Camera Obscura: Lair of Laird Barron

Longtime readers of my blog will know I normally don't spend a lot of time highlighting other blogs in their entirety. However, I had to make an exception after poking around at length on Camera Obscura, Laird Barron's online journal.

His name is one that should be familiar to those who have picked up the top rated Lovecraftian anthologies of recent years. The Imago Sequence, Barron's first short story collection, has received incremental and well deserved praise. It has achieved nearly cult following due to a richness derived from what seems like a bizarre marriage of themes, characters, and styles. Macho men turned investigators confront the cosmic horrors lurking behind our world (and often not for long before they come onto the stage), transcribing their stories through an ink heat storm--vibrant, quasi-experimental prose. For Barron, blasting the Cthulhu Mythos' old remnants into the great beyond to see what new form they have after crash landing has become the norm. This originality will likely be upheld and advanced when his second collection, Occultation, is published later this year.

Getting back to the blog, though. Barron's colorful writing and keen observations are not merely confined to his fiction, as his online presence demonstrates. Between status updates on his work, one will find several year's worth of mini-reviews and other commentary on his contemporaries. Barron's literary tastes and musings on the horror genre poke through--offering rare insight into a weird fiction writer's professional inclinations, and in "real" time too. Moreover, weird fiction readers needn't be familiar with Barron's previous work to appreciate his most recent posts on Gary McMahon and Simon Strantzas. These are a knowledgeable critic's words; definitely ones worthy of attention in supernatural literature's bulging online repository.

-Grim Blogger