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The Imago Sequence and Other Stories
The title story of this collection -- a devilishly ironic riff on H. P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's model" -- was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, while "Probiscus" was nominated for an International Horror Guild award and reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 19. In addition to his previously published work, this collection contains an original story.
280 pages, ebook
First published July 1, 2007
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About the author
Laird Barron
174 books2,867 followersLaird Barron, an expat Alaskan, is the author of several books, including The Imago Sequence and Other Stories; Swift to Chase; and Blood Standard. Currently, Barron lives in the Rondout Valley of New York State and is at work on tales about the evil that men do.
Photo credit belongs to Ardi Alspach
Agent: Janet Reid of New Leaf Literary & Media
Photo credit belongs to Ardi Alspach
Agent: Janet Reid of New Leaf Literary & Media
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 501 reviews
November 12, 2021
There is a great deal about Laird Barron's writing that I like very much. Unlike Stephen King (whose descriptive passages often resemble an exhaustive catalog of the contents of someone's pockets or purse), Barron has a poet's eye for detail and the knack for choosing the right phrase in order to fix a disgusting or disturbing detail in the reader's mind. But sometimes he also allows himself--something King would never do--to be distracted from the essential narrative by his own evocative details and phrases.
When the overwhelming preponderance of such details lead to the heart of the story--as they do in "Old Virginia," "Shiva, Open Your Eye," "Hallucigenia," and "The Imago Sequence"--the result is a superb contemporary horror story, atmospheric and chilling; when they don't, the result is atmospheric, and occasionally chilling, but also puzzling and unfocused.
All of these stories are worth reading, however, and the best are superb.
November 28, 2017
The Imago Sequence and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by Laird Barron.
This is Laird Barron's first short story collection and the fifth book of his I've read this year. I'm running out of ways to praise the man who has infected my brain like some kind of alien parasite.
Nine stories of sanity-blasting cosmic horror haunt its pages. Even though it's his first published collection, all of the Barronial bits are there: Chandler by way of Lovecraft prose, lonliness, helplessness, and things beyond mortal ken. I can't say enough about Barron's prose, a delicious but deadly poetry.
The stories themselves are a diverse mix, many touching upon his concepts of the nature of time and the Children of Old Leech. "Old Virginia" hooked me and held my attention like a vise. I was going to list the standouts but honestly the only one I wasn't ass over tea kettle for was "The Royal Zoo Is Closed". The two most noir-flavored, "Bulldozer" and "The Imago Sequence", were my favorites. There are some secrets man isn't meant to know.
Most of the stories take place in Washington State, which is now a place I don't want to visit for fear of sinister dohlmens, pylons, and alien horrors. His heroes are more Continental Op than mossback scholars, making the horrors they encounter that much worse.
I'm a latecomer to the Laird Barron party but now I'm the guest that won't leave. Got any yearbooks? Four out of five stars.
This is Laird Barron's first short story collection and the fifth book of his I've read this year. I'm running out of ways to praise the man who has infected my brain like some kind of alien parasite.
Nine stories of sanity-blasting cosmic horror haunt its pages. Even though it's his first published collection, all of the Barronial bits are there: Chandler by way of Lovecraft prose, lonliness, helplessness, and things beyond mortal ken. I can't say enough about Barron's prose, a delicious but deadly poetry.
The stories themselves are a diverse mix, many touching upon his concepts of the nature of time and the Children of Old Leech. "Old Virginia" hooked me and held my attention like a vise. I was going to list the standouts but honestly the only one I wasn't ass over tea kettle for was "The Royal Zoo Is Closed". The two most noir-flavored, "Bulldozer" and "The Imago Sequence", were my favorites. There are some secrets man isn't meant to know.
Most of the stories take place in Washington State, which is now a place I don't want to visit for fear of sinister dohlmens, pylons, and alien horrors. His heroes are more Continental Op than mossback scholars, making the horrors they encounter that much worse.
I'm a latecomer to the Laird Barron party but now I'm the guest that won't leave. Got any yearbooks? Four out of five stars.
September 13, 2013
Based on the praise this book received and and how good the author's novel was, this was a HUGE disappointment. And the tricky thing about reviewing a book that so many have obviously liked or appreciated is the second guessing...did I really just not like this that much? Well, yes. Did the book show potential? Definitely. Were the stories original? To an extent, being mostly cosmic horror pastiches and classic horror inspired tales. Was it good? It might have been, but it really really didn't sing for me. Maybe a betrayal of plebeian tastes, but can you really appreciate a story if you don't care about a single character? There is no emotional investment, just words, unpleasant things happening to unpleasant people, over and over again. Stylized to be a modern day classic, all bleak and gloom, this book kept reminding of a much acclaimed piece of art that completely fails to speak to you. Even if academically you can see how it might be perceived as good, personally it just looks like nothing much of worth or notice. This was a spectacularly laborious read that took forever and the only motivation for finishing it was OCD completist drive. It bored senseless and dragged on and on (insanely so for such a relatively slender volume) primarily due to the utter failure to engage and keep the interest. And then again, this is exactly the sort of book that someone (someone with tastes completely different from mine) might absolutely love. Opinions are like that. But personally this was just a total waste of time.
March 7, 2014
I've never forgotten my first encounters with certain horror collections, at different times in my life, that resonated with me - Lovecraft, Machen, Blackwood, Barker, T.E.D Klein, Ramsey Campbell, M John Harrison, Ligotti, Robert Aickman, among others. But they were books that transported me and made me want to write. I've come to Laird Barron relatively late, but I'm adding him to my pantheon of greats (and I don't use that word lightly). Just finished his first two single author works - THE IMAGO SEQUENCE & OCCULTATION - and they transfixed me (as did his other three books). I often read a few short stories in the evening before I crash, but on two occasions I only managed to read one story: PROCESSION OF THE BLACK SLOTH and HALLUCIGENIA. My God they're hellacious! I had to take time afterwards to mull over all I had just read and imagined, because the stories deserved an evening all to themselves. I'm marking these collection as "essential". For those yet to read them ... while stocks last, folks ...
January 9, 2020
I didn't believe in curses. I believed in alcoholism, drug addiction and paranoid delusion. Put them in a shaker and you were bound to lose your marbles now and again.
Laird Barron's first collection, early 21st century weird fiction about masculinity and the American backwoods and aging and suffering and cracks and holes and hunger. There's a strong noir influence, and his protagonists tend to be over-the-hill men cognizant of what they've lost, drinking their pain away, driven to find and face cosmic horrors because of work, because they're men of action and someone is paying them to act (or, occasionally, because they're wealthy men driven by indolence and self-destructive curiosity). His world is riddled with unknowable predators, but they dwell mostly off-page, leaving trails of putrescence and corruption for these men to follow.
The two go-to cliches when discussing Barron's work are his biography and the influence of Lovecraft, but some things are cliches for a reason, I suppose. His descriptions of his early life are readily available elsewhere (raised in the remote Alaskan wilderness, devoted evangelical mother and violent atheist father, poverty, dog-racing and -breeding) but it informs his fiction so clearly that it bears a glancing mention here again. Lovecraft, meanwhile, is also hard to avoid here, because the influence is a pretty direct one. Like Lovecraft, Barron is focused on the inhumanity of the universe at large, and his narrative arcs tend to map pretty closely to the old man's (someone bumps into something they shouldn't have, is driven to pursue it against their own self-interest, and pays for it). Barron, though, is rooted in physicality in a way that Lovecraft very much was not, both in terms of the effects of the horrors and the lived-in affect of his protagonists, and shares little of the latter's verbosity. There's also some Machen in there, in terms of nature and the ineffable-beyond-the-veil.
Like Lovecraft, Barron builds something of an ongoing mythos through these stories, most taking place in the Pacific Northwest, and several featuring recurring characters of major or minor import, although whether they're all to be understood to be taking place in the same "world" is unclear (PARALLAX offers a possible faultline in that regard).
Where Lovecraft's was unknowable, Barron's is a hungry universe - humans are not inconsequential nothings but food, and his monstrosities are not tentacled mysteries on unknown planets but parasites and predators hidden among us (and often wearing our shape). It's not a mistake that the collection is named for an insectoid lifestage, the final form of an insect after enduring the indignity and literal disintegration of a chrysalis, and many of Barron's men, after some glancing encounter with the ineffable, find themselves similarly broken down remade, and/or facing other men who have. Rather than gibbering madness, these protagonists shoulder on, headaches and all, fighting back against all odds - and losing. It's not a happy book. Think of it as cosmic noir, if you will, corrupt men facing a corrupt world, betrayed not only by their bodies and lives but by a carnivorous universe at large (and, often, by their own minds).
I thought the longer novellas here (Procession of the Black Sloth, Hallucigenia, and the title story) were the most successful, giving Barron enough room to draw out the tension from each irruption and glancing encounter. Occasionally a character slips into caricature (think of the femme fatale in PROCESSION, the academic in BULLDOZER, the agent in PROBOSCIS) but they're exceptions rather than rules, thankfully. He has a number of effects that he returns to repeatedly - mysteriously familiar figures, insects, decrepitude, the aforementioned holes and cracks running through things, corrupted audiovisual evidence, mouths as organs of both sense and devourment - but they work, technically and thematically, so why shouldn't he?
Old Virginia (2003)
It's 1959 at an MK-ULTRA research station in West Virginia examining psychic powers in a "senile crone" for Project TALLHAT (there's a lot of witch allusions here). Our protagonist is an old spook, past his prime but still on the job, and he quickly finds that he's in over his head. Ably folds in conspiracy theories, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, cosmic horror, and a firm historical grounding in the Cold War, although the dialogue is a little shaky at times.
