Infernal House is due to release Laird Barron's first ultra-luxurious book, The Light is the Darkness, before the end of June. This illustrated hardcover follows the horrific trek of a modern gladiator seeking his missing sister. If it's anything like Barron's past efforts, then readers can expect a thrilling tour through underworld terror with richly imaginative prose and a mildly Lovecraftian, but original seasoning.
The Light is the Darkness continues Barron's ascent as a major force in the literary horror genre. The novel also indicates that he has generated enough demand for upscale limited editions, as well as paperbacks. At $175 and a 174 copy print run, it's set to appeal most to longtime Barron followers and collectors.
However, those with lower budgets have nothing to fear. Word is that the unconventional author is hard at work on another novel, The Croning, as well as a third short story collection. If you've been under a rock, then pick up his first two affordable books, The Imago Sequence and Occultation, immediately. Even newcomers might find themselves rushing to purchase The Light is the Darkness shortly after reading these previous collections. After all, an exposure with Laird Barron's fiction is unforgettable and highly addicting.
Weird horror fiction is again enjoying a strong presence on the Stoker Award ballots. Finalists for each category were announced earlier this week. Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron head up the purely weird, for superior achievements in non-fiction and short story collections, respectively.
Laird Barron's nightmare stirring collection, Occultation (reviewed last year), is a strong contender amid fierce competition. It's battling Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars, among others. Another Barron tale shows up in Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas, and a finalist for superior anthology.
Thomas Ligotti's pessimistic assessment of human existence, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (reviewed at length here), faces three other works in a death match. This nomination and potential win is near perfect timing for the book, which sold out its first edition in late 2010. Conspiracy is due for a paperback re-release by Hippocampus Press later this spring. Ligotti holds the possible advantage of being a previous Stoker winner, with numerous past nominations and several outright wins, thanks to The Nightmare Factory in 1996 and My Work Is Not Yet Done in 2002.
Voting for the awards should conclude by late March. Here's a full list of the finalists:
Superior Achievement in a NOVEL:
HORNS by Joe Hill (William Morrow)
ROT AND RUIN by Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster)
DEAD LOVE by Linda Watanabe McFerrin (Stone Bridge Press)
APOCALYPSE OF THE DEAD by Joe McKinney (Pinnacle)
DWELLER by Jeff Strand (Leisure/Dark Regions Press)
A DARK MATTER by Peter Straub (DoubleDay)
Superior Achievement in a FIRST NOVEL:
BLACK AND ORANGE by Benjamin Kane Ethridge (Bad Moon Books)
A BOOK OF TONGUES by Gemma Files (Chizine Publications)
CASTLE OF LOS ANGELES by Lisa Morton (Gray Friar Press)
SPELLBENT by Lucy Snyder (Del Rey)
Superior Achievement in LONG FICTION:
THE PAINTED DARKNESS by Brian James Freeman (Cemetery Dance)
DISSOLUTION by Lisa Mannetti (Deathwatch)
MONSTERS AMONG US by Kirstyn McDermott (Macabre: A Journey through Australia’s Darkest Fears)
THE SAMHANACH by Lisa Morton (Bad Moon Books)
INVISIBLE FENCES by Norman Prentiss (Cemetery Dance)
Superior Achievement in SHORT FICTION:
RETURN TO MARIABRONN by Gary Braunbeck (Haunted Legends)
THE FOLDING MAN by Joe R. Lansdale (Haunted Legends)
1925: A FALL RIVER HALLOWEEN by Lisa Mannetti (Shroud Magazine #10)
IN THE MIDDLE OF POPLAR STREET by Nate Southard (Dead Set: A Zombie Anthology)
FINAL DRAFT by Mark W. Worthen (Horror Library IV)
Superior Achievement in an ANTHOLOGY:
DARK FAITH edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon (Apex Publications)
HORROR LIBRARY IV edited by R.J. Cavender and, Boyd E. Harris (Cutting Block Press)
MACABRE: A JOURNEY THROUGH AUSTRALIA’S DARKEST FEARS edited by Angela Challis and Marty Young (Brimstone Press)
HAUNTED LEGENDS edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas (Tor)
THE NEW DEAD edited by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s Griffin)
Superior Achievement in a COLLECTION:
OCCULTATION by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
BLOOD AND GRISTLE by Michael Louis Calvillo (Bad Moon Books)
FULL DARK, NO STARS by Stephen King (Simon and Schuster)
THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY by Stephen Graham Jones (Prime Books)
A HOST OF SHADOWS by Harry Shannon (Dark Regions Press)
Superior Achievement in NONFICTION:
TO EACH THEIR DARKNESS by Gary A. Braunbeck (Apex Publications)
THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE by Thomas Ligotti (Hippocampus Press)
WANTED UNDEAD OR ALIVE by Jonathan Maberry and Janice Gable Bashman (Citadel)
LISTEN TO THE ECHOES: THE RAY BRADBURY INTERVIEWS by Sam Weller (Melville House Publications)
-Grim Blogger
Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron Stoker Finalists for 2011
SF Signal's recent interview with Laird Barron is an enlightening one that's more than just a chat with a rapidly up-and-coming weird horror writer. Barron discusses several interesting trends in the horror industry, as well as his own views on literary horror and the possible threat of a backlash against horror exploring intellectual themes in traditional formats like the short story. With a sharp and somewhat irritated sense, he also zeroes in on horror's more troublesome aspects that may be clouding the genre today: sycophantic reviews, fragmented readerships, and what horror means to the masses, among other things.
