We’re getting closer to Halloween, smack in the middle of Spooky season, time for a Spooky book! The original plan was to read Stephen King’s latest, but then I found out that Laird Barron – cosmic horror writer extraordinaire – just released his fifth short-story collection. Stephen King can wait, this one’s MINE.
I’ve been drinking in this collection for the last week, and trying to decide why Barron’s writing is so appealing to me. “Dark” isn’t a strong enough word for it. The universe where he sets all his stories is alive, hungry and filled with menace, or completely unknowable and apt to crush all of humanity by sheer indifference. These are Gothic tales of the most un-Gothic characters (drifters, yuppies, single mothers living below the poverty line), and even the stories of secret-agent and super-villain skullduggery (of which there are not one, but three in this collection), have an overwhelming feeling of doom and decay.
Events happen out of sequence, tales are nested within flashbacks set inside hallucinations. More often than not you won’t get a full explanation for what the hell is going on, and many of these stories don’t end so much as just stop, with the implication that things will keep going on for a horrifically drawn-out lifetime. Barron creates shockingly vivid images, like a rickety shack perched on the edge of a canyon, with a sheet of blood pouring out of the floor and staining the cliff face below. Or a roof inexplicably cracking open, looking like a star-filled mouth that devours the humans inside. Or an unexplained tunnel in the basement. This is the perfect book for me to curl up with when the nights are getting colder and longer and I’m wondering if I’m going to have trouble sleeping later.
I’ve seen the true, unspeakable face of the universe; a face that reflects my lowly place in its scheme. And the answer is yes. Yes, there are hells, and in some you are burned or boiled or digested in the belly of a monster for eternity.
The book is divided into four sections, and I found myself wondering how the title of each section applied to the stories. The first section, Blood Red Samaritans, of course made me think of the story of the Good Samaritan, but you have to keep in mind that the Samaritan was used as an example of the outsider, the stranger, the person you didn’t expect to help someone in need. The narrator of “In a Cavern, In a Canyon” is a woman who’s entire life has been shaped by her alcoholic father’s…abandonment? Sure, we’ll go with that. She obsessively worms her way into major and minor disasters under the guise of a Good Samaritan, and she’s torched more than one relationship by her hunt for the Help Me Monster, a creature that lurks around horrible events, and preys on our best impulses.
“The Glorification of Custer Poe” features another kind of dangerous outsider, and it’s one of my favorites in the book. I love a tale where someone says any variation of “let me tell you how it all started”, and this selection is all history. It’s a first person account of a cranky old veteran of the Civil War, scraping together a living in the wilds of Alaska while being haunted by the ghost of the general he assassinated (and possibly by other things) and telling drunken tales until we find out just how unreliable a narrator he is.
“It’s dying edge will splash Earth in, oh, approximately forty-five seconds.”
Mundane relationships that either fail for perfectly mundane reasons or turn into…something else, are a big feature of Barron’s writing. Delia in “Girls Without Their Faces On” is a little suspicious of her new boyfriend J, but she’s completely unprepared for her life to turn into a solitary trek through the end of the world after an astrological event destroys humanity in ways that make zero sense. In “Mobility”, instead of a new relationship turning ominous, it’s an older one going kablooey. A perfectly self-sufficient college professor is unceremoniously dumped and then becomes a victim of…something? Food poisoning? The vengeance of the universe? What follows is a fun-house hallucination fever dream where past and present stop following the rules.
Reminded him of how Dad sometimes hid under the bed while wearing Mom’s nylon stocking over his face, and the homemade blood transfusion kit he unpacked when they played Something Scary.
“Jōren Falls” has the winning combination of a retired couple’s gently decaying marriage, and something in the attic. The story “The Blood In My Mouth” (another one of my favorites) features a relationship that transcends time and space. This is not a good thing. The nameless narrator wanders aimlessly through life until he stumbles across a woman who’s almost otherworldly in her intelligence and damage. And oh, the places she leads him to. I had to go back and reread this one; it has the most traditional narrative structure and an ending that hit like running into a brick wall at full speed.