Shiva, Open Your Eye (2001)
A very odd one, more of a prose poem than a story, (sort of) the oldest entry here, wherein an old man is visited by a PI investigating local disappearances. What begins as a seemingly-straightforward horror story (whose narrator, the old man, maintains his innocence, sort of) quickly dissolves into a lengthy confessional monologue about cosmic horror rooted in Biblical imagery and allusions("God is ever hungry"). "But-" bridges the sections throughout as kind of a pedal note. An author taking chances, for sure, although I'm not sure that I would have called it entirely successful on its own - what's most interesting about it in conversation with the other pieces is the fact that this monstrous, inhuman prophet ("His Mouth," an early example of post-human infernal disciples functioning as mouths or eyes for cosmic horrors) is one of Barron's most sympathetic protagonists, and in fact the pathetic asshole PI shares far more in common with most of his central characters.
Procession of the Black Sloth (2007)
One of my favorite horror/weird setups is where an increasingly-confused protagonist (seemingly?) faces reality crumbling around them. This is a sterling (and particularly nightmarish) example. An American industrial espionage security consultant (ie a PI for corporations) embarks on an assignment in Hong Kong, and from the flight on finds himself in a surreal nightmare, missing memories, facing an inexplicable cult, perhaps, and hallucinatory violence (by and against him). The only story here original to the volume, because of its placement in the TOC it provides the reader's first exposure to many of Barron's frequent tics: hallucinatory videos, alcoholic self-medication, Tuckerization, strangers who are vaguely recognizable, outbursts of violence, terrible old people, etc. An outlier, though, in the protagonist's relationship to the carnivorous horrors being inflicted upon him. This is, per Barron, an ode to Asian horror films, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about the subject to comment.
Bulldozer (2004)
A Pinkerton agent in a CA gold town in the late 1800s tracking down an ex-PT Barnum strongman who is meddling with forces that should not be meddled with (Belphegor, a carnivorous elder being that pops up in a few of these stories). More first person stream of consciousness than Barron usually tends to, I really enjoyed the setting and tone of this one (and the structure!) but the voice was a bit too much pastiche for me. It probably deserves a re-read.
Proboscis (2005)
A down on his luck actor accompanies his brother-in-law and another bruiser on a (failed?) bounty hunt. You won't be surprised to learn that things don't go well for them. This one, I think, featured hungry entities different from all the other hungry entities in the other stories, and was likewise more oblique than any of the others, with bleak hints toward genetics and mosquitoes and a possibly-revealing confusion between entomology and etymology. Mimicry is another element that recurs throughout the collection, but nowhere stronger than here.
Hallucigenia (2006)
A man of immense wealth and privilege, gone to seed a bit, gets stranded with his inappropriately-young wife in the middle of nowhere WA when their car breaks down. They approach a nearby barn (ignoring several indications that they should NOT approach said barn) and interrupt a ritual that's been set in place there. They pay the price (the wife moreso than the husband). Unlike most of the other stories here (or in weird fiction in general), this one starts with an explosive intrusion of weirdness and then plays out the PTSD and survivor's guilt that ensues (and, of course, the terrible visions granted to someone granted a glimpse through the veil). A modern classic of cosmic horror.
Parallax (2005)
An artist continues to muddle through life six years after his wife went missing. It was something of a cause celebre and he is widely assumed to be responsible, although the detective assigned to the case seems to be hiding some things as well. Most of the horror in this one comes directly from other human beings without being modulated through/from a supernatural entity. Ties in to the shared universe of the Belphegor stories, but gives a possible faultline for the/an "other" world as well. A bit more textually complicated than most of the other stories, with some first person stream of consciousness interspersed with interview transcripts and other materials.
The Royal Zoo is Closed (2006)
Another outlier, but a less successful one than PARALLAX, an almost Beat-esque frenetic free association of references and hallucinations (?) as a reactionary xenophobe navigates a disaster-stricken Seattle.
The Imago Sequence (2005)
A bruiser in Washington is captivated by a mysterious photograph from the 1950s that appears to show some sort of monstrous subterranean face, part of a series of three (one of which no one has ever seen) and is hired by a rich "friend" to investigate the disappearance of his rich father, which seems to be linked to a search for the other photographs (which are, of course, the Imago Sequence). This one is a tough nut to crack and boils down the themes of the collection nicely (quelle surprise). I'm always a sucker for stories of weird artworks a la the King in Yellow (although aside from that specific conceit this story has more of _The Great God Pan_ about it, about which the recurring pan pipes should probably clue you in). Genetics, atavism, insects, distorted visual records, parallel dimensions, piercing the veil... it's all here.
Hour of the Cyclops (2000)
Not in the ToC, printed in a different font, apparently not even included in some editions of the book, Barron's earliest (and weakest) story, tongue-in-cheek action pulp pastiche about a rescue effort in an Alaskan fortress and horrors borrowed straight from Lovecraft.
Laird Barron's first collection, early 21st century weird fiction about masculinity and the American backwoods and aging and suffering and cracks and holes and hunger. There's a strong noir influence, and his protagonists tend to be over-the-hill men cognizant of what they've lost, drinking their pain away, driven to find and face cosmic horrors because of work, because they're men of action and someone is paying them to act (or, occasionally, because they're wealthy men driven by indolence and self-destructive curiosity). His world is riddled with unknowable predators, but they dwell mostly off-page, leaving trails of putrescence and corruption for these men to follow.
The two go-to cliches when discussing Barron's work are his biography and the influence of Lovecraft, but some things are cliches for a reason, I suppose. His descriptions of his early life are readily available elsewhere (raised in the remote Alaskan wilderness, devoted evangelical mother and violent atheist father, poverty, dog-racing and -breeding) but it informs his fiction so clearly that it bears a glancing mention here again. Lovecraft, meanwhile, is also hard to avoid here, because the influence is a pretty direct one. Like Lovecraft, Barron is focused on the inhumanity of the universe at large, and his narrative arcs tend to map pretty closely to the old man's (someone bumps into something they shouldn't have, is driven to pursue it against their own self-interest, and pays for it). Barron, though, is rooted in physicality in a way that Lovecraft very much was not, both in terms of the effects of the horrors and the lived-in affect of his protagonists, and shares little of the latter's verbosity. There's also some Machen in there, in terms of nature and the ineffable-beyond-the-veil.
Like Lovecraft, Barron builds something of an ongoing mythos through these stories, most taking place in the Pacific Northwest, and several featuring recurring characters of major or minor import, although whether they're all to be understood to be taking place in the same "world" is unclear (PARALLAX offers a possible faultline in that regard).
Where Lovecraft's was unknowable, Barron's is a hungry universe - humans are not inconsequential nothings but food, and his monstrosities are not tentacled mysteries on unknown planets but parasites and predators hidden among us (and often wearing our shape). It's not a mistake that the collection is named for an insectoid lifestage, the final form of an insect after enduring the indignity and literal disintegration of a chrysalis, and many of Barron's men, after some glancing encounter with the ineffable, find themselves similarly broken down remade, and/or facing other men who have. Rather than gibbering madness, these protagonists shoulder on, headaches and all, fighting back against all odds - and losing. It's not a happy book. Think of it as cosmic noir, if you will, corrupt men facing a corrupt world, betrayed not only by their bodies and lives but by a carnivorous universe at large (and, often, by their own minds).
I thought the longer novellas here (Procession of the Black Sloth, Hallucigenia, and the title story) were the most successful, giving Barron enough room to draw out the tension from each irruption and glancing encounter. Occasionally a character slips into caricature (think of the femme fatale in PROCESSION, the academic in BULLDOZER, the agent in PROBOSCIS) but they're exceptions rather than rules, thankfully. He has a number of effects that he returns to repeatedly - mysteriously familiar figures, insects, decrepitude, the aforementioned holes and cracks running through things, corrupted audiovisual evidence, mouths as organs of both sense and devourment - but they work, technically and thematically, so why shouldn't he?
Old Virginia (2003)
It's 1959 at an MK-ULTRA research station in West Virginia examining psychic powers in a "senile crone" for Project TALLHAT (there's a lot of witch allusions here). Our protagonist is an old spook, past his prime but still on the job, and he quickly finds that he's in over his head. Ably folds in conspiracy theories, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, cosmic horror, and a firm historical grounding in the Cold War, although the dialogue is a little shaky at times.
Shiva, Open Your Eye (2001)
A very odd one, more of a prose poem than a story, (sort of) the oldest entry here, wherein an old man is visited by a PI investigating local disappearances. What begins as a seemingly-straightforward horror story (whose narrator, the old man, maintains his innocence, sort of) quickly dissolves into a lengthy confessional monologue about cosmic horror rooted in Biblical imagery and allusions("God is ever hungry"). "But-" bridges the sections throughout as kind of a pedal note. An author taking chances, for sure, although I'm not sure that I would have called it entirely successful on its own - what's most interesting about it in conversation with the other pieces is the fact that this monstrous, inhuman prophet ("His Mouth," an early example of post-human infernal disciples functioning as mouths or eyes for cosmic horrors) is one of Barron's most sympathetic protagonists, and in fact the pathetic asshole PI shares far more in common with most of his central characters.
Procession of the Black Sloth (2007)
One of my favorite horror/weird setups is where an increasingly-confused protagonist (seemingly?) faces reality crumbling around them. This is a sterling (and particularly nightmarish) example. An American industrial espionage security consultant (ie a PI for corporations) embarks on an assignment in Hong Kong, and from the flight on finds himself in a surreal nightmare, missing memories, facing an inexplicable cult, perhaps, and hallucinatory violence (by and against him). The only story here original to the volume, because of its placement in the TOC it provides the reader's first exposure to many of Barron's frequent tics: hallucinatory videos, alcoholic self-medication, Tuckerization, strangers who are vaguely recognizable, outbursts of violence, terrible old people, etc. An outlier, though, in the protagonist's relationship to the carnivorous horrors being inflicted upon him. This is, per Barron, an ode to Asian horror films, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about the subject to comment.
Bulldozer (2004)
A Pinkerton agent in a CA gold town in the late 1800s tracking down an ex-PT Barnum strongman who is meddling with forces that should not be meddled with (Belphegor, a carnivorous elder being that pops up in a few of these stories). More first person stream of consciousness than Barron usually tends to, I really enjoyed the setting and tone of this one (and the structure!) but the voice was a bit too much pastiche for me. It probably deserves a re-read.
