Laird Barron's Blog, page 48

Listen to This: Blood Music

I listen to a lot of different music while I write. Sometimes I choose accompaniment appropriate to the particular story. My current mission is to finish a crime novel. Here a couple of tunes in my ear at the moment.

 

 

 

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction brought out King’s Dark Tower. It debuted the horror classics The Autopsy and “The Angel of Death” by Michael Shea. Paolo Bacigalupi got started there, and while she’d gotten her start elsewhere, F&SF is where I first encountered the work of the immensely talented M. Rickert. Gene Wolfe and Joan Aickman appeared in those pages. And Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link, and Ray Vukcevich with one of the best and creepiest horror stories you’ll ever read called “Whisper.”

I’m fond of publisher Gordon Van Gelder and his magazine because he’s the one who gave me my first pro sale back in 2000. I’ve had a few milestones since “Shiva, Open Your Eye” came out as the closer for the Kate Wilhelm issue in the fall of 2001. My handful of appearances in F&SF remain dear.

The venerable publication is a going concern, but it could always use support. The online zines are swell, but they seldom publish longer novelettes or novellas–a major blindspot created by the shift toward electronic formats. Pick up a copy at a bookstore, or subscribe. It’s hard to go wrong with a magazine that has been so consistently excellent for so many years.

Lovecraft Ezine

The Lovecraft Ezine has matured into one sleek beast. Articles, essays, fiction, and reviews. Give it a look. The cover of the latest issue is a stellar rendition of a scene from “The Crevasse” by Ballingrud & Bailey. One of the best Lovecraftian tales to have emerged in recent years.

 

art by Peter Szmer

Read This: North American Lake Monsters

Nathan Ballingrud’s debut collection, North American Lake Monsters, has arrived. John Langan’s excellent LA Review of Books piece covers a lot of territory, so I’ll content myself with a handful of comments.

One thing we must talk about when we talk about Nathan Ballingrud is his felicity with language. The rough and tumble of his narratives is apprehended in the often laconic and deceptively relaxed cadences of a Dan Chaon or a Larry Brown. His exquisite renderings of body horror suggest a connection to Clive Barker. Ballingrud is a prose poet who operates at a level rarely encountered in genre, much less horror’s neck of the woods. His poetry is in keeping with the great North American tradition–it is not wrong that Langan assigns Ballingrud a slot in the ever accreting fossil record that has claimed the likes of Carver and Hemingway.

The collection is a raw read. It resonates mostly at the naturalistic end of the scale despite the presence of angels, vampires, werewolves, and ghouls. Yet at the center of it, down in the darkness, the blood, and inhumanity, beats the heart of a humane man. Seldom has the paradox of human resiliance and fragility been so brilliantly reconciled. Ballingrud’s characters are uniformly at odds with themselves, hell bent upon transformation from whatever they are into some desired, or dreaded, configuration–story after story touches upon this theme of transfiguration, whether it occurs via brute force or brutish consumption, catharsis of spirit, or an actual physical rebirth. One can’t help but feel the author shares his characters’ existential anguish, the incohate and urgent desire to claw through the amniotic sac, to crack the shell from within and emerge into some new, cleaner light.

North American Lake Monsters

Watch This: J.T. Petty’s HELLBENDERS

J.T. Petty is one of my favorite filmmakers, especially among those working at the horror end of the spectrum. The Burrowers is a particularly well-done take on Lovecraftian horrors emerging during the “wild west” era of U.S. history.

His latest effort, Hellbenders, appears about as profanely humorous as one might hope for a take on the exorcism genre. Looking forward to it.

Hellbenders

Lensing the Weird

After years of online correspondence I finally had a chance to meet Nick Gucker at Necronomicon last month. Nick turns out to be a nice man as well as a skilled artist. Check out the feature on him at Weird tales.

 

art by Nick Gucker

 

 

 

 

Andrea Bonazzi and the art of cosmic horror

It is humbling to be read and supported in my work by a great talent such as Andrea Bonazzi. He dwells in Genoa, Italy and his art is darkly splendorous, as Richard Gavin might say. I hope that some convention planning board will get him on a plane and Stateside as artist guest of honor one of these days.

Some images from Andrea’s site:

    

Read This: Let’s Play White

From 2011:

It’s painfully obvious that the pool of women writing in the horror field is much smaller than that of the men, but damn, for my money the women are representing big time. Some of the hardest, meanest, blood-in-the-eye storytelling is being dished out by Kaaron Warren, Livia Llewellyn, Gemma Files, and Chesya Burke, to name several I’ve been reading. If you love horror and hardboiled fiction and aren’t reading Warren, you’re missing out. Llewellyn sort of eludes genre description–she’s closer to Ligotti if Ligotti was as deft at drawing flesh and blood as he is brilliant at recreating nightmares. Llewellyn can handle both. Files has long been among the brightest lights of the Canadian horror scene.

Then there’s Burke and her new book. Let’s Play White exhibits the kind of toughness and steely character I appreciate in the writing of Warren and Llewellyn–a no holds barred style of storytelling that pulls back the rock and gives us a peek at the dark recesses of the soul. These are horror stories, oh yes indeed. There’s supernatural intrusion and mind control and monstrousness and evil, but it’s a matter of layers. Her depiction of monstrousness and evil chill and horrify and illuminate just as spectacularly as the more traditional weird components do. She, like Nathan Ballingrud and Lucius Shepard whom she occasionally reminds me of, is gifted at capturing the essence of everyday lives, photographing them in candid black and white, and then raveling their stories in ways that are shocking and morbid and ultimately revelatory. That Burke also infuses some of them with a Weird Tales, pulp aesthetic, is just icing.

Let’s Play White is well worth a trip to the store–along with Llewellyn’s Engines of Desire, I guarantee you’ll be hearing plenty about this when the lists are being drawn up at the end of the year.

Read This: Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny got my brothers and I through many a dark day of our youth. I wish I’d met him.

One of the greatest novels in this shadow or any other:

Lord of Light

Event: A Night of Fears

Thanks to Alex Houstoun I’ll be reading at WORD in Brooklyn, 7pm on October, 22.

From the Devil to Cosmic Horrors: A Night of Fears: “Prepare for Halloween with a night of tales of terror! Bring your flashlight and your safety blanket and settle in as readers present stories from old-world gothic to modern horror. The evening features Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing that Awaits Us All), translator Susan Bernofsky (The Black Spider), Jason Diamond of Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and others.”

I’m looking forward to a train ride into the city one night in the Lonesome October. If you’re in the neighborhood, swing by. I’m happy to sign books and chat.