I found “Nemesis” utterly baffling, an entire story filled with nothing but unreliable narrators. It doesn’t end well. Mostly because it doesn’t actually end. And “The Soul of Me” needs some trigger warnings for animal death. Many animal deaths. It’s billions of years in the life(lives) of a Very Good Boy.
You are Rex. Spot, Fido, Roscoe, Yeller, Tramp, Rusty, Rin Tin Tin, Buck, and the others, the ever-popular others, yes, those too. But always and forever, Rex. The last of your kind and the kinds that came before.
The next three stories feel like a bit of a departure. Barron’s recurring character Jessica Mace makes an appearance in two of them, still wandering the earth, trying to solve the mystery of whatever it was that happened to her mother, and generally being a bad-ass. “Swift To Chase” has Mace acting as a reluctant secret-agent, sent to steal priceless information from the most fatal of femme fatales out there. “Don’t Make Me Assume My Ultimate Form” has Mace appearing as a secondary character in the tale of a criminal psychic with a felony conviction and an inoperable brain tumor, who joins an all-female team of secret agents and assassins (each one of whom could have an entire story devoted just to them) at Mrs. Shrike’s Home for Wayward Girls. Mace is absent for the third story, “Fear Sun” which instead stars a pampered, spoiled princess of industry, with enough power and money to recreate a Lovecraftian town to play in. The interest of some very dangerous and powerful (and possibly not human) people just makes her even more likely to indulge all kinds of bad decisions.
She knew I had to do it, because beneath the caviar slurping, bubblegum popping, jet setting facade throbbed a black hole that didn’t want to eat the light; it needed to.”
Mace makes another appearance in “American Remake of a Japanese Ghost Story”, which also ties into an earlier story. This one gives us much explanation as we’re going to get for why Mace keeps running into otherworldly hazards. It’s also the one that has the closest to a traditionally happy ending (which means not terribly happy, but maybe some not so nice people are going to die very badly.)
The last section of the book is Lake Terror, and contains four stories all loosely collected around the same area of the Catskills. “Strident Caller” is one brief chapter in the life of an ordinarily laid-back boy-toy who’s in way over his head. Jesse Craven has the bad luck to bring himself and his dog to stay as a guest of an aging Scream Queen, in a creepy atmospheric mansion that is lit by candles when the power (frequently) goes out, and which has something horrible in the basement.
The perfect place to host a dinner party and then watch the guests vanish one by one.
Most of the entries in this book have appeared elsewhere over the last ten or so years. The one story that’s original to this collection is “Not a Speck of Light”, and I feel it’s the darkest in the book. A husband and wife are gradually falling out of love with each other, and decide to take drastic steps to save the relationship. No, not have a kid; they adopt a dog. The way the shaggy mutt Aardvark cements his place in their hearts just makes the latter half of the story that much more grim. I can agree with the priorities of the couple; a shame it didn’t work out better.
“Tiptoe” is told from the point of view of a successful photographer who’s life has been derailed by an ambiguous childhood trauma. Just what was up with the stalking game his father played with them? And why do his memories of his father and their last family vacation in the Catskills feel so…off. This story includes a theory that I always find fascinating, that the phenomenon of the Uncanny Valley may be something humans evolved for our own protection.
“So why are we allegedly fearful of, er, imitations?”
“For the same reason a deer or a fowl will spook if it gets wind of a decoy. Even an animal comprehends that a lure means nothing good.”
The last entry in the book, “(You Won’t Be) Saved by the Ghost of Your Old Dog”, is also the shortest, only two pages long. A lone hunter tracks a dog through the snow. From their age, the person is years closer to the end of the story. But who’s story? We don’t know what the goal is or how long he’s been hunting, but for some reason I thought of it when I read Barron’s remark in the Afterword: “For me, every collection is a battle fought in a war of attrition that we all all lose in the end.
Cover art and interior illustrations by Trevor Henderson. You really need to get a copy of this book and take a look at the tiny black-and-white pictures for each chapter, they’re all appropriately disturbing. Especially the one for Swift To Chase, yikes.