Readers unfamiliar with Barron's genre insights and more renowned talents in weird fiction owe it to themselves to absorb this interview. And, after that, check out his latest collection, Occultation (which was previously reviewed here).
Since H.P. Lovecraft's death in 1937, many writers have sought to tap his visions and energies for their own literary purposes. Some have careened wildly into new territory as a result. None, however, has done so in quite the way Laird Barron has. When his first short story collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, appeared several years ago, Barron gained a cult following. Now he is back with a new book of nine stories called Occultation and Other Stories, which at times seems like a ritualistic tome designed to transmit Barron's dark fantasies into readers' souls. The vibrant sorcery that thunders from these pages has its origins in his challenging depictions of exotic characters and environments, as well as a scrambled version of Lovecraft's Cosmicism designed to invoke a timeless chill within our bones.
Many have classified Laird Barron as a Lovecraftian writer--a deserved identification--but one that should only be used with limited parameters. The sheer range of style and setting that appears in Occultation probes venues and records voices Lovecraft could have never dreamed of, people and places unexplored by most post-Lovecraft "Cthulhu Mythos" authors. The stories in this collection tear through boundaries presented by societies and geography, letting through unadulterated strangeness and terror in its purest form...everywhere. Beyond that, Barron manages to unearth new treasures, shining with a grim luster that does not owe its brilliance to Lovecraft's ghost, but to other influences and the author's own experimental designs.
The book's remarkable diversity is inescapable, and much of it stems from Barron's large storytelling toolbox. In the title story, "Occultation," a nightmarish situation centered around a strange shape on a cheap hotel's wall unrolls itself through innocuous dialogue. These are the words of a hapless couple trying to deny the insanity of what is happening a few feet from their bed, in exchanges that are painfully human. However, the subconscious denial expressed here is feeble, and rightfully so. The collapse of safe, dependable anchors in Barron's worlds is so thorough that neither his fictional subjects nor his readers can successfully negate the transmutation carried out by outre actors. Subverting "known" reality is Laird Barron's specialty, and his faithfulness to this principle drives his dimensional membrane ripping styles.
Barron's ability to seamlessly integrate equally unsound dreams and realities is the most frequently marshaled technique in his narrative arsenal. Nowhere is this better applied than in "The Lagerstatte," where a disorienting trio of hallucination, nightmare, and faded life struggle for dominance over a woman who has lost her family in a plane crash. This is an enshadowed representation of madness intersecting with dark, primal spirits, who bring unwelcome reminders of loss to the tortured protagonist and beyond the book's covers. Another frightfully uncertain atmosphere settles over the wasteland of "--30--." Here, an alienated pair are stuck in an artificial module, far from civilization, tracking natural phenomena on land tainted by a bizarre cult's mysterious history. As in "The Lagerstatte," emissaries of the uncanny and unknowable intrude into minds that are already distraught by past burdens and frequent nightmares. No blows are withheld in the story's awful climax, and the excruciating collision engineered by Barron will leave readers inventing their own interpretations about the mechanics of the supernatural and the subconscious.
