heroic Fatigue, The Last Adventure of Constance Verity being about her trying to make it stop.
  Everywhere Connie went, adventure might be lurking.
• Rincewind in the Discworld books was one of these, and it bothered him; he didn't just want to be normal, he wanted to be actively boring. It's no coincidence that one of the books with him is titled Interesting Times.
  • He's a favorite of the Lady, and Fate hates him personally. Death actually gave up on trying to collect him, as he can no longer tell when Rincewind's due to die (due to massive deformation of his life hourglass — which Death now keeps on his desk as a curio), and treats him rather like an amusing show he drops in on occasionally to see what's happening this episode.
  • Tiffany Aching could also be said to be one, and before Agnes Nitt was an official witch she could sing harmony with herself and had hair that would occasionally eat combs. This trope seems to come with the territory for Discworld witches.
  • Soul Music states that wizards, being naturally attuned to occult frequencies, are natural weirdness magnets, comparing them to mine canaries or lightning rods. 'If anything strange was happening, it would happen to the wizards first.' This is strengthened by that the senior faculty of Unseen University, minus Mustrum Ridcully, are the first ones sucked into the Music With Rocks In craze. In Reaper Man, before Ankh-Morpork is hit with a rash of poltergeist activity when Death Takes a Holiday, ancient wizard Windle Poons dies and comes back as a zombie. And in Hogfather, the excess belief caused by the Hogfather's disappearance allows the wizards to inadvertently call new personifications into existence, such as the Veruca Gnome and Oh God of Hangovers.
  • Susan laments being prone to this in Hogfather, ruing the fact that she's riding the horse of death in the company of a talking raven and stranger beings, on a desperate and ill-conceived mission to avert supernatural misfortune... again!
  • By Snuff, one of the major reasons why Colon and Nobby remains on the otherwise fairly respectable now Watch is that Contrived Coincidences that lead to the solution of cases keep happening to them. This has involved, for example, Colon finding a goblin soul pot in his cigar and Nobby having something try to lay eggs in his nose.
• In Blood Debt, the last of Tanya Huff's Blood Books, Henry Fitzroy wants to know why he is being haunted by ghosts that he does not know, and his lover/regular snack, Tony Foster, points out that "like attracts like", and as a vampire, Henry should expect ghosts and things like that to show up on his doorstep.
  • In the second book, Henry swears that he used to live a quiet life; while this is not entirely true, his attraction to the supernatural does seem to have gotten much stronger once Vicki and Tony came along. The events in the subsequent Smoke and Shadows novels suggest that Tony is, in fact, the actual weirdness magnet.
• The Armitage children from the various Armitage stories in Joan Aiken's collections have this peculiarity, but it has its genesis in a wish their mother made with a genuine wishing stone, that she would have two children and they would have interesting magical things happen to them one day a week, usually but not always on the same day. She got her oddly specific wish...
• The whole premise of A Series of Unfortunate Events.
• The protagonist of Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein, described as a "shit magnet", is never more than a few pages away from coincidentally bumping into something extraordinarily weird or disturbing.
• The title character of Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell Trilogy; though that seems to be more Johnny being the only one who notices the weirdness (due to his chronic lack of imagination, he lacks the mental filters "normal" people have that tell them "This can't be real").
• Callahan's Place in the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series at least begins as a magnificent but otherwise ordinary bar that just happens to draw alien observers, talking animals and darts masters who cheat with telekinesis.
• Gil's All Fright Diner:
  "That happen a lot?"
  "More often that it should. When you cross over into the weird stuff, there's no going back. Hector has a theory on it. Calls it the law of 'Anomalous Phenomena Attraction.' He explained it to me once. Didn't really pay attention, but it boils down to 'weird shit pulls in more weird shit.' Figure it's gotta be true. Ever since I killed that guy, I keep runnin' across cults and monsters and fallen gods."
• There is a series of young adult books about a place called Eerie, Indiana. It involved these two kids named Marshall Teller and Simon Holmes who were in a small town in Indiana where lots of weird and crazy stuff happened (like running into kids from the future, or a TV cable salesman ripping holes in reality). It turns out the town was a weirdness magnet, for two reasons. One, a meteorite filled with a material called "eerieum" had landed, and it soaked into the local landscape. This material causes weirdness. Two, the Roswell aliens are being stored there, attracting even more weirdness. Guess you could call them space oddities. Preceded by the TV series Eerie, Indiana, as noted below; after FOX rebroadcast the former NBC episodes for Saturday morning, the series became much more popular. The books were then written to take advantage of the resulting new demand for young adult Weird Fiction.
