Laird Barron's Blog, page 21
May 5, 2015
Watch This: Dirty Laundry
They say Tom Hardy wants to play Punisher. I like Hardy. He’d do fine. But we already have the right guy for the job. Let’s give Thomas Jane another crack at a feature film.
April 26, 2015
Don’t Make Me Assume My Ultimate Form
The cover and ToC of Ross Lockhart’s upcoming weird fiction anthology,��Cthulhu Fhtagn!��have been revealed. The anthology is up for preorder.
Thank you to Ross Lockhart for taking “Don’t Make Me Assume My Ultimate Form.” Jessica Mace, the Black Kaleidoscope, the eater of dolls, dread puppets, and introducing Mrs. Shrike and her girls.
Table of Contents
Introduction: In His House at R���lyeh��� ��� Ross E. Lockhart
The Lightning Splitter ��� Walter Greatshell
Dead Canyons ��� Ann K. Schwader
Delirium Sings at the Maelstrom Window ��� Michael Griffin
Into Ye Smoke-Wreath���d World of Dream ��� W. H. Pugmire
The Lurker In the Shadows ��� Nathan Carson
The Insectivore ��� Orrin Grey
The Body Shop ��� Richard Lee Byers
On a Kansas Plain ��� Michael J. Martinez
The Prince of Lyghes ��� Anya Martin
The Curious Death of Sir Arthur Turnbridge ��� G. D. Falksen
Aerkheim���s Horror ��� Christine Morgan
Return of the Prodigy ��� T.E. Grau
The Curse of the Old Ones ��� Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington
Love Will Save You ��� Cameron Pierce
Assemblage Point ��� Scott R. Jones
The Return of Sarnath ��� Gord Sellar
The Long Dark ��� Wendy N. Wagner
Green Revolution ��� Cody Goodfellow
Don���t Make Me Assume My Ultimate Form ��� Laird Barron
Cover Reveal–The Case Against Satan
At last, the cover for Ray Russell’s��The Case Against Satan��has arrived. The book will hit shelves this fall.
A terrific and terrifically creepy novel. I am proud to have written the foreword to this Penguin Classics edition. Thank you to Elda Rotor and Samuel Raim at Penguin for their editorial assistance.
April 17, 2015
The Din of Celestial Birds
image via Weird Fiction Review
April 16, 2015
Read This: The Faster, Redder Road
Stephen Graham Jones is one of those writers whose name will live on well after his career ends. When we talk about great weird fiction, great horror, Jones is always in the conversation. He’s putting together a selection of stories and novel excerpts called��The Faster, Redder Road. I am looking forward to it.
The description:
This collection showcases the best writings of Stephen Graham Jones, whose career is developing rapidly from the noir underground to the mainstream.��The Faster Redder Road��features excerpts from Jones���s novels���including��The Last Final Girl,��The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong,��Not for Nothing, and��The Gospel of Z���and short stories, some never before published in book form. Examining Jones���s contributions to American literature as well as noir, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.���s introduction puts Jones on the literary map.
April 12, 2015
On Writing: Lumps
Writing is a form of masochism. Students complain of tough instructors. New authors complain of tough editors. Established authors complain about bad reviews.
It doesn’t get easier with publication or paychecks or awards. Good editors continue to bust your chops. As far as reviews go, novelist Joe Abercrombie sums it up nicely: “If everyone loves your stuff, it’s not being read widely enough.”
April 8, 2015
Moving Day
Yesterday, I began what will be a lengthy process of moving into a new place near Stone Ridge, NY. Jessica and I renting on a month to month basis, but it’s a lovely home in the heart of farm country in the Catskill foothills and I suspect we’ll be here a while. The journey here has been long and arduous. Moving into a house with one’s significant other is an important transition.
Several years ago my personal life went pear-shaped. Life basically took all my skin off over the course of a few weeks and left me a bundle of exposed nerves. The two things that kept the ship from sinking was my dog and my writing projects. I took care of them and they returned the favor.��I spent most of 2011 holed up in the mountains near Lincoln, Mt with my brother Jason and his wife Harmony. During the day, I managed a neighbor’s kennel of huskies and helped with all the labor that attends a homestead on the edge of the wilderness. At night, I wrote “More Dark,” “Hand of Glory” and��The Croning.��
Late that fall I packed the truck and drove in two shots across the country to Rifton, NY. I rented a room from John and Fiona Langan. Since then, I’ve worked with Fiona down at the farm, hayed during the summer, helped with a couple of rescue dogs,and seen John and his son David progress from white to red belts in Tang Soo Do.
