Laird Barron's Blog, page 20
May 30, 2015
Judge Holden is the Devil
The Judge in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is Satan. The book tells us so within the first few pages when he confronts a tent-revival preacher with a litany of false accusations. The reverend says,
This is him. The devil. Here he stands.
Case closed.
May 28, 2015
Interviews: Langan & Llewellyn
May 27, 2015
Happy Birthday, Christopher Lee
Happy birthday, Sir Christopher. A great actor and a fascinating man. Your Dracula had a hell of an effect on the 1970s model of me.
image via fanpop.com
May 26, 2015
Read this: Disintegration
Today is release day for DISINTEGRATION by Richard Thomas. Marvelous, febrile, violent noir. Buy it. Then check out Richard’s interview at Lit Reactor.
May 23, 2015
Lo, The Blood in My Mouth
Volume II of The Madness of Cthulhu toc and other details are available at S.T. Joshi’s journal. It should be up for preorder soon.
The ToC
Foreword by Kim Newman
Introduction by S. T. Joshi
20,000 Years Under the Sea by Kevin J. Anderson
Tsathoggua’s Breath by Brian Stableford
The Door Beneath by Alan Dean Foster
Dead Man Walking by William F. Nolan
A Crazy Mistake by Nancy Kilpatrick
The Anatomy Lesson by Cody Goodfellow
The Hollow Sky by Jason C. Eckhardt
The Last Ones by Mark Howard Jones
A Footnote in the Black Budget by Jonathan Maberry
Deep Fracture by Steve Rasnic Tem
The Dream Stones by Donald Tyson
The Blood in My Mouth by Laird Barron
On the Shores of Destruction by Karen Haber
Object 00922UU by Erik Bear and Greg Bear
Notes on Contributors
May 15, 2015
Read This: Darren Speegle
Resurrecting a post from 2007 about one of the best weird fiction authors. And when it comes to weirdness, Speegle is only matched by the likes of Brian Evenson and Michael Cisco.
Regarding Darren Speegle:
I think it appropriate to begin with Speegle as he recently announced his collection, A Dirge for the Temporal will be reprinted in hardcover by RAW DOG SCREAMING PRESS.
Someone at a message board asked, if given their taste for the works of Ligotti, Mark Samuels, and Don Tumasonis, and other writers of the weird, would he enjoy Speegle…
My response, lifted from the board: “If you enjoy Tumasonis, I think you’ll enjoy Speegle. They share a lot of qualities and explore similar themes — strangers in strange lands, the uncertainty and mutability of relationships, geography as a mirror for the mind, an extension of dream state. Both produce work I find grandly elliptical and consummately dark.”
Gary Braunbeck also answered the above poster. He described Speegle’s work as “Hallucinations on paper” among other superlatives. Gary isn’t wrong: My reaction to a concentrated dose of Gothic Wine and A Dirge for the Temporal in a brief period was one of profound cognitive dislocation. Speegle’s tales frequently approximate lucid dreams, his protagonists often interchangeable with the author, if not the reader. Seldom has the unreliable narrator been so smoothly accomplished. As is the hallmark of much heavyweight literature, immersion in this guy’s world may affect one’s own dream state.
The elliptical nature of Speegle’s prose, its elegance and simplicity is striking as evidenced by this passage from his short story “Lago di Inquita”:
“We did Florence, Venice, and Verona, in that order, during the first three full days of our seven-day vacation. In the presence of Michelangelo’s David one reassessed one’s opinions about the nature of things; all the superlatives, no matter how soulfully or originally uttered, became instant cliché. Lovers’ Venice, with its watery streets and sighing bridges, was a much easier distraction. As was Verona, which ensnared one in Roman history rather than the elusive and delicate Renaissance.
“Somewhere in the middle lay the dark ages, my real reason for being in Europe again.”
Speegle has lived in Europe, spent a significant amount of time exploring the landscapes, the cultures. These influences are unmistakable, indeed, inseparable from the fiction itself. His horrors, the intrinsic darkness of his themes, derive from the angst of the American as outsider, the barriers of language, custom, the very weight of history no process of naturalization is likely to ever fully breach.
This is an author who continues to be criminally overlooked despite his regular appearances in the small press. This may be due to the complexity of his work, its obliqueness and reticence to resolve in neat endings. Speegle works in the seams of fiction; he inhabits the twilight land between psychological horror and the supernautral. He produces fragments and stream of thought vignettes and is content to permit the reader to shoulder the load; the culmination of these fragments assembling into something of a warped mosaic that defies ready categorization. Even when his terrors would seem explicit in the context of genre tropes and expectations, Speegle slyly yanks out the rug, introducing a dozen rational explanations for the irrational machinations of the universe. Time will tell if his audience finds him. I suspect it will.