The Imago Sequence won broad appeal in part because its characters depart wildly from traditional Lovecraftiana. Unbalanced strongmen and clumsy elites suffered equally as they fell to forces they could never hope to understand. Occultation's cast includes a few familiar personality types, but its main characters are more diverse than in Barron's first collection. The professions, genders, ethnicities, and sexual preferences vary wildly in an egalitarian distribution of cosmic terror. None are spared. Similarly, no two environments envisioned by Laird Barron are the same, despite his slight preference for northwestern America's familiar stalking grounds. His cities, countrysides, forests, and deserts have their names--real or imaginary--but all of these places wind up as putty built to heighten each story's horrors, as backdrops for madness and menace.
While Barron's plots, characters, and styles are as unique as they come, there are strong echoes of a worldview familiar to H.P. Lovecraft readers in more than half the stories in Occultation. In fact, the clarity with which Barron presents H.P. Lovecraft's philosophical legacy marks him as one of the few writers working in the genuinely Lovecraftian tradition--not by dropping names of curious sounding entities and books, but by boldly showing mankind's dust speck like place in the universe. "The Forest" follows a renegade entomologist and his well-to-do buddies on a quest to breakthrough the barriers of time and species to communicate with humanity's insectoid successors. Extraterrestrials with an insatiable hunger are the chief threats in "The Broadsword," an anxiety boosting tale that chronicles an invasion by hostile voices and visitors at an old hotel converted into residences. In these stories, the horrors actually decipher themselves, but there is no comfort found in knowing their monstrous workings. The Lovecraftian theme of forbidden knowledge surfaces in the novella length "Mysterium Tremendium," which covers a group of gay friends and lovers on their trek to the Kalamov Dolmen mentioned in The Black Guide, a tome as unsettling and magical as any rattled off by Lovecraft. The sanity and relationship shattering encounter at the story's conclusion is practically expected by the time it occurs, but the full revelation of an ancient evil's true form is as surprising as it is disturbing.
Barron's unique modernization of Lovecraftian Cosmicism will probably be the book's main attraction, but another subset of stories presents a worthwhile contrast especially suited for more general readers of weird fiction. In these tales, the distant influences of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood supplant Lovecraft. They also testify to Laird Barron's capable handling of weird fiction at large, not just the Lovecraftian. "Catch Hell" is easily on par with this collection's best Lovecraftian pieces. Dark gods and black magic forever alter the disjointed lives of a couple trying to have another child after the shock death of their first. This story houses an original breed of possession, and eerie questions about mortality and fertility, questions that have never been asked in the gruesome way posed here. More traditional markers of evil also take center stage in "Six Six Six." As might be guessed from the story's title, Satanism and archaic occult powers cease to be banished when an heir occupies his family's ancestral home. Old shadows consume the present. Psychotic, ugly truths about the heir's family are exposed to his wife, who follows her husband into a black pit unbound by time. Finally, "Strappado" is quite different from any other Barron tale. An artistic performance in a foreign land turns equal parts criminal and mysterious, leaving one broken participant to drown himself in futile denial, even as acidic questions about the will to live wash over readers in a torrent. Questions raised by this story, like the others in Occultation, are designed to haunt and hurt well after completing an initial read. And a second, and a third, and so on. Barron powered queries are never comfortable, but they are definitely enlightening.
Occultation really is a well balanced collection that builds on the solid foundations left by The Imago Sequence. Laird Barron serves up more of the wonderful Lovecraftian fare his previous readers expect. His experiments in new directions pay off exceedingly well, and may foreshadow horrific vistas of future short story collections and novels. Occultation may be analyzed one day not merely as another successful collection of weird tales, but as an important transit point in Barron's literary career, leading to evolutionary paths as alien and vivid as his fictional horrors.
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.
The multi-faceted Matt Cardin indicates in a recent blog post that his latest work is about to be released on the world. This follows his update last week, when a finalized table of contents listing all the stories and essays slated to appear was published. Cardin's Dark Awakenings, his second major collection of fiction, is due to surface this fall from Mythos Books.
In a move that ought to catalyze interest in the book, Cardin has publicized high praise for it from established weird writers Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron. These innovative voices are a good pairing for Cardin, whose fiction often mixes stark religious themes with the darker symbolism feverishly adored in the best weird fiction today.
See the advertisement at the top for more specifics on Dark Awakenings. Also, interested parties should definitely pay a visit to Matt Cardin's blog, "The Teeming Brain," an erudite resource of news and observations by the author. He also maintains an embryonic website here.