• Kitty Norville. Arguably justified in that most of her problems are the result of being a werewolf and public celebrity. Some, though, really have no possible explanation other than the bad luck and/or destiny of being a Weirdness Magnet.
• A great deal of Tom Holt's characters. For example, Paul Carpenter from the J.W. Wells & Co. series. He gets a job with a major firm of unknown purpose, despite confusing Anton Chekhov with Pavel Chekov. The building seems to reshape itself more or less at random, the stapler will disappear across the building if you put it down for two seconds (even if you're the only one in the room and the door is locked), new employees are left to sort graph printouts that have been scrambled and draw circles around anything on an aerial photograph that looks like a bauxite deposit, and claw marks and sinister glowing eyes appear to pop up occasionally. Paul's misadventures last for three books, all of them introducing new elements of the Fantasy Kitchen Sink any of Holt's characters find themselves stuck in...and all of them seem to need Paul for some purpose in their great (ten-sided) game of Xanatos Speed Chess. It turns out he's been developed as a living weapon by a couple of blood relatives, one of whom is a) God and b) his real father, and as an additional bonus he's the reincarnation of a Norse warlord.
• In L. J. Smith's The Vampire Diaries, the town of Fell's Church was a weirdness magnet, because of all the souls buried there.
• One of the (many) drawbacks to being a demi-god in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is this; monsters are drawn to their presence.
• Harry Potter and his friends Ron and Hermione, as well as Hogwarts School in general, are a definite magnet for weirdness. Lampshaded in the sixth film, where Professor McGonagall wonders aloud why "you three" are always around whenever something bad happens. Ron responds that he's been wondering the same thing for six years.
• Justified with Harry Dresden of The Dresden Files, since he's the only openly practicing wizard in the country. Name's in the phonebook. Conjure by it at your own risk.
  • Also, Chicago is Harry's area of operations, and it happens to be both a hub of leylines and a financial and travel hub in the United States. As a result, a lot of weirdness naturally converges on Chicago.
  • Thirdly, Johnny Marcone is a mob boss (and later member of the magical United Nations) who deals in magical artifacts, and whose enemies are more than willing to use black magic against him.
  • Then again, Harry specifically mentions in Storm Front (set before he effectively retires from the "wizard in the Yellow Pages" schtick by being drafted into the Wardens) that he has referral-exchange deals with various other non-magical investigators in Chicago.
• In the Earthsea series, even after Sparrowhawk loses his magic in the third book, he retains his ability to turn up precisely where and when he's needed. Tenar comments on this pointedly.
• The Anti-Zombie Squad, a group created to put an end to the After the End scenario of a Zombie Apocalypse in How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse features no less than a pizza-loving, BFS-in-the-shape-of-a-giant-pencil-wielding Idiot Hero, a Comedic Sociopath Hippie-wannabe with mental issues, a Genki Girl who dresses as a reaper, an Emo Teen afraid of black things who can't look at himself in a mirror for obvious reasons, a pesudo-geek popular guy wannabe who tells deafening jokes and sings like a walrus and last but not least a Big Guy who may seem scary as hell but writes My Little Pony fanfiction. And each member thinks of themselves as the most normal one.
• Bella Swan of Twilight fame. Her first love and boyfriend turns out to be a vampire, her best friend turns out to be a werewolf. A vicious vampire sets a whole army to kill her, and the leader of the vampire royalty Aro, places his eyes on her.
• In the Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins is clearly a weirdness magnet. Although by all measures she is a typical British nanny in appearance and behavior (commutation via wind and fireworks notwithstanding), eight books' worth of weirdness occurs around her (and, just as tellingly, stops whenever she leaves, a fact the Banks children notice and bemoan).
• Eragon in the Inheritance Cycle
  Saphira: Nothing out of the ordinary ever occurs to me when I'm by myself. But you attract duels, ambushes, immortal enemies, obscure creatures such as the Ra'zac, long-lost family members, and mysterious acts of magic as though they were starving weasels and you were a rabbit that wandered into their den.
  • This from his supposedly extinct dragon just to emphasise the point. When the fantastical beast is calling you out on being this, you have no grounds to deny it.
• Jakub Wędrowycz attracts all kinds of weird happenings, supernatural or otherwise. At one point, after he finds a nuclear warhead (and tries to break it open for scrap), the local police officer goes insane when trying to comprehend just how come that all the bizarre things in the world are happening to that one guy.
