Laird Barron

A second collection from Laird Barron, more tales to gouge your world out and then hold the dripping world out on the end of its talons and wave it at the universe and ask if anything wants a snack and a billion disgusting filthy things start shuffling hungrily forward.

More great writing, and a greater variety of protagonists to fall prey to the slow erosion of sanity and reality as Barron mythos grows and infects yet more settings and locales and transforms more doomed and hapless humans show more into food or feeders. Gay lovers, bereaved mothers, retired surveyors, scientists and married couples, all grist to the horror mill.

The stories themselves are disquieting, disturbing, and disgusting enough to churn the stomach but draws enough veils to churn the mind. Your heart will break and your mind will revolt at the terrible fates of many of these characters, but you'll be glad it isn't you.

Reread - or rather re-listen, just for Halloween 2020. Cosy and reassuring!

Rereread show less

This is a top-notch story from 'The Book of Cthulhu' (2011) where it was one of two original contributions. The book also anthologised Ligotti's 'Nethescurial' which we have reviewed separately. So, why is this story a cut above the average Lovecraftian tale?

In fact, the Lovecraftian elements are perhaps not its strongest point. These are grim enough with a very dark and disturbing conclusion and a well drawn visceral aspect to the tale but what really attracts is the setting in which the show more dark narrative unfolds.

Barron spends the first half of this long story building a picture of lumbermen in the early 1920s, creating distinctive characters who are plausible in their time and place. Some of the obvious absurdities of the Lovecraftian aspects become the more horrific through this use of social realism.

Barron is a fine writer who has taken what might have been just another pulp story in the tradition of 'Weird Tales' and made something better. We are drawn into the tale by the local colour and the filmic quality of the narrative. Its scenes are fresh and thrilling.

This is horror writing close to its best. It comes as no surprise to learn that Barron has himself experience of hard living as a working class man in Alaska. His descriptions 'feel' authentic and his sensitivity to the mythos (if touching on the absurd at times) is real. show less

“Her trail started at the edge of camp. It was easy to follow the broken twigs, the gore-splattered needles and leaves, and though it wound serpentine through brush and trees, he quickly guessed the destination. She’d been dragged by her hair, like a carcass.
It was a long, bloody crawl to the den.
He lay on his side, panting, fixated on her sandal. The sandal was caked in black grime and wedged between split halves of a stone. He’d seen the other shoe a ways back, dangling from a show more bush. The sun fell below the jagged rim of the mountains. Heat rapidly dissipated, sucked into the advancing red shadows. He mumbled and whined to himself, incoherent except for flashes of insight that urged him to slice his throat and be done, and he would’ve committed the act, except when the moment came, he realized he’d dropped the improvised blade, that it was lost. And so all was lost. The moon crept up from its lair and grinned its devil grin. She cried out, muffled and faint. Or a coyote yipped over the ridge. He trembled from head to toe, galvanized to pitiful life by the image of her screaming, buried alive.”

—“—30—” by Laird Barron

𝘖𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 is a good collection of creepy stories steeped in the obsession of transmogrification. The very bad kind of tranformation. And there is rarely anything on the shadowed blue marble of Barron’s worldscape that can stop that “monsterification”. Which is cool. I can roll with that. But it’s not a great collection. The mutations are gory and gooey and sometimes portend to an even greater darkness (the bloody tip of the chthonic iceberg). The characters, though, are mostly watered down human tea. And it’s only fitting to equate these doomed bastards with potations since humans don’t seem much else in Barron’s world except meat broth and compost for the demon horde. I really couldn’t care about any character in this entire collection as much as I did each one’s gloopy demise. It’s so much better when you feel sorry for the poor fucker—otherwise it’s nothing more than a series of different matter in entropy, higher states to lower liquified states, and you can’t even remember the name of the dude who’s now a puddle and ruined your good goddamn shoes. And the clichés . . . Jesus . . . even I at least wrote “𝘤𝘩𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤 iceberg” in this post.

My hopes were set high for this collection. I’d read his novel, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘐𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴, and really dug how much terror could be squeezed from scenes outside of the action. Locked doors and whispering baby voices . . . aliens? Monsters? I mean, wasn’t the gladiatorial shit enough? I loved that weird mélange he’d created. And 𝘖𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 had come highly recommended, it was in my bailiwick, had all kinds of blood and bloody beings, so . . . I don’t know . . . weak human tea, like I’ve said.

I will continue to read his newer fiction—maybe he’s embraced subtle horror and pathos over hotel intercourse and splatter. Yeah, there’s a lot of fucking in this, which, you know . . . I should’ve liked more. Oh well. I’m sure if Laird read my stuff he’d say it needed more humping. And Lovecraftian leviathans. And what’s with starting all your sentences with “and”, Mr. Sherman? And he’d be right.

Write?

I do need more humping in my fiction. But I promise you that when those lovers die mid-thrust, you’ll fucking care about their destruction.

Cthulhu iceberg? show less

Get cosmic, get grim, get weird, get a nice big dog and head out into the wild wastes of Alaska to find the strange and terrible horrors waiting for you there, or maybe just poke your head into the attic, or drop by at a friend's party, terrible things are uncoiling everywhere, including inside the husk of blood and meat you call yourself. Laird Barron nearly died to bring you these messages, the least you could do is devour it until it begins to devour you.