Proboscis (2005)
A down on his luck actor accompanies his brother-in-law and another bruiser on a (failed?) bounty hunt. You won't be surprised to learn that things don't go well for them. This one, I think, featured hungry entities different from all the other hungry entities in the other stories, and was likewise more oblique than any of the others, with bleak hints toward genetics and mosquitoes and a possibly-revealing confusion between entomology and etymology. Mimicry is another element that recurs throughout the collection, but nowhere stronger than here.
Hallucigenia (2006)
A man of immense wealth and privilege, gone to seed a bit, gets stranded with his inappropriately-young wife in the middle of nowhere WA when their car breaks down. They approach a nearby barn (ignoring several indications that they should NOT approach said barn) and interrupt a ritual that's been set in place there. They pay the price (the wife moreso than the husband). Unlike most of the other stories here (or in weird fiction in general), this one starts with an explosive intrusion of weirdness and then plays out the PTSD and survivor's guilt that ensues (and, of course, the terrible visions granted to someone granted a glimpse through the veil). A modern classic of cosmic horror.
Parallax (2005)
An artist continues to muddle through life six years after his wife went missing. It was something of a cause celebre and he is widely assumed to be responsible, although the detective assigned to the case seems to be hiding some things as well. Most of the horror in this one comes directly from other human beings without being modulated through/from a supernatural entity. Ties in to the shared universe of the Belphegor stories, but gives a possible faultline for the/an "other" world as well. A bit more textually complicated than most of the other stories, with some first person stream of consciousness interspersed with interview transcripts and other materials.
The Royal Zoo is Closed (2006)
Another outlier, but a less successful one than PARALLAX, an almost Beat-esque frenetic free association of references and hallucinations (?) as a reactionary xenophobe navigates a disaster-stricken Seattle.
The Imago Sequence (2005)
A bruiser in Washington is captivated by a mysterious photograph from the 1950s that appears to show some sort of monstrous subterranean face, part of a series of three (one of which no one has ever seen) and is hired by a rich "friend" to investigate the disappearance of his rich father, which seems to be linked to a search for the other photographs (which are, of course, the Imago Sequence). This one is a tough nut to crack and boils down the themes of the collection nicely (quelle surprise). I'm always a sucker for stories of weird artworks a la the King in Yellow (although aside from that specific conceit this story has more of _The Great God Pan_ about it, about which the recurring pan pipes should probably clue you in). Genetics, atavism, insects, distorted visual records, parallel dimensions, piercing the veil... it's all here.
Hour of the Cyclops (2000)
Not in the ToC, printed in a different font, apparently not even included in some editions of the book, Barron's earliest (and weakest) story, tongue-in-cheek action pulp pastiche about a rescue effort in an Alaskan fortress and horrors borrowed straight from Lovecraft.
February 9, 2025
I don’t write reviews.
“The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.”
Shiva, Open Your Eye
Barron writes like a man on fire. A man who has something important to tell you and not much time. But he won’t skimp on the details of the telling and he won’t rush the process. He’s the guy in a CA Smith story with a parasite in his brain, who just wants to warn you. Don’t follow the path I’ve taken. Behold! There are worse things than death.
I enjoy the unreality of reality in his tales. Protagonists don’t know if they are going mad or finally seeing things for what they truly are.
“Waiting for cars to drive past so I could count them, I had an epiphany. I reealized the shabby buildings were cardboard and the people milling here and there at opportune junctures were macaroni and glue. Dull blue construction paper sky and cotton ball clouds. And I wasn’t really who I thought of myself as - I was an ant left over from a picnic raid, awaiting some petulant child-god to put his boot down on my pathetic diorama existence.”
Proboscis
We, of course, know that there’s madness in truth. No separation of the two. The future is arriving and finished all at once and again and again. Time is a ring, after all….
“The glitterball pulses. It’s the white exit of a black entrance, mouth of an event horizon. The hole at the heart of everything. In moments it has filled all space, has compressed all time to a point. The possibilities are infinite.”
Parallax
Book 3 - Laird & I Will Follow: A Laird Barron Retrospective
“The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.”
Shiva, Open Your Eye
Barron writes like a man on fire. A man who has something important to tell you and not much time. But he won’t skimp on the details of the telling and he won’t rush the process. He’s the guy in a CA Smith story with a parasite in his brain, who just wants to warn you. Don’t follow the path I’ve taken. Behold! There are worse things than death.
I enjoy the unreality of reality in his tales. Protagonists don’t know if they are going mad or finally seeing things for what they truly are.
“Waiting for cars to drive past so I could count them, I had an epiphany. I reealized the shabby buildings were cardboard and the people milling here and there at opportune junctures were macaroni and glue. Dull blue construction paper sky and cotton ball clouds. And I wasn’t really who I thought of myself as - I was an ant left over from a picnic raid, awaiting some petulant child-god to put his boot down on my pathetic diorama existence.”
Proboscis
We, of course, know that there’s madness in truth. No separation of the two. The future is arriving and finished all at once and again and again. Time is a ring, after all….
“The glitterball pulses. It’s the white exit of a black entrance, mouth of an event horizon. The hole at the heart of everything. In moments it has filled all space, has compressed all time to a point. The possibilities are infinite.”
Parallax
Book 3 - Laird & I Will Follow: A Laird Barron Retrospective
January 26, 2010
'Bliss is ephemeral; true for anyone or anything. The oceans have been decimated several times in the last billion years. Sterile waters in a clay bowl. Life returned unbidden on each occasion. The world slumbers, twitches and transforms. From the jelly, lizards crawled around the fetid swamps eating one another and dying, and being replaced by something else. Again, again, again, until you reach the inevitable conclusion of sky-rises, nuclear submarines, orbiting sattelites, and Homo Sapiens fornicating the earth. God swipes His Hand across Creation, it changes shape and thrives. A cycle, indeed a cycle, and not a pleasant one if you are cursed with a brain and the wonder of what the cosmic gloaming shall hold for you.'
- Shiva, Open Your Eye
Barron gazes long into the cosmic gloaming in the course of the short stories assembled in The Imago Sequence, his first short story collection. What he sees is a doomed, oblivious race, scuttling about in chaotic orbits, attending parties, chasing thrills, living lives, unaware that something larger lurks behind the scenes, waiting to devour everything.
Shiva, Open Your Eye is the oldest story here, and in some ways the most rudimentary. After a short scene-setting introduction we are plunged into an extended monologue from an ancient consciousness that exists merely to destroy and devour. This is at once the most bare and the most telling story in the collection; it sets the stage, I think, lets us know what kind of a ride we are in for.
Elsewhere, Barron indulges an obsessive eye for surface detail, piling nuance after nuance up in a sort of phantasmagoria that embraces the quotidian with the same brio with which it trots out the horrific. The story The Royal Zoo Is Closed is nearly all detail - a kaleidoscopic view of the apocalypse that resolves into a Beckettian stalemate for its impotent protagonist.
In between these two extremes, Barron tells us a variety of tales that partake of the surface conventions of noir, with their tough-guy protagonist, investigative thrust, settings that are either seedy, glamorous or a mix of both, and a certain dry, wry tone of voice. There's a Pinkerton detective chasing a circus freak who has stolen a tome of ancient terrors across the old West; a failed wrestler and strongarm man who is sent to track down a missing millionaire and the last photo in a sequence that purports to show the face of pure, primal evil (or is it ultimate, bind Godhead?); a corporate spy who tracks shady dealings in Asia and winds up in a very nasty Buddhist hell and so on.
These are men of the world, not Lovecraft's wimpy scholars. They're tough customers who can swing a punch and take one too. They live in worlds where crazy stuff of the more mundane, violent variety is common. And then, the other sort of crazy stuff - the bad, supernatural sort - filters through.
Barron conjures up a baroque filigree of disjointed yet telling horrific detail overlaid on the very real world his protagonists inhabit. There are vast entities, primal, blind predators lurking behind the surfaces he so lovingly describes, and the surfaces crumble away to reveal the horrors within in story after story.
Most of his stories are loosely linked by characters, phrases or concepts. These tales are largely set in the USA and can be read as an interlinked series if you want to. Procession Of The Black Sloth stands apart from these with its Asian setting and retributive rather than merely all-consuming terrors; it may represent a new departure for Barron. Either way, I'm, convinced that here is a very original stylist, a sort of richly patterned, sensory-overloading complement to Ligotti's more austere, tenebrous fiction. A writer who evokes a truly cosmic sense of unease.
'One final kernel of wisdom gained through the abomination of time and service. A pearl to leave gleaming on this empty shore; safely assured that no one shall come by to retrieve it and puzzle over the contradiction. Men are afraid of the devil, but there is no devil, just me and I do as I am bid. It is God that should turn their bowels to soup. Whatever God is, He, or It, created us for amusement. It's too obvious. Just as He created the prehistoric sharks, the dinosaurs and the humble mechanism that is a crocodile. And Venus fly traps, and black widow spiders, and human beings. Just as He created a world where every organism survives by rending a weaker organism. Where procreation is an imperative, a leech's anesthetic against agony and death and disease that accompany the sticky congress of mating. A sticky world, because God dwells in a dark and humid place. A world of appetite, for God is ever hungry.'
- Shiva, Open Your Eye
January 21, 2013
Very much a 4.5 on the star-rating chart; it is rare I find an anthology of stories where I like the bulk of the entire collection. This time there was only a couple that just didn't do it for me, otherwise, a most awesome weird fiction/horror read.
This is actually a reread for me; I first read this in 2007 when it was published, but I recently felt the need for reading horror and really couldn't remember much about this one, so I pulled it off my shelf. After finishing it this time, it came to me that I must not have really put any effort into it during my first go, because frankly, these stories are absolutely unforgettable. The reader is taken off guard, thrown into that sense of unease from the first page, and with only minor respites between stories, is for the most part kept off kilter until the last sentence of the book. The Imago Sequence more than exceeded my expectations in terms of the fear quotient -- that feeling I get when I read something that keeps a) the hairs on the back of my neck bristling, b) my stomach in knots, and c) the feeling of looming dread alive and well throughout. Add in a writing style where horror meets literature, and well, they just don't get much better than this, folks. Seriously.