Do yourself a favor and get thee to Amazon and pick up one or both of Darren Speegle’s exemplary collections.
May 13, 2015
Brian Keene AMA
Famed horror author Brian Keene will field questions this evening at Reddit, 7PM/EST. Brian is a hell of an entertainer and he has a great deal of knowledge about the industry.
May 11, 2015
May 10, 2015
Ignotus Awards
A major honor to be considered alongside Jeff VanderMeer and Terry Pratchet, among other great writers: The Croning��has been��nominated��for an Ignotus Award in the foreign novel category. Thank you to my agent Janet Reid, Ruben Martin for translating, Valdemar for publishing the Spanish edition, and most of all, the fans for voting this onto the ballot.
May 9, 2015
Shirley Jackson Award Nominees 2015
Congratulations to those appearing on this year’s��Shirley Jackson Awards��slate. The Jackson is a great award and, by design, it’s no easy feat to make the ballot. I had the honor of writing forewords to��Burnt Black Suns and��Unseaming,��two horror collections that take strikingly different vectors in their approach. These are books that exemplify the state of weird fiction and horror, circa 2015. I’m disappointed that Scott Nicolay’s Ana Kai Tangata didn’t make the ballot as I think it’s probably the strongest weird fiction debut in years. However, the universe is in balance as Simon Strantzas is finally accorded some of the recognition he is due from US awards committees.
My other favorite in the collection category is��After the People Lights Have Gone Off.��Stephen Graham Jones is at the top of my list when it comes to contemporary horror. And finally, congratulations to Lockhart & Steele for the��Children of Old Leech.��I had serious reservations, but the authors and editors knocked it dead. My thanks to those involved for working so hard to make it a terrific anthology.
From the official Shirley Jackson Awards page:
2014 Shirley Jackson Awards Nominees
Boston, MA (May 2015) �����In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson���s writing, and with permission of the author���s estate, The Shirley Jackson Awards, Inc. has been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.
The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.
The nominees for the 2014 Shirley Jackson Awards are:
NOVEL
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals)
Bird Box, Josh Malerman (Ecco)
Broken Monsters, Lauren Beukes (Mulholland)
Confessions, Kanae Minato (Mulholland)
The Lesser Dead, Christopher Buehlman (Berkley)
The Unquiet House, Alison Littlewood (Jo Fletcher Books)
NOVELLA
The Beauty, Aliya Whiteley (Unsung Stories)
Ceremony of Flies, Kate Jonez (DarkFuse)
The Good Shabti, Robert Sharp (Jurassic London)
The Mothers of Voorhisville, Mary Rickert (Tor.com, April 2014)
We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory (Tachyon)
NOVELETTE
���The Devil in America,��� Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com, April 2014)
���The End of the End of Everything,��� Dale Bailey (Tor.com, April 2014)
���The Husband Stitch,��� Carmen Maria Machado (Granta)
���Newspaper Heart,��� Stephen Volk (The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, Spectral Press)
���Office at Night,��� Kate Bernheimer and Laird Hunt (Walker Art Center/ Coffee House Press)
���The Quiet Room,��� V H Leslie (Shadows & Tall Trees 2014, Undertow Publications/ChiZine Publications)
SHORT FICTION
���Candy Girl,��� Chikodili Emelumadu (Apex Magazine, November 2014)
���The Dogs Home,��� Alison Littlewood (The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, Spectral Press)
���The Fisher Queen,��� Alyssa Wong (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May/June 2014)
���Shay Corsham Worsted,��� Garth Nix (Fearful Symmetries, ChiZine Publications)
���Wendigo Nights,��� Siobhan Carroll (Fearful Symmetries, ChiZine Publications)
SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION
After the People Lights Have Gone Off, Stephen Graham Jones��(Dark House)
Burnt Black Suns:�� A Collection of Weird Tales, Simon Strantzas (Hippocampus)
Gifts for the One who Comes After, Helen Marshall (ChiZine Publications)
They Do The Same Things Different There, Robert Shearman (ChiZine Publications)
Unseaming, Mike Allen (Antimatter Press)
EDITED ANTHOLOGY
Letters to Lovecraft, edited by Jesse Bullington (Stone Skin Press)
Fearful Symmetries, edited by Ellen Datlow (ChiZine Publications)
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, edited by Mark Morris (Spectral Press)
Shadows & Tall Trees 2014, edited by Michael Kelly (Undertow Publications/ChiZine Publications)
The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron, edited by Ross E. Lockhart and Justin Steele (Word Horde)
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as��The Haunting of Hill House��and��We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, ���The Lottery.��� Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work.
Congratulations to all the nominees.
