“Time is a ring. Everything and everyone gets squished under the wheel.”
Today’s the first day of October, time for another month of Spooky Book Reviews!
The rules are simple: while sticking as close as possible to the horror genre, over the course of the month I have to review at least one new book, one “classic” book (ie: older than me), and one book that I’ve been wanting to read for a while now. This week it’s the third option, as PaperbackSwap came through for me and provided the 2010 collection Occultation: and Other Stories, nine short stories filled with the kind of cosmic horror and mundane dread that only Laird Barron can do.
I’ve reviewed quite a few stories by Laird Barron, and I don’t feel like I’m any closer to really capturing why they have such an effect on me. The way his universe is alive – and hungry – is very close to Lovecraft (especially when you have impossibly ancient gods clawing their way into our world). But the prose is earthier than that, filled with sex and dismemberment, even while the author is writing beautifully flowing descriptions of roads that unroll like tongues, ancient crumbling castles, and characters feeling inexplicable horror from things like a dim lobby and a door leading into blackness.
Barron can even make a sunlit meadow feel ominous, like he does in “Catch Hell”, a story about a young couple who seem to have stopped loving each other years before, after a tragedy that’s never fully explained.
Golden light fell over the leaves and grass. It was a hushed and sacred moment before reaping-time. The world was balanced on the edge of a scythe.
The stories jump forward and backward in time, the speaker often changes in mid paragraph, meaning you have to pay close attention to who’s saying what, and all of the narrators are unreliable; you’re never quite sure if they’re dreaming, flashing back to a terrible memory, or hallucinating as they’re drugged/losing their minds. In “The Lagerstatte”, grief becomes a way of forcing a door between worlds…unless the main character has actually sunken so far that she’s imagining all of the things she’s telling her therapist. Grief also comes into play in “The Forest”, and you have to wonder if the main character will ever see any beauty in it, or if he plans to literally draw the curtain over the horrors he’ll never be able to forget.
If you’re traumatized by the idea of innocent people being dragged into endless suffering for no reason, then you might want to skip this collection, because the idea of “fair” doesn’t really come into these stories. “The Broadsword” is set in a crumbling old hotel that’s been converted into an equally-crumbling apartment building, and no one involved really seems to have done anything to deserve what happens when cannibals start infesting the crawlspaces.
…the only thing an advanced species would want from us would be our meat and bones.
“Mysterium Tremendum” centers around four friends, all of whom seem to be genuinely good people, the kind you’d want to know, or work with, or get drunk with and get into the kind of trouble that you tell stories about for years. Unfortunately they also have the bad sense (or bad luck) to go traipsing off into the wilderness using only a mysterious thrift-store paperback as a guide. It’s a raucous Boy’s Weekend of beer and weed and out-of-nowhere barroom brawls, right up until they find what the guide has been leading them to.
“This is weird,” Victor said. “You guys think this is weird?” I said, “In my opinion this qualifies as weird. Also highly unsettling.”
Barron is especially good at never fully explaining something, leaving the worst horrors to whatever your imagination can come up with. We don’t find out exactly what the patrons of the arts went through in “Strappado”, but the nightmares that the main character has afterwards gives you just enough information that if I ever do get invited to a guerrilla art exhibit, I’ll probably decline by running away screaming.
“Six Six Six” follows the reliable old trope: Young Couple Inherits The Spooky Family Mansion. It takes place over the course of a tipsy evening on moving in day, as the young wife gradually finds out how off-kilter her husband’s family is. Like a lot of these stories, the ending hits with all the force of running into a brick wall, and it gave me that wonderful moment of oh…ohhhh, that’s…well I’m still not sure what’s happening here but that ending certainly changed what I thought was happening.
“–30–” is another standard trope: Isolated Scientific Post In The Wilderness. Something awful happened here in the past (cult sacrifices? government chemical testing? a tear in the fabric of the world?), something very odd is happening to the animals in the present, and both the unnamed narrator and his former flame/current coworker/it’s complicated are steadily losing their minds.
There wasn’t anything left to say, so they sat as if shackled to their chairs until the full moon floated to the surface of the sky like a corpse buoyed and bloated by its decomposition.
(Ooo, and I just found out that “–30–” was made into a movie, “They Remain”. May have to check that out.)
If I had to pick, I’d say that “Occultation” is my favorite. It’s also (in my opinion) the scariest in the book. It actively terrified me. There are so many different flavors of dread in these stories, but this one is the kind where you successfully scare yourself. It reminded me of being kids in our grandmother’s backyard at night, hearing the unfamiliar sound of a train in the distance, and telling ourselves what it would be like if the very noisy cicadas went silent all at once just before train suddenly came charging through the yard. Imagine that kind of fear, and then not being able to get out of it. It’s the mundane terror of a mostly empty motel, a splotch on the wall, and some unmoving impossible thing in the parking lot. Like most of Barron’s stories I’m still not sure what’s he’s doing here, but oh my goodness he’s doing it really really well.
Laird Barron has been working with crime noir genre lately. His two books about mob enforcer Isaiah Coleridge are available now, and I really do need to get around to reading both of them.