Contained in The Imago Sequence are nine stories, three of which (*) are so well written and so incredibly creepy that I'm still thinking about them two days later.
1. "Old Virginia," the tale of a CIA agent assigned to a detail in the wilds of West Virginia, kept in the dark about an MK-ULTRA project until it's too late;
2. "Shiva, Open Your Eye," a short but powerful entry in this collection. A presence whose sole task lies well beyond human comprehension takes on human form, leaving bodies in its wake. Read this one carefully -- it sets the stage for most of the stories that follow.
3.* "Procession of the Black Sloth," which is one my favorites in this book, is so unsettling that I had to read it twice. Set in Hong Kong, with a variety of creepy characters, a man is sent to uncover who is at the root of corporate espionage, and ends up uncovering his true destiny. Much of "Procession of the Black Sloth" is viewed via scenes aired on televisions, in photos or other media, and it really reminded me of a lot of the Japanese and Korean horror flicks I watch when my husband's away that keep me up all night afterwards listening to the creaks in the house. This one had much the same effect -- I had to set the book aside for a day before I could continue.
4."Bulldozer," a story set in the wild west where a gun-wielding, tough-guy Pinkerton operative has been sent on a mission by PT Barnum to recover a stolen Necronomicon-type tome and runs into serial murders that are part of a hideous ritual. I really didn't appreciate this one until reading later stories in this book, but it was good and frightening all the same.
5. "Proboscis," in which an actor who's seen better days tags along with some bounty hunters on a mission to snag a serial killer and realizes that there are devourers among us...
6.* "Hallucigenia." This is another one of the entries in this novel that provides an off-the-charts goosebump-producing experience as you read. A wealthy man who's been around and his beautiful, young wife are out on a drive when their car suddenly breaks down; while it's being fixed the wife decides to go shoot some photos and comes across an old barn. He follows and out of nowhere his wife is seriously injured, left with a strange crack in her head that refuses to heal. As he's trying to make sense of what's happened at that barn, he spares no expense in tracking down anyone connected with the place. That day, in more than one way, was a life-changer; "Hallucigenia" provides several OMG moments of sheer delightful fright.
7. "Parallax," which runs more along the lines of science fiction than the others, where a man whose wife suddenly and out of nowhere goes missing tells the story of the aftermath of her disappearance; the payoff comes at the very end of this story and will leave you stymied. I liked this one -- and like many of the other stories, it demanded an instant reread.
8. "The Royal Zoo is Closed," is probably my least favorite story in the collection; that doesn't mean it's bad but I just felt that the others were far, far better.
9. * "The Imago Sequence," another of my favorites and probably the creepiest of them all, has as its main character a noir-type protagonist who is hired to find out what happened to someone who went missing, and to find two of a set of three photographs that taken together are known as the Imago Sequence. The first one strikes some inner chord that is disturbing enough to the protagonist that he has to see the others, especially the last one. Truly one of the major highlights of this book, this story held me in its grip and didn't let up for a second -- and I'm still thinking about it.
There are a number of things that I loved about this book. First, an interesting aspect about all these stories as a whole is that they point thematically in several of the same directions: a) there are the tough-guy characters who in their own realities can more take care of themselves in particularly knotty and extreme situations yet who eventually become putty in the hands of cosmic forces well beyond their control and their comprehension; b) said forces are often described by Barron as mouths with appetites and he uses holes and cracks as symbols and metaphors that transverse all of these stories; c) the idea that our human need to know is often responsible for our own downfall resonates clearly -- as one character in "Bulldozer" notes, "Ignorance is all the blessing we apes can hope for," but the way Barron develops his characters here leaves little room for passive acceptance among them -- these people want to try to get a grip on understanding what's happening. Finally, d) there's a cyclical feel to a number of these stories, as well as the sense that some of them are connected across time and space. Another reason that this book is such a winner is that Barron doesn't have to lay out scenes of explicit, slasher-film type gore to make his stories work -- he is one of the most gifted horror writers I've read. He is incredibly talented in using prose that takes readers to the edge of the worst that can happen and leaving them dangling to experience the fear, panic and ultimately the hopelessness that abides there. He can create a most palpable sense of doom and dread without having to resort to cheapness, which sadly I've found exists in a lot of horror writing and which is why I rarely read much of it any more.
There are a number of very eloquent reviews of this book on line; for my part, all I can say is that I am in awe of Barron's talent as a writer. The outright uneasiness and the sense of being off-kilter I felt throughout this novel speaks to how deeply I was drawn into the worlds he's created. I had to go back to read several stories a second time to make sure that what I'd just read was indeed the case, a number of these stories gave me an unstoppable case of the willies to the point where I had to put the book down and walk away for a while, and the fact that I'm still thinking of a couple of them two days after finishing is the icing on the cake of how very well written and downright creepy this book is. The Imago Sequence is definitely a no-miss in the odd world of weird fiction.
This is actually a reread for me; I first read this in 2007 when it was published, but I recently felt the need for reading horror and really couldn't remember much about this one, so I pulled it off my shelf. After finishing it this time, it came to me that I must not have really put any effort into it during my first go, because frankly, these stories are absolutely unforgettable. The reader is taken off guard, thrown into that sense of unease from the first page, and with only minor respites between stories, is for the most part kept off kilter until the last sentence of the book. The Imago Sequence more than exceeded my expectations in terms of the fear quotient -- that feeling I get when I read something that keeps a) the hairs on the back of my neck bristling, b) my stomach in knots, and c) the feeling of looming dread alive and well throughout. Add in a writing style where horror meets literature, and well, they just don't get much better than this, folks. Seriously.
Contained in The Imago Sequence are nine stories, three of which (*) are so well written and so incredibly creepy that I'm still thinking about them two days later.
1. "Old Virginia," the tale of a CIA agent assigned to a detail in the wilds of West Virginia, kept in the dark about an MK-ULTRA project until it's too late;
2. "Shiva, Open Your Eye," a short but powerful entry in this collection. A presence whose sole task lies well beyond human comprehension takes on human form, leaving bodies in its wake. Read this one carefully -- it sets the stage for most of the stories that follow.
3.* "Procession of the Black Sloth," which is one my favorites in this book, is so unsettling that I had to read it twice. Set in Hong Kong, with a variety of creepy characters, a man is sent to uncover who is at the root of corporate espionage, and ends up uncovering his true destiny. Much of "Procession of the Black Sloth" is viewed via scenes aired on televisions, in photos or other media, and it really reminded me of a lot of the Japanese and Korean horror flicks I watch when my husband's away that keep me up all night afterwards listening to the creaks in the house. This one had much the same effect -- I had to set the book aside for a day before I could continue.
4."Bulldozer," a story set in the wild west where a gun-wielding, tough-guy Pinkerton operative has been sent on a mission by PT Barnum to recover a stolen Necronomicon-type tome and runs into serial murders that are part of a hideous ritual. I really didn't appreciate this one until reading later stories in this book, but it was good and frightening all the same.
5. "Proboscis," in which an actor who's seen better days tags along with some bounty hunters on a mission to snag a serial killer and realizes that there are devourers among us...
6.* "Hallucigenia." This is another one of the entries in this novel that provides an off-the-charts goosebump-producing experience as you read. A wealthy man who's been around and his beautiful, young wife are out on a drive when their car suddenly breaks down; while it's being fixed the wife decides to go shoot some photos and comes across an old barn. He follows and out of nowhere his wife is seriously injured, left with a strange crack in her head that refuses to heal. As he's trying to make sense of what's happened at that barn, he spares no expense in tracking down anyone connected with the place. That day, in more than one way, was a life-changer; "Hallucigenia" provides several OMG moments of sheer delightful fright.
7. "Parallax," which runs more along the lines of science fiction than the others, where a man whose wife suddenly and out of nowhere goes missing tells the story of the aftermath of her disappearance; the payoff comes at the very end of this story and will leave you stymied. I liked this one -- and like many of the other stories, it demanded an instant reread.
8. "The Royal Zoo is Closed," is probably my least favorite story in the collection; that doesn't mean it's bad but I just felt that the others were far, far better.
9. * "The Imago Sequence," another of my favorites and probably the creepiest of them all, has as its main character a noir-type protagonist who is hired to find out what happened to someone who went missing, and to find two of a set of three photographs that taken together are known as the Imago Sequence. The first one strikes some inner chord that is disturbing enough to the protagonist that he has to see the others, especially the last one. Truly one of the major highlights of this book, this story held me in its grip and didn't let up for a second -- and I'm still thinking about it.
There are a number of things that I loved about this book. First, an interesting aspect about all these stories as a whole is that they point thematically in several of the same directions: a) there are the tough-guy characters who in their own realities can more take care of themselves in particularly knotty and extreme situations yet who eventually become putty in the hands of cosmic forces well beyond their control and their comprehension; b) said forces are often described by Barron as mouths with appetites and he uses holes and cracks as symbols and metaphors that transverse all of these stories; c) the idea that our human need to know is often responsible for our own downfall resonates clearly -- as one character in "Bulldozer" notes, "Ignorance is all the blessing we apes can hope for," but the way Barron develops his characters here leaves little room for passive acceptance among them -- these people want to try to get a grip on understanding what's happening. Finally, d) there's a cyclical feel to a number of these stories, as well as the sense that some of them are connected across time and space. Another reason that this book is such a winner is that Barron doesn't have to lay out scenes of explicit, slasher-film type gore to make his stories work -- he is one of the most gifted horror writers I've read. He is incredibly talented in using prose that takes readers to the edge of the worst that can happen and leaving them dangling to experience the fear, panic and ultimately the hopelessness that abides there. He can create a most palpable sense of doom and dread without having to resort to cheapness, which sadly I've found exists in a lot of horror writing and which is why I rarely read much of it any more.