• Clan Korval in Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Liaden Universe series is either this or a Coincidence Magnet, depending on your point of view—the strange series of coincidences Clan Korval is susceptible to are not particularly supernatural to them, but to the mundanes who get caught up in events it could be a different story.
• Jame, in P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath series, seems to attract weirdness and catastrophe, enough that it's lampshaded by other characters. This may be because she's pretty weird herself.
• Three of the primary protagonists in the Wheel of Time series are known to be ta'veren, which means that the Wheel reshapes destiny around them. This causes very odd and improbable things to happen to them and to those around them. Lampshaded on at least one occasion by having characters track Rand, Mat or Perrin by following the trail of unlikely occurrences.
• At the end of Another Fine Myth, Aahz tells Skeeve point-blank that neither of them will have to go looking for adventure;
  Aahz: In our profession, it usually comes looking for us.
  Narration!Skeeve: I had an ugly feeling he was right.
• The protagonist of the Garrett, P.I. series is so used to getting into weird things by this point, he takes things like dogs transformed into pretty teenage girls completely in stride. As early as Red Iron Nights, thugs at Morley's Bad Guy Bar leave the premises when Garrett shows up, not because they're scared of the guy, but because they know that weird trouble is sure to follow him.
• J. R. R. Tolkien:
  • Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit was minding his own business, as all hobbits do, when a prototypical wizard and his posse of fallen dwarf-lords showed up out of nowhere and dragged him off on an epic dragon-hunting adventure. Among the many bizarre things he encounters on his unwanted quest is a deranged cave-dweller, who happens to have an ancient demon prince's long-lost Soul Jar. Bilbo waltzes off with it, not having a clue how important it is. It takes three more books to deal with the aftermath of his magnetism.
  • Farmer Giles of Ham. A fat red-headed farmer who doesn't like trespassers. Including giants and dragons. Especially dragons.
• The entire town of Golgotha in Six Gun Tarot is one. Half the people in town have some supernatural trait or possession of some sort, and the town attracts such people. Also mentioned in passing are the grave that must be surrounded with a circle of salt lest a presence in the night drain the blood from livestock and people, a bat-winged creature that snatched people off the street, a plague of rat-people…
• A Fantasy Attraction has Alice, a young girl who has the literal ability to attract magical beings. She, in just the one day the story covers, pulls in : A genie, hobgoblin, horde of goblins, gnome, fairy, manticore, griffins, pixie, troll, dragon, sphinx, kobold, tribe of ogres, wyverns, salamander, harpy, hippogriff, gargoyle, and phoenix.
• Our Hero in Mr Blank never thought he was, but in the sequel when he tried to retire he found out that wouldn't stop everyone within a ten mile radius approaching him with various noir plots, dealing with Eldritch Abominations, or various magical artifacts.
• The town Gusliar from Gusliar Wonders by Kir Bulychev, with new aliens, fairy tale creatures or social experiments in every story. Recurring character Udalov is a prominent magnet even by the town's standards, usually as Butt-Monkey, Cosmic Plaything or Action Survivor.
• Nancy Drew is always followed by weirdness no matter where she goes.
• In the Strange Matter series, Fairfield is a hotspot of ghosts, aliens, monsters, and other weirdness.
• The Affix is a jewel that abuses probability. Its chosen keeper is a target for whatever bizarre crap it throws their way. This is worse when it's "awake" and goes beyond mere low-level coincidences into car-crashing, casino-breaking mayhem.
• Discussed but subverted in Trash of the Count's Family. Eruhaben thinks that the protagonist Cale is one, but Cale's just a Manipulative Bastard who gets himself into dangerous situations on purpose.
• Esther Diamond: Actress Esther Diamond gets involved with vampires, a voodoo prestress, evil sorcerers trying to summon demons, vampires, and mystical curses over the course of seven books (so far) that take up less than a year.
• In InCryptid, the Price family seems to always be in the right place at the right time to be involved in major supernatural events, but since they often seek that out, they don't really notice anything unusual. They also have some degree of natural immunity to Johrlac, and both of these traits are revealed to be because they're partially descended from the Kairos species, whose hat is being Unluckily Lucky.
• Homer Price: If you were a first-time visitor to Centerburg In-Universe, you wouldn't believe all the mishegaas that goes on there. The locals, by contrast, appear to be used to it.
