Books
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Barron, Laird – Occultation Laird Barron returns with his second collection, Occultation. pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation’s eight tales of terror (two never before published) include the Theodore sturgeon and Shirley Jackson award-nominated story “The Forest” and Shirley Jackson award nominee “The Lagerstatte.” Featuring an introduction by Michael Shea, Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron’s fans have come to expect. |
Occultation Reviews:
“In every tale, everything heard and unheard, seen and unseen becomes creepier and creepier. The protagonists try to escape by drinking, drugging, fighting, fucking, even fleeing. Yet it’s doubtful any of their gorgeously scary stories has much of a sequel.”— Ray Olson for Booklist
“Writing with a poet’s eye for detail and a folklorist’s understanding of mythos, Barron lives up to his reputation for elegant, subtle, and nightmare-inducing tales with a Lovecraftian edge in his second short story collection (after 2007’s The Imago Sequence and Other Stories), which includes six reprints and three original stories. In “The Lagerstätte,” a woman who cannot come to terms with her husband’s loss clings to an occult artifact said to reunite lovers whom death has separated. A guerrilla art exhibit turns murderous in the taut and bloody “Strappado.” A mysterious guidebook leads four men on a terrifying camping trip in “Mysterium Tremendum.” Heartbreaking, hilarious, sophisticated, and gory, these stories will thrill, trouble, and haunt Barron’s fans and have newcomers scrambling to search for his other work. (June)”
Publishers Weekly starred review
“Sometimes while reading Laird Barron’s stories I become so immersed in the densely detailed, highly descriptive prose that I have to take a break because I feel like I might be going insane. Only the films of David Lynch affect me in the same way: Afterward, for a short time, I am able to see real objects and people but I have an eerie sense that nothing is what it seems. At any moment walls will talk and people will be sucked sideways into another dimension.”
S.P Miskowski for the Seattle Post Intelligencer
The Imago Sequence Reviews:
“Horrors that defy description and challenge reader expectations charge the electrifying stories in this powerful debut collection. Barron synthesizes influences ranging from H.P. Lovecraft to hard-boiled crime fiction in nine ingeniously plotted tales whose many layers peel away to reveal highly original and viscerally unsettling premises. “Old Virginia” is narrated by a Cold War–era CIA agent, unaware that the chaos around him is due not to Communists but to occult forces escaping the control of the scientists he’s guarding. In the period western “Bulldozer,” a Pinkerton agent discovers that serial killings are part of an elaborate occult ritual for placating a supernatural entity. The title story concerns a triptych of photographs used by a malign cult to snare acquisitive art collectors. Barron intensifies the emotional impact of his fiction by providing protagonists who ultimately realize that their doom is inevitable and drag the reader down with them. These vividly imagined and eerily credible stories herald a potent new voice in horror fiction. (Sept.)”
–Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Barron’s monsters are revoltingly earthy, yet psychically controlling….Barron doesn’t shrink from going over the top, but his narrators, like some of pulp crime novelist Jim Thompson’s, keep going beyond when they should be dead…Bloody wonderful stuff.”
Booklist, starred review
More Praise for Laird Barron’s Work:
“…one senses that he has the potential to change the expectations of the next generation of readers by elevating the genre to a new standard of excellence.”
Lucius Shepard, author of Trujillo
“If you think there aren’t any new Richard Mathesons or Harlan Ellisons out there, you need to read Laird Barron.”
Stewart O’Nan, Bestselling Author of A Prayer for the Dying
“…Laird Barron [is] a more ingenious Lovecraftian than most. He doesn’t merely recycle the master’s elaborate,harebrained “mythos, but adds…his own strange spin to tales of ancient evil…”
The New York Times ( Terrence Rafferty)
“Laird Barron is one of the dynamic new voices in contemporary horror fiction… Barron has all the tools to become a classic himself.”
S. T. Joshi, author of An H P Lovecraft Encyclopedia
Laird Barron is a writer who has a real sensitivity to the atmospherics necessary to first rate dark fantasy/horror and the talent to make that atmosphere alive on the page. He is one of the leading writers of his generation.
David G. Hartwell, coeditor of the Year’s Best Fantasy series
“A striking and original writer…A first rate stylist.”
Jeff VanderMeer, author of City of Saints and Madmen
“For my money, Laird Barron is far and away the best of the new generation of horror writers.”
Michael Shea, World Fantasy Award winning author of Polyphemus
“Laird Barron’s fiction is rich with images that are horrifying and shocking in their otherness, and in their beauty..”
Paul Tremblay, author of THE LITTLE SLEEP
“Laird Barron concocts the most wonderful nightmares.”
Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners
“ The Imago Sequence & Other Stories belongs on every horror connoisseur’s shelf of landmark debut collections, sandwiched between Michael Shea’s Polyphemus and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood.”
Marc Laidlaw, Author of the World Fantasy Award nominated The 37th Mandala
“I envy you the experience of opening up this book. Prepare to squirm…”
Ellen Datlow, editor of Best Horror of the Year 1
“Laird Barron is one of the most talented new writers around.”
Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Like those past masters, Barron writes phantasmagorias, hallucinatory nightmares of worlds beyond his characters’ control, where the veil can be torn away for a moment to reveal, ever so briefly, the true face of reality.
Fearzone (by Nick Kaufmann)
”… the way Barron consistently keeps his language focused on specific, manageable, concrete detail catapults the true terror…well beyond any of Lovecraft’s abstract hyperbole. There is much debt to the close, specific horror of Patrick McGrath and the outlandish psychological horror of Jim Thompson.”
IROSF ( Blunt Jackson)
“A very impressive array of stories from a distinctive talent.
Don D’Ammassa, Critical Mass
“No wan, scholarly dweebs here. Barron’s protagonists are often Big Tough Guys. These bruisers have seen hard times and done whatever it takes to survive them. Men who struggle to make sense out of a world that’s bigger and more dangerous than they realized, and then they end up in a Laird Barron story. Tragic really.”
io9
“If you’re looking for an heir to the Lovecraft legacy, Barron holds the title.”
–Matt Adder (Bookgasm)
“…the impression grows that Barron is a miraculous synthesis of Lovecraft and Lucius Shepard, with the original grotesque imagination of the one and the evocative density of the other.”
Locus ( Nick Gevers)
“Barron jumbles language effectively: now the rough, formal drawl of the frontier, now the disjointed spectacular language of an Ezra Pound, a James Joyce…A shot of Cormac McCarthy and a shot of Raymond Chandler, neither shaken nor stirred: just pounded straight down.”
The Internet Review of Science Fiction (Blunt Jackson)