There are a number of very eloquent reviews of this book on line; for my part, all I can say is that I am in awe of Barron's talent as a writer. The outright uneasiness and the sense of being off-kilter I felt throughout this novel speaks to how deeply I was drawn into the worlds he's created. I had to go back to read several stories a second time to make sure that what I'd just read was indeed the case, a number of these stories gave me an unstoppable case of the willies to the point where I had to put the book down and walk away for a while, and the fact that I'm still thinking of a couple of them two days after finishing is the icing on the cake of how very well written and downright creepy this book is. The Imago Sequence is definitely a no-miss in the odd world of weird fiction.
June 14, 2018
I discovered Laird Barron's work last October, when I read "The Croning" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and fell in love with his elegant and haunting work; obviously, I immediately got a copy of all his short story collections as soon as I had the chance. My favorite kind of horror is the subtle and cosmic kind, that works its way slowly into my mind as I read, like a really good peaty scotch that I don't notice I've had too much of until I get up. And that's kind of the best way to read this short story collection: slowly, paying close attention to the strange things happening on the page.
And cheers to Barron, because those stories are solid cosmic horror, exploring the things that creep at the very edge of the corner of our eyes, that shouldn’t be there but somehow are, and threaten his characters’ sanity. To be fair, they don’t start out being ordinary people: bounty hunters, corporate investigators and black ops military – people who are not, by nature, likely to look the other way, but who will dig and dig until they have answers - struggle with isolation, paranoia, loneliness and insanity. Barron is not reinventing the wheel that Lovecraft set in motion; he is refining it, making it contemporary and palpably familiar.
The stories are not all perfect, but they are all interesting: the world you get a glimpse of does not leave you mind easily, it lingers in the corners. The atmosphere is thick and heavy, and yet subtle and elegant. You also see a certain interconnectedness between the vignettes; a few words here and there set a trail of common elements, some of which link these stories back to the wonderfully creepy world of “The Croning”. “Old Virginia”, “The Procession of the Black Sloth”, “Hallucigenia” and "The Imago Sequence" were particular stand-outs for me, their almost dream-like logic making them especially disturbing.
This is really a wonderful collection and I look forward to the other waiting on my shelf.
And cheers to Barron, because those stories are solid cosmic horror, exploring the things that creep at the very edge of the corner of our eyes, that shouldn’t be there but somehow are, and threaten his characters’ sanity. To be fair, they don’t start out being ordinary people: bounty hunters, corporate investigators and black ops military – people who are not, by nature, likely to look the other way, but who will dig and dig until they have answers - struggle with isolation, paranoia, loneliness and insanity. Barron is not reinventing the wheel that Lovecraft set in motion; he is refining it, making it contemporary and palpably familiar.
The stories are not all perfect, but they are all interesting: the world you get a glimpse of does not leave you mind easily, it lingers in the corners. The atmosphere is thick and heavy, and yet subtle and elegant. You also see a certain interconnectedness between the vignettes; a few words here and there set a trail of common elements, some of which link these stories back to the wonderfully creepy world of “The Croning”. “Old Virginia”, “The Procession of the Black Sloth”, “Hallucigenia” and "The Imago Sequence" were particular stand-outs for me, their almost dream-like logic making them especially disturbing.
This is really a wonderful collection and I look forward to the other waiting on my shelf.
August 16, 2015
Laird Barron is essential reading in the horror genre, case closed.
I dig his style. Let's be clear folks, this is not a fast-paced slasher, bogeyman-in-the-closet, call it like you see it type of writing, it's layered and poetic, so you will have to work. And that's fine with me, as a reader, because the payoff is exceptional. It is like one of those fuzzy white noise pictures that takes a while to get into focus but then an amazing picture rises to the surface.
Barron brings his characters into surroundings that are fully alive, if not a little diabolical. The language is beautiful.
From PROBOSCIS - "Sunrise forged a pale seam above the distant mountains. We were rolling through certified boondocks, thumping across rickety wooden bridges that could've been thrown down around the Civil War. On either side of busted up two-lane blacktop were overgrown fields and hills dense with maples and poplar. Scotch broom reared on lean stalks, fire-yellow heads lolling hungrily. Scotch broom was Washington's rebuttal to kudzu. It was quietly everywhere, feeding in the cracks of the earth." Beautiful imagery, and thematically on point. The world we know it is old and will be taken back and overrun once we're gone. Each tale is a very real glimpse of the mortality of civilization.
OLD VIRGINIA was a great start to the collection. An old CIA agent finally meets his doom, curiosity leading to unremitting horror. The last few sentences were chilling.
SHIVA, OPEN YOUR EYE was a tale told by ancient evil itself. Well, more like ancient chaos than ancient evil, but this story is colder and more bare than the rest. PROCESSION OF THE BLACK SLOTH picks up nicely where SHIVA's undertones leave off. We begin, as readers, trying to make connections between the stories...what's going on here?
With BULLDOZER and HALLUCIGENIA, we begin to see the connections of Barron's universe, the spread of the dark stuff that is slowly eating our world and probably countless worlds like ours. PARALLAX suggests even more about the situation. The titular tale, THE IMAGO SEQUENCE, is damn frightening. The Imago Sequence is a series of 3 photographs of something unspeakably evil, taken by a traveler in an unknown parts of the world, and passed down from many collectors who all met bad ends or simply disappeared. Our narrator is tracking the photos down, and their mysterious owner, as he loses his sanity. Barron captures that Lovecraftian idea of the weak primate minding losing all semblance of itself once its exposed to even a glimpse of the true evil nature of the ancient universe, but with much better writing than Lovecraft himself.
In the end, Barron's message seems to be: We are all lost, or will be soon, nothing but ants fighting uphill with meaningless purpose, until the moment the sticky cosmic darkness pulls us in and eats us up. It. Is. Some. Deep. Shit.
Cheers.
April 3, 2019
Barron is very quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. I cannot believe it took me so long to pick up his books. This is the second collection I've read from him so far, and I'm going to have to go on a spending spree to get more from him. This is fantastic writing. This is writing that I crave and absolutely fall head over heels in love with. Barron's prose is brilliant, and the plots of his stories are equally as enchanting. And dark. Don't pick up Barron if you are looking for sunshine and happy endings. Pick up this collection if you want to explore the pits of inky black insanity.
Even though it's the third story in the collection, I'm going to mention Procession of the Black Sloth first. This story actually gave me nightmares. That never happens to me! It's such an odd, disturbing, fever dream of a story, and I read it before going to bed. And it squirmed into my subconscious and gave some really messed up dreams. I'm not the type of person to wake up from a nightmare gasping and sweating and freaked out. I understand that it's just my mind dumping thoughts and images while I sleep, so I actually thought it was pretty cool that a story gave me nightmares. That's how effective Barron's writing can be.
Old Virginia is the first story in the collection and it defies explanation just like most of the stories in this book. Often I try to tell my husband about a story or a book I'm reading, and when I tried to tell him about Procession of the Black Sloth I realized it's really hard to condense or relate a story from Barron. You need to read it to fully grasp it. The end of Old Virginia, like most of the stories in this collection, is just crazy perfect. I knew right away that I was in for one hell of a ride.
I'm not going to go into each story and rehash them, but all of them have a cosmic fever dream vibe that sticks with you long after you have finished reading. Each page, each sentence is a delight, and I love to revel in the dark absurdity of Barron's stories. Read this collection. And Occultation too. I promise if you love horror, and especially cosmic horror, you will not be disappointed.
Even though it's the third story in the collection, I'm going to mention Procession of the Black Sloth first. This story actually gave me nightmares. That never happens to me! It's such an odd, disturbing, fever dream of a story, and I read it before going to bed. And it squirmed into my subconscious and gave some really messed up dreams. I'm not the type of person to wake up from a nightmare gasping and sweating and freaked out. I understand that it's just my mind dumping thoughts and images while I sleep, so I actually thought it was pretty cool that a story gave me nightmares. That's how effective Barron's writing can be.
Old Virginia is the first story in the collection and it defies explanation just like most of the stories in this book. Often I try to tell my husband about a story or a book I'm reading, and when I tried to tell him about Procession of the Black Sloth I realized it's really hard to condense or relate a story from Barron. You need to read it to fully grasp it. The end of Old Virginia, like most of the stories in this collection, is just crazy perfect. I knew right away that I was in for one hell of a ride.
I'm not going to go into each story and rehash them, but all of them have a cosmic fever dream vibe that sticks with you long after you have finished reading. Each page, each sentence is a delight, and I love to revel in the dark absurdity of Barron's stories. Read this collection. And Occultation too. I promise if you love horror, and especially cosmic horror, you will not be disappointed.
September 12, 2025
Barron is gifted and unique, and the rest is a matter of taste, as is everything, which makes these reviews and all human opinion subjective BS, which is downright depressing, or so Laird might have us think...
Two particular stories, Bulldozer and The Procession of the Black Sloth, hit you in the gut. Others were disappointing.
But without question and rightly so, Barron has received much acclaim, and much of this collection is spellbinding.
The build-ups of some tales don't always lead to fitting payoffs. This is most evident in the title story. Still, the hard-boiled characters are consistently well-drawn.
A couple of duds are utterly forgettable. Barron's style is not. His authentic vernaculars and arcane diction help create menacing tones.
Without the horror, Laird Barron may have become a Raymond Chandler type, because his private dicks are intriguing. Add in the weird and you've got some interesting stuff.
Two particular stories, Bulldozer and The Procession of the Black Sloth, hit you in the gut. Others were disappointing.
But without question and rightly so, Barron has received much acclaim, and much of this collection is spellbinding.
The build-ups of some tales don't always lead to fitting payoffs. This is most evident in the title story. Still, the hard-boiled characters are consistently well-drawn.
A couple of duds are utterly forgettable. Barron's style is not. His authentic vernaculars and arcane diction help create menacing tones.