• Discussed in the novelization for Ghostbusters II: As the guys investigate what caused her baby Oscar's carriage to run amuck, Dana asks if she has a genetic problem that makes her vulnerable to supernatural beings, considering she got possessed and turned into a demon dog in the first film. While Peter assures her it's all coincidence, Ray and Egon aren't quite so quick to agree.
• While nobody in Baccano! can escape the chaos entirely, crazy tends to gravitate towards Firo the most. Childhood Friend? Ax-Crazy solipsist Insufferable Genius. Join a gang? It just happens to have a 250-year-old alchemist and an Eldritch Abomination in the ranks. Promoted? Two loony thieves crash the party, spike the booze with the Grand Panacea. First love? The Mad Scientist's Beautiful Homunculus Daughter. Picking up said loony thief friends at the train station? They brought you a 230-year-old child to be your new flatmate. Friend went missing? Well, that guy over there with the crazy blood eyes and shark teeth seems to want to help find them...
• Kamijou Touma from A Certain Magical Index. This does not only include his streak of misfortune that is a side-effect of his powers, but also he attracts weirdness in general because of other side-effects. When there's a girl holding the greatest secrets of magic hunted by her Coven, she will land on his balcony. When he takes vacation in Italy, the people keeping him will most definitely get attacked. When someone casts a spell that switches the body of every single human being, he is one of the select few unaffected. Considering how long the series and original novels went (not even counting the New Testament sequel where at one point, a giant flying fortress tracks him down because of the disturbance he causes in the earth's Ley Lines), this happens to him a lot. And then there are the moments when people are actively trying to recruit or use him in weird situations. It doesn't help that he lives in a city full of psychics and his roommate as well as his neighbor are mages.
• Sousuke from Full Metal Panic! (not that he isn't weird himself) has no less than six Whispereds personally connected to him — including his love interests Kaname, commanding officer Tessa, and arch-enemy Leonard. He and Tessa both lampshade this at different points in the story, with Tessa suggesting that maybe it's a sign Sousuke is special in his own way.
• More or less the entire premise of Haruhi Suzumiya. It's not that weirdness gravitates toward Haruhi, though, so much as that she generates it. Relating to the Monk example below, at one point two characters in the series have a conversation to the effect that fictional detectives cause bad things to happen by virtue of their very presence, and that Haruhi, at that point on a "detective" kick, might subconsciously will such a disaster into being. Completely subverted when the expected murder actually happens — Kyon immediately knows it's a hoax precisely because he trusts that Haruhi wouldn't really wish for someone to die just so she could play detective.
  • The series doesn't portray this very well, but Kyon himself has some pretty weird acquaintances from middle school. There's Nakagawa, who falls in love with Nagato at first sight because he just happens to be a semi-esper who can see her link to the Integrated Thought Entity, and Sasaki, a very strange girl who's also the center of attention for a collection of aliens, time travelers and espers who are rivals to the SOS Brigade's members' factions.
    • Though there is some indication that the reason for this is that it is not Haruhi who is the weirdness magnet, but actually Kyon himself.
    • Whenever one of the goddesses gets Kyon to repeat their patterns (visual patterns for Haruhi, audio patterns for the other girl), strange things shall happen.
• Mahiro Yasaka from Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! is an Ordinary High-School Student whose only special traits are a fondness for the works of H. P. Lovecraft and the ability to use forks as deadly weapons. Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos appearing in his life and declaring her undying love for him is just the start of his troubles, which includes dealings with time-traveling Moral Guardians, alien Animal Wrongs Groups, and being kidnapped so he can be auctioned off as the star of a Boys' Love TV show. Lampshaded in one episode where Nyarko remarks that something about Mahiro makes him "strangely attractive" to aliens.
• In The Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village, each male member of the Jinnai family has a strange interaction with youkai.
  • Shinobu naturally attracts youkai. Any that are capable of affection adore him and will happily become his friend, even those which are ordinarily deadly.
  • Hayabusa is antagonized by youkai, who view him as something akin to a Metal Slime. It got so bad he moved to Tokyo as youkai can't stand urban areas.
  • Shinobu's father terrifies youkai and can easily drive them off if angered.
• How to Survive Camping: The campsite being "old land" means that it has become home to creatures of folklore, unnatural phenomenons, and even possibly a few deities. It becomes more apparent as the stories go on that it literally acts as a weirdness magnet, and that while it is a refuge to some creatures, it is more akin to a prison for others.
• The main characters of The Questport Chronicles, at first. They soon get used to it. The village of Questport itself is famed in-universe as an example.

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