Mostly, however, I’ve battened down the hatches and written. Out of all those dark times have come Jessica Mace, Johnny Cope, Rex, a crime novel, and numerous crazy ideas for stories that would not have occurred to me otherwise. What I needed for recovery was the time and environment to focus on the work which gives me purpose and fulfillment.
Thank you to Jason, Harmony and the little Barrons in Montana, and thank you to John, Fiona, and David Langan here in New York. Thank you for giving me shelter and allowing me to put the pieces back together.
April 4, 2015
Formicate! Formicate!
I watched this on the silver screen when it hit in the early ’70s. That means I was four or five and probably still eating stray ants. Could be the experience altered my brain chemistry. Watched it again last year and the film holds up with bizarre magnificence.��Phase IV��fits my conception of all that is unholy about horror and weird fiction/cinema.
Adam Mills��takes a good whack��at why this is an important weird film.
March 30, 2015
Watch This: It Follows
I am frequently asked,��what scares you?��Or more recently,��what’s the scariest thing that’s ever happened to you?��People might expect me to say something about blizzards, or falling through the ice, or getting lost in the wilderness, or doppelgangers. While all those things have a foothold in my mind, among the most dreadful experiences I’ve had is a recurring nightmare of walking along an endless sidewalk in a Seattle neighborhood. The dream has haunted me for twenty years.
And the scenario is always the same: It’s late and overcast. Dead leaves cover the wet lawns and clog the gutters. Streetlamps ignite a murky twilight haze and my shadow stretches before me. Something awful trails me. I don’t know what it is, or where it is, except that it’s malevolent and that it only emerges between glances over my shoulder, inexorably closing the distance. I wake before I make it to my door and the sense is that moment of awakening is the moment of my death.
Today, I went to a matinee of��It Follows. My only company in the theater was an usher who patrolled the walkway every twenty minutes or so like a shark cruising the shallows. I’m not going to say much directly about this film. Hype aside, director David Robert Mitchell doesn’t reinvent the genre so much as take a nightmare and filter it through the lenses of John Carpenter and James Cameron. This story isn’t shiny or new. The threat isn’t breathtakingly original. No, we’ve met it before; we’ve known it all along. It is old, and scaly as our darkest hind-brain. It lurks within the clammy, clumsy first embrace with a stranger; it lurks between the lines of the story of The Birds and the Bees, and it lurks at the overheated core of the North American horror tradition. That unpleasant, inevitable familiarity is precisely what makes��It Follows��affecting.
Mitchell gets it so right because he takes on the relationship between category horror and sexuality. He sets our terror of intimacy and pleasure within the confines of an inescapable nightmare powered by its own illogical and contradictory progressions. He’s accomplished a devastating takedown of Judeo-Christian-inflected horror and its insatiable preoccupation with hedonistic sex and nubile youth and a corresponding compulsion to punish and destroy that youth.
Walking back to my truck after the show, I glanced warily at a guy shuffling across the lot. It occurred to me from the ache in my arms, that I’d been white-knuckling for an hour and change. Of course, I chuckled ruefully and moved on. Been a while since a horror movie got into my head and much longer since one has inhabited my subconscious to the degree that I swim up from a nap to type out a few sleep-drugged thoughts on the experience.
Mitchell’s film took me back to my nightmare wasteland of deserted Seattle streets and the sense of being stalked by some incarnation of malevolence. My baggage is unique and what disquiets me will leave another shrugging. Most of us understand the nightmare, though. Most of us share it, in some form. Mitchell certainly does, and It Follows taps that primordial vein.
March 26, 2015
Pirate Birthday Party Screening
The Rosendale Theater was standing room only last night for the debut of Peter Ferland’s��Pirate Birthday Party. A wry, and frequently dark, coming of age comedy with some terrific writing from Ferland who also plays the beleaguered father. He drew nice performances from the actors, especially the kids.
The film unfolds as a comedy, but there are much heavier moments that have me mulling the implications long after the curtain dropped. The cast was on hand to take a bow afterward and it was touching to see how proud the actors were of their accomplishment and the ovation from the audience. An excellent film and an excellent community-building experience. I hope more filmmakers are able to do this sort of project in the area.
Special congratulations to my girlfriend Jessica who portrayed the villainous Ms. Blackburn. She knocked em dead.
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