Without the horror, Laird Barron may have become a Raymond Chandler type, because his private dicks are intriguing. Add in the weird and you've got some interesting stuff.
June 7, 2016
I've tried really hard to develop an appreciation for Laird Barron. I started with The Light is the Darkness and found my expectations outweighed what I was presented with. I've also read The Croning and considered it an overly wordy and bloated novel propped up by a great central concept. So I hoped getting a hold of one of his collections of shorter works might prove to be the gold that most everybody else has seemed to find when panning through Barron's works.
Sadly, The Imago Collection was more of the same for me. Overly long tales filled with unnecessary detail that, in most cases, tended to lose me before the half way mark of the story. The titular tale was the best of these, but placed as it was at the conclusion of the book, I had genuine trouble investing in the tale by the time I got to it. The rest of the stories amount to the same basic premise: Flawed characters becoming aware of something greater than themselves operating on the edge of human knowledge/space/time, usually covered up by other, more knowledgeable people with nefarious intentions, and ultimately coming to an unpleasant end.
In the end, the only reason I rated this one higher than 1.5 stars was because of how accomplished Barron is as a writer in a technical sense. His prose, whilst less than engaging to me, was extremely polished and beyond what most writers - myself most definitely included - could ever hope to emulate.
2 Grand Conspiracies for The Imago Sequence.
Sadly, The Imago Collection was more of the same for me. Overly long tales filled with unnecessary detail that, in most cases, tended to lose me before the half way mark of the story. The titular tale was the best of these, but placed as it was at the conclusion of the book, I had genuine trouble investing in the tale by the time I got to it. The rest of the stories amount to the same basic premise: Flawed characters becoming aware of something greater than themselves operating on the edge of human knowledge/space/time, usually covered up by other, more knowledgeable people with nefarious intentions, and ultimately coming to an unpleasant end.
In the end, the only reason I rated this one higher than 1.5 stars was because of how accomplished Barron is as a writer in a technical sense. His prose, whilst less than engaging to me, was extremely polished and beyond what most writers - myself most definitely included - could ever hope to emulate.
2 Grand Conspiracies for The Imago Sequence.
November 17, 2021
It's been over a week and I still have not been able to put together an intelligent review of this book. Several attempts have been utter disasters. I'm am having a difficult time expressing exactly why this book was so special to me. To me, Barron really conveys a sense of atmosphere or heaviness with his writing. There are times when it is difficult to determine whether the scene is dream, reality, nightmare or something in between. It's almost like looking in a cracked mirror, things don't quite match up, something is just a little off. At times horrific but more often subtle, Barron is not really about gore and splatter much more psychological and cosmic. I'm already planning a re-read, I loved it that much.
August 28, 2014
This is the best horror book I have read for some time. Laird Barron is like a horror poet and his use of words is just incredible. All the stories were great, but I really loved "Bulldozer" which is a wild west horror story (how cool!). I also loved "The Imago Sequence" I found it very...absorbing. (chuckle, sorry) I know this is kind of like doing things in reverse, but after reading Barron I really want to check out Lovecraft!
October 11, 2009
If you like H.P. Lovecraft and his modern successors like Caitlin Kiernan, then you'll probably like Barron. Though, to be sure, he only intermittently captures Lovecraft's creepiness or Kiernan's lyricism. In the end it all comes down to "did I enjoy reading these stories"? And, for the most part, the answer would be "yes."
"Old Virginia" - Set in the most paranoid days of the Cold War, a team of CIA operatives guards a couple of scientists and a mysterious patient (Old Virginia) in an isolated cabin. Old Virginia is a gateway for an ancient, primordial entity, and as with most CIA operations things rapidly get out of the agency's control.
"Shiva, Open Your Eye" - Another tale about a representative of a primordial power whose existence and purpose is largely unguessed (and thankfully so) by humanity told from the point of view of the representative.
"Procession of the Black Sloth" - One of the nice things about a good Lovecraftian-style tale is that you are never quite sure whether the events are real or just figments of a disintegrating mind. So in this tale we have the recollections of Royce, who's sent to investigate a seemingly mundane affair of corporate skullduggery but winds up caught in the coils of a demonic cult.
"Bulldozer" - A lot of Barron's characters in this collection are detectives or two-bit thugs hired to investigate "normal" cases but who invariably wind up discovering things that claim life and soul - as is the case in this story about a Pinkerton detective chasing down a serial killer.
"Proboscis" - A story about entities sucking out lives.
"Hallucigenia" - Probably the most "Lovecraftian" of the stories: A degenerate white-trash family straight out of Lovecraft's New England, a creature that resembles Yog-Sothoth or the Dunwich Horror, and portals opening out into the Void. It's also my favorite.
"Parallax" - An interestingly twisty tale about a man suspected of murdering his wife when she disappears, a serial-killer ex-cop, and quantum mechanics.
"The Royal Zoo Is Closed" - This was the least satisfying tale of the bunch. A stream of consciousness ramble, a style I always find hard going.
"The Imago Sequence" - My second favorite of the collection. Reminiscent of Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" and Kiernan's Threshold it also includes a do-it-yourself trephining scene as a madman attempts to become a god.
"Old Virginia" - Set in the most paranoid days of the Cold War, a team of CIA operatives guards a couple of scientists and a mysterious patient (Old Virginia) in an isolated cabin. Old Virginia is a gateway for an ancient, primordial entity, and as with most CIA operations things rapidly get out of the agency's control.
"Shiva, Open Your Eye" - Another tale about a representative of a primordial power whose existence and purpose is largely unguessed (and thankfully so) by humanity told from the point of view of the representative.
"Procession of the Black Sloth" - One of the nice things about a good Lovecraftian-style tale is that you are never quite sure whether the events are real or just figments of a disintegrating mind. So in this tale we have the recollections of Royce, who's sent to investigate a seemingly mundane affair of corporate skullduggery but winds up caught in the coils of a demonic cult.
"Bulldozer" - A lot of Barron's characters in this collection are detectives or two-bit thugs hired to investigate "normal" cases but who invariably wind up discovering things that claim life and soul - as is the case in this story about a Pinkerton detective chasing down a serial killer.
"Proboscis" - A story about entities sucking out lives.
"Hallucigenia" - Probably the most "Lovecraftian" of the stories: A degenerate white-trash family straight out of Lovecraft's New England, a creature that resembles Yog-Sothoth or the Dunwich Horror, and portals opening out into the Void. It's also my favorite.
"Parallax" - An interestingly twisty tale about a man suspected of murdering his wife when she disappears, a serial-killer ex-cop, and quantum mechanics.
"The Royal Zoo Is Closed" - This was the least satisfying tale of the bunch. A stream of consciousness ramble, a style I always find hard going.
"The Imago Sequence" - My second favorite of the collection. Reminiscent of Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" and Kiernan's Threshold it also includes a do-it-yourself trephining scene as a madman attempts to become a god.
June 9, 2012
While this portends to be a series of stories set in the vein of Lovecraft, this fell very short of the mark. While two of the stories (Bulldozer and Parallax) were very well done, and the namesake story (the Imago Sequence) came close, the remainder of the stories were mediocre, at best.
There is a big difference between weird fiction that shows you glimpses of a world far darker and stranger than the real world, and fiction that doesn't really do much more than give confusing and disjointed images. There is a certain art to using the absence of information and detail to let the reader draw his or her own picture, especially when the main character is clearly unable to process what they are seeing (evoking a sympathetic reaction in the reader). But some of the stories were just bereft of enough detail to pull the narrative together.
I never managed to really see what others see in this collection, and finished it more to keep seeing if something would really demonstrate the writer's strength. Unfortunately, I just didn't see it. I could never enjoy the stories, and truthfully just wanted the experience to end.
There is a big difference between weird fiction that shows you glimpses of a world far darker and stranger than the real world, and fiction that doesn't really do much more than give confusing and disjointed images. There is a certain art to using the absence of information and detail to let the reader draw his or her own picture, especially when the main character is clearly unable to process what they are seeing (evoking a sympathetic reaction in the reader). But some of the stories were just bereft of enough detail to pull the narrative together.
I never managed to really see what others see in this collection, and finished it more to keep seeing if something would really demonstrate the writer's strength. Unfortunately, I just didn't see it. I could never enjoy the stories, and truthfully just wanted the experience to end.
June 27, 2007
I’m half convinced that Laird Barron is the love child of Jack London and H.P. Lovecraft, and his writing evokes both authors, fusing hardboiled naturalism with unflinching cosmic horror. Amazing stuff, well worth picking up for the title tale, an update of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” but all nine stories are top-notch horror fiction in the vein of Lucius Shepard, Thomas Ligotti, or Peter Straub.
July 11, 2012
I have mixed feelings about this collection. There is much in it which I like, but I am also put off by aspects of the author's style.
His stories are cluttered with superfluous characters: consider, for example, the very long description (p.136) of persons at a party in "Hallucingenia" (an effective story in other respects). When I first read the tale, I was so annoyed at this tediously intrusive super-paragraph that I more or less skipped it; looking back, I don't see that I missed anything.
Just as he piles on unnecessary characters, Barron is also generous in constructing complicated backstories for many of them, often elliptically presented so that the reader must pause to figure out just what the backstory is (e.g. "Proboscis"). He does so not just with protagonists, but secondary characters as well. Making the reader stop cold to puzzle out what the author is *not quite* saying about essentially tangential matters is like throwing sand into the gears of a machine.
I think Barron has been inspired by Lovecraft's technique of evoking the uncanny through an accumulation of telling images and tantalizing details. But while Lovecraft is very focussed on developing a weird atmosphere, and keeps extraneous matters to a minimum (even to the extent of eliminating characterization), Barron spends far too much time on prosaic stuff derived from daily life or the hard-boiled genre of fiction. And I have to say that while other authors can write realism or tough-guy fiction and make it work superbly, Barron simply isn't one of them. When he strays from the weird (as he often does), he is rather dull.
In spite of these problems I found the stories interesting, with the exception of "The Royal Zoo is Closed". My picks would be "Old Virginia", "Shiva, Open Your Eye", and (apart from a somewhat anticlimactic finish) the title story. "Parallax" is also good, with its nicely inexplicable Fortean premise. "Procession of the Black Sloth" has fine things in it, but needs heavy pruning.
His stories are cluttered with superfluous characters: consider, for example, the very long description (p.136) of persons at a party in "Hallucingenia" (an effective story in other respects). When I first read the tale, I was so annoyed at this tediously intrusive super-paragraph that I more or less skipped it; looking back, I don't see that I missed anything.
Just as he piles on unnecessary characters, Barron is also generous in constructing complicated backstories for many of them, often elliptically presented so that the reader must pause to figure out just what the backstory is (e.g. "Proboscis"). He does so not just with protagonists, but secondary characters as well. Making the reader stop cold to puzzle out what the author is *not quite* saying about essentially tangential matters is like throwing sand into the gears of a machine.
I think Barron has been inspired by Lovecraft's technique of evoking the uncanny through an accumulation of telling images and tantalizing details. But while Lovecraft is very focussed on developing a weird atmosphere, and keeps extraneous matters to a minimum (even to the extent of eliminating characterization), Barron spends far too much time on prosaic stuff derived from daily life or the hard-boiled genre of fiction. And I have to say that while other authors can write realism or tough-guy fiction and make it work superbly, Barron simply isn't one of them. When he strays from the weird (as he often does), he is rather dull.
In spite of these problems I found the stories interesting, with the exception of "The Royal Zoo is Closed". My picks would be "Old Virginia", "Shiva, Open Your Eye", and (apart from a somewhat anticlimactic finish) the title story. "Parallax" is also good, with its nicely inexplicable Fortean premise. "Procession of the Black Sloth" has fine things in it, but needs heavy pruning.
October 20, 2016
Reading Laird Barron has become something of a life-affirming pleasure for me. Not only his stories delight me, but his storytelling skills are so sound I understand why I like them and why they're so great. Barron is like a champion boxers who mastered the jab. It's the simplest punch, you know he's coming, yet he catches you with it every single time. So many stories in this collection freaked me out. OLD VIRGINIA blindsided the crap out of me. PROCESSION OF THE BLACK SLOTH was elegant and clever like few, BULLDOZER, PARALLAX and the title story all gripped me through similar mechanics, yet had me yearn for the well-calculated, predatory tense moments. If this collection proves anything, it's that Laird Barron always was a natural storyteller. He's one of these authors who was put on this planet to write fiction.
June 26, 2020
Maybe I'm not smart enough for Laird Barron, or maybe it was the fact that I was reading most of this while under the influence of NSAIDs and muscle relaxers to deal with my sciatica, but I frequently found myself at the end of each story thinking "so what the fuck happened?". Then again, there is probably some amount of deliberate obscurantism going on here. I think that for a lot of this, the mystery and atmosphere requires, or at least heavily relies on, a lack of clarity. Barron's writing is powerful, and his use of language is exquisite, so it seems the fuzziness must be intended. I feel like I should read some of these stories again when my head is a bit more clear, and that I should slow down, especially since I quite liked the title story which I did read in a better state of mind.
September 4, 2015
Laird Barron has got some pretty serious writing chops. I can’t remember the last time I had to look up so many words in the dictionary while reading. Strangely enough it didn’t bug me like I thought it would and I actually dug checking out the definitions.
The subject matter of these shorts are pretty freaking bleak and the prose is very dark and complex, but not overwhelmingly so. A great read for sure and a must for fans of cosmic horror.
The subject matter of these shorts are pretty freaking bleak and the prose is very dark and complex, but not overwhelmingly so. A great read for sure and a must for fans of cosmic horror.
February 21, 2023
Un excelente libro de un autor que ha cogido lo mejor de Lovecraft y ha creado un mundo de terror particular y desasosegante. Laird Barron mete a sus personajes, que aquí no son el típico profesor o estudioso de Lovecrfat sino tipos rudos o investigadores privados rollo noir; en berenjenales contra sectas y poderes de dioses primigenios creando unos relatos de gran atmósfera. En algunas ocasiones el caos de drogas, visiones y alucinaciones de sus personajes hacen que te pierdas y es lo único negativo que resaltaría pero hay algunos relatos en esta colección que son geniales y puede ser la manera más original de torcer las enseñanzas del maestro de Providence para crear algo nuevo y original.
Los relatos que destacaría son:
"Bulldozer"(****): Un investigador busca un forzudo escapado de un circo de Barnum en una época cercana a los Westerns americanos. Encontrará mucho más al divisar una extraña cueva. Ambientación fantástica,se me hizo corto.
"Proboscis"(***): Un actor fracasado acompaña a un pelotón de cazarecompensas a investigar unas desapariciones pero encontrará a unos extraños devoradores de carne.
"Hallucigenia"(****): Un ricachon y su mujer viajan en su limosina cuando deciden bajar a explorar una vieja cabaña. Lo que allí encuentran dejará totalmente loca a la mujer y muy tocado al hombre que empezará a investigar el lugar tratando de borrarlo de la faz de la tierra. No sabe con que está jugando pero pronto lo averiguará. Brutales descripciones y monstruos alucinantes para un gran relato.
"La secuencia Imago"(*****): Un rudo investigador es contratado para encontrar dos fotografias extrañas después de que un amigo suyo le muestre la primera de una serie de tres en una fiesta.
En el viaje perderá la cordura y se las verá con una extraña secta. El que más me ha gustado por el misterio de las fotografías y las alucinaciones que vive el investigador.
Quiero leer el resto de libros de relatos de Barron.
Los relatos que destacaría son:
"Bulldozer"(****): Un investigador busca un forzudo escapado de un circo de Barnum en una época cercana a los Westerns americanos. Encontrará mucho más al divisar una extraña cueva. Ambientación fantástica,se me hizo corto.
"Proboscis"(***): Un actor fracasado acompaña a un pelotón de cazarecompensas a investigar unas desapariciones pero encontrará a unos extraños devoradores de carne.
"Hallucigenia"(****): Un ricachon y su mujer viajan en su limosina cuando deciden bajar a explorar una vieja cabaña. Lo que allí encuentran dejará totalmente loca a la mujer y muy tocado al hombre que empezará a investigar el lugar tratando de borrarlo de la faz de la tierra. No sabe con que está jugando pero pronto lo averiguará. Brutales descripciones y monstruos alucinantes para un gran relato.
"La secuencia Imago"(*****): Un rudo investigador es contratado para encontrar dos fotografias extrañas después de que un amigo suyo le muestre la primera de una serie de tres en una fiesta.
En el viaje perderá la cordura y se las verá con una extraña secta. El que más me ha gustado por el misterio de las fotografías y las alucinaciones que vive el investigador.
Quiero leer el resto de libros de relatos de Barron.
June 18, 2012
I kind of went at Laird Barron’s oeuvre backwards. Though I had read “Old Virginia,” and “The Broadsword” in "new-Lovecraftian" anthologies, I picked up his excellent new novel The Croning before fully exploring either of his story collections (the other being Occultation). Of course I fell madly in fascinated disgust, and had to immediately devour everything he had in print. So I started at the beginning, with The Imago Sequence.
To read this set of stories, which range over a period of about six years just after the turn of the millennium, is to watch Barron’s uniquely horrific talent slowly unfold. Though quasi-Lovecraftian at times, Barron really has his own voice – in TIS themes are introduced which will eventually coalesce into a truly original mythology.
Heavily masculine and vaguely noir, most of the pieces in TIS feature a manly, tough-guy protagonist: an aging spook; a white-collar spy; a Pinkerton man; a crippled athlete; the adventurer scion of a wealthy and privileged family. Fellow weird-fiction writer Brett Talley said of Barron that he “writes like Hemingway might have if he weren’t so boring.” That’s a perfect blurb if ever I saw one.
In Laird Barron’s horrorshow, however, these men are victims rather than heroes: we watch as the kind of men who have never learned how to lose are broken down, turned inside-out, chewed up in the maw of a world become uncanny. Incidentally, gaping maws, too, are a thematic preoccupation of Barron’s. His is a cthonic, subterranean horror, lurking in the damp, hot darkness of mouths and caves, and in the primitive lizard-brain, just waiting to find your weaknesses and turn the world into a nightmare.
Standout stories in the collection are “Old Virginia,” the tale of a CIA agent nearing the end of his career assigned oversight on a very special MK-ULTRA project; “Procession of the Black Sloth,” a fevered nightmare set in an ex-pat community in Hong Kong; and “Hallucigenia,” about a man who has it all, but can’t avoid the slide into horror and madness after his young wife discovers something unspeakable in an abandoned barn. The title story, about a series of legendary and unpleasant photographs, is in some ways a nod to "Pickman's Model," but also sets the stage for Barron's own developing mythos.
Be forewarned: these stories are not pleasant, and should leave you uneasy. There are no happy endings in Laird Barron's world, only variations on death and madness.
To read this set of stories, which range over a period of about six years just after the turn of the millennium, is to watch Barron’s uniquely horrific talent slowly unfold. Though quasi-Lovecraftian at times, Barron really has his own voice – in TIS themes are introduced which will eventually coalesce into a truly original mythology.
Heavily masculine and vaguely noir, most of the pieces in TIS feature a manly, tough-guy protagonist: an aging spook; a white-collar spy; a Pinkerton man; a crippled athlete; the adventurer scion of a wealthy and privileged family. Fellow weird-fiction writer Brett Talley said of Barron that he “writes like Hemingway might have if he weren’t so boring.” That’s a perfect blurb if ever I saw one.
In Laird Barron’s horrorshow, however, these men are victims rather than heroes: we watch as the kind of men who have never learned how to lose are broken down, turned inside-out, chewed up in the maw of a world become uncanny. Incidentally, gaping maws, too, are a thematic preoccupation of Barron’s. His is a cthonic, subterranean horror, lurking in the damp, hot darkness of mouths and caves, and in the primitive lizard-brain, just waiting to find your weaknesses and turn the world into a nightmare.
Standout stories in the collection are “Old Virginia,” the tale of a CIA agent nearing the end of his career assigned oversight on a very special MK-ULTRA project; “Procession of the Black Sloth,” a fevered nightmare set in an ex-pat community in Hong Kong; and “Hallucigenia,” about a man who has it all, but can’t avoid the slide into horror and madness after his young wife discovers something unspeakable in an abandoned barn. The title story, about a series of legendary and unpleasant photographs, is in some ways a nod to "Pickman's Model," but also sets the stage for Barron's own developing mythos.
Be forewarned: these stories are not pleasant, and should leave you uneasy. There are no happy endings in Laird Barron's world, only variations on death and madness.
January 6, 2024
I really don't know how to add this to Goodreads, as I only read the namesake story, The Imago Sequence.... and I didn't love it. I still am unsure if I even like cosmic horror, as nothing I have consumed has ever really done anything for me in the creepy sense. (I would be willing to take recommendations!)
My main issue with this guys writing is it's all middle aged men being boring middle aged... men. I just don't really feel like reading about... boring men. (In the other anthology, I accidentally read 3 of the stories not realizing they were short stories and I was so confused... BUT ALL THE CHARACTERS WERE THE SAME BORING MIDDLE AGED MAN!!! I didn't realize they were supposed to be separate stories!!)
People say they love his prose, but I think his abundance of details threw me a bit, but I have hypophantasia, so when you go that hard on explanations, I just get lost in a sea of words and have no idea what is going on.
That said, I did understand the story in the end.... But it didn't really do much for me. I think that can be explained by the fact that it gave me "The Enigma of Amigara Fault" by Junji Ito vibes, so I kind of had a feeling of where it was going midway, and then it wasn't that shocking when it got there. That said, Amigara freaked me the fuck out when I first read it, but I'm super desensitized to it now.
I am glad I gave him a try, but now I know he is not for me.
I also read these from Occultation and Other Stories (I don't feel like adding both anthologies to my library since I finished neither.)
- The Forest
- Occultation (The one recced to me.)
- The Lagerstatte (Stopped midway when I realized I had read 3 different stories without realizing it.)
I was so confused hahaha.
June 27, 2011
This book collects stories previously published in various magazines within the last ten years. Coming highly praised by those who have read it, I wanted to try some more modern horror, hoping for something above and beyond the generic horror thrillers so common these days. I was not disappointed.
Many of the stories are set in Washington state (apparently where the author now resides) and a few landmarks and places crop up in more than one story, thereby going about developing a folklore and mythology for his locale in a similar way in which Lovecraft did for Providence.
The comparisons with lovecraft will not end there, with many of his stories feature investigators looking into some mysterious circumstances and ending up finding out more than is good for their lives and sanity. As with Lovecraft, the universe is a hostile place with terrifying beings poised to wake up and bring in a new age of nightmare and obliteration. The insignificance of man and what we think we know about the universe is brought home to those who inadvertantly get too curious.
But Barron is far more than a Lovecraft impersonator. His protagonists are more gritty characters. He does not shy away from the more visceral side of things when he feels it suits the story but when he does, it is not overdone.
Barron is not up to the standards of Ligotti or Aickman who's command of prose to create a sense of unease easily oustrips Barron's capabilities but in Barron's most effective stories he successfully creates a real sense of horror in his own and unique way. The best examples of this are in my opinion: "Old Virginia", "The Procession of the Black Sloth" and "Hallucigenia". Others, including the title story, were not quite so well done.
A good body of work so far though and I will definitely look with interest at what Barron produces in the future.
Many of the stories are set in Washington state (apparently where the author now resides) and a few landmarks and places crop up in more than one story, thereby going about developing a folklore and mythology for his locale in a similar way in which Lovecraft did for Providence.
The comparisons with lovecraft will not end there, with many of his stories feature investigators looking into some mysterious circumstances and ending up finding out more than is good for their lives and sanity. As with Lovecraft, the universe is a hostile place with terrifying beings poised to wake up and bring in a new age of nightmare and obliteration. The insignificance of man and what we think we know about the universe is brought home to those who inadvertantly get too curious.
But Barron is far more than a Lovecraft impersonator. His protagonists are more gritty characters. He does not shy away from the more visceral side of things when he feels it suits the story but when he does, it is not overdone.
Barron is not up to the standards of Ligotti or Aickman who's command of prose to create a sense of unease easily oustrips Barron's capabilities but in Barron's most effective stories he successfully creates a real sense of horror in his own and unique way. The best examples of this are in my opinion: "Old Virginia", "The Procession of the Black Sloth" and "Hallucigenia". Others, including the title story, were not quite so well done.
A good body of work so far though and I will definitely look with interest at what Barron produces in the future.
March 9, 2025
"... and then a leech squirmed itself up my butthole. The end."
May 31, 2019
Only true bibliophiles will understand this, but there is an almost orgasmic thrill when one stumbles upon an incredible new author. When one book gives us a tingle, we may think maybe it’s a fluke. When the second book blows us away, we may still skeptically say to ourselves maybe I just got lucky and found the only two books that this author wrote that are incredible. But three books? That’s more than just luck or chance, baby. That’s love.
Laird Barron impressed the shit out of me with his two recent novels, “Blood Standard” and “Black Mountain”, neo-noir crime thrillers starring his detective/ex-Mafia thug Isaiah Coleridge. They’re violent, funny, and smart, which are three things I tend to look for in the crime genre. (Think Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, Lee Child) Occasionally, “terrifying” and “dark” will come into play, which is why I like authors like John Connolly and Michael Connelly (no relation). Add “weird” to the mix, and that’s just icing on the cake.
Prior to his recent foray into crime noir, Barron had published a lot of short stories in the New Weird genre, a blend of dark fantasy, horror, and science fiction that has gained popularity in the last 20 years or so, based heavily on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
His first book of short stories, “The Imago Sequence and Other Stories” was published in 2007, with original material and stories previously published in magazines like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
From the opening paragraph of the first story--- “On the third morning I noticed that somebody had disabled the truck. All four tires were flattened and the engine was smashed. Nice work.”---I was hooked. I didn’t want to stop reading. Barron can write the shit out of a sentence, but more importantly, it’s what he puts in those sentences that keeps one riveted.
More often than not, though, it’s what he doesn’t put in the sentences that get to you. There’s plenty of creepy imagery, graphic violence, and gratuitous blood and guts to satiate the most thirsty gorehound in Barron’s works, but it’s the stuff he doesn’t say, the lack of explanation, the effects without visible causes, the things that happen off-screen, so to speak, that are what truly terrify. Do you really need to know why that guy’s face is splitting open to reveal what appears to be a plethora of venus fly traps to know that it’s scary as shit? No, of course not.
Every story in this collection is insanely terrifying. And every story in this collection is brilliant. It is weird cosmic horror at its best. Barron goes beyond what even Lovecraft could have imagined. These stories are Lovecraft’s nightmares.
They are also disturbing examinations of our 21st-century maladies and malefactions, the New Sins of a godless century: our capitalism, materialism, corporate espionage, social media, celebrity fixation, body dysmorphic disorders, political apathy, sex addiction, opioid epidemic, morbid obesity, white nationalism, Trumpism, narcissism, atheism. They are stories of our new Gods: Money, Fame, Science, Business, Sex; which are, in truth, just the Old Gods creeping their way back into our world. And they are out for blood.
Laird Barron impressed the shit out of me with his two recent novels, “Blood Standard” and “Black Mountain”, neo-noir crime thrillers starring his detective/ex-Mafia thug Isaiah Coleridge. They’re violent, funny, and smart, which are three things I tend to look for in the crime genre. (Think Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, Lee Child) Occasionally, “terrifying” and “dark” will come into play, which is why I like authors like John Connolly and Michael Connelly (no relation). Add “weird” to the mix, and that’s just icing on the cake.
Prior to his recent foray into crime noir, Barron had published a lot of short stories in the New Weird genre, a blend of dark fantasy, horror, and science fiction that has gained popularity in the last 20 years or so, based heavily on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
His first book of short stories, “The Imago Sequence and Other Stories” was published in 2007, with original material and stories previously published in magazines like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
From the opening paragraph of the first story--- “On the third morning I noticed that somebody had disabled the truck. All four tires were flattened and the engine was smashed. Nice work.”---I was hooked. I didn’t want to stop reading. Barron can write the shit out of a sentence, but more importantly, it’s what he puts in those sentences that keeps one riveted.
More often than not, though, it’s what he doesn’t put in the sentences that get to you. There’s plenty of creepy imagery, graphic violence, and gratuitous blood and guts to satiate the most thirsty gorehound in Barron’s works, but it’s the stuff he doesn’t say, the lack of explanation, the effects without visible causes, the things that happen off-screen, so to speak, that are what truly terrify. Do you really need to know why that guy’s face is splitting open to reveal what appears to be a plethora of venus fly traps to know that it’s scary as shit? No, of course not.
Every story in this collection is insanely terrifying. And every story in this collection is brilliant. It is weird cosmic horror at its best. Barron goes beyond what even Lovecraft could have imagined. These stories are Lovecraft’s nightmares.
They are also disturbing examinations of our 21st-century maladies and malefactions, the New Sins of a godless century: our capitalism, materialism, corporate espionage, social media, celebrity fixation, body dysmorphic disorders, political apathy, sex addiction, opioid epidemic, morbid obesity, white nationalism, Trumpism, narcissism, atheism. They are stories of our new Gods: Money, Fame, Science, Business, Sex; which are, in truth, just the Old Gods creeping their way back into our world. And they are out for blood.
November 15, 2016
Laird Barron is simply brilliant. Some of the best and most imaginative writing I've ever read. It is dense though, smart, heavy stuff that I can only read in segments, put down and absorb. This collection has no duds. Bulldozer gets the nod for being my favorite and also for having maybe my favorite opening line ever written (and yes I like it better than the opening of The Gunslinger... so shoot me, heh).
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