“I, for one, have no interest in being tortured, imprisoned, or experimented on. Again.”
The story begins in a school for assassins in the Himalayas, so at first it looks like this will be a tale of deprivation and physical training. But then it switches to two brothers leaving the temple for their summer vacation, looking forward to a few months of brawling and debauchery: firearms, booze and women mandatory. Except the brothers are awfully young (12.5 and 14.5 to be exact) so this is really more of a boy’s adventure, except that they’re the heirs to a multinational family/corporation that’s in the middle of a war with several other families, a war that’s exacerbated by an arms race and a secret plot involving contact with a shambling intelligence from beyond the stars…
…I think I should probably start over. This story is all over the place, and like a lot of Laird Barron’s writing, it’s kind of hard to describe.
Laird Barron first appeared on my radar with his story “The Imago Sequence”. It was a fantastically creepy piece, one of those stories that you end up thinking about when you’re awake at four in the morning. The author likes to play with crime, noir, and pulp genres in addition to science fiction, and he states on Goodreads that he likes to mix those with “a so I snapped up the Nook copy of the novella “X’s for Eyes” pretty quickly when I saw it had just come out last December.
Each of Barron’s stories has a different feel depending on which genre he’s pulling from, and he was obviously having a lot of fun with all of the Boy’s Adventure tropes for this one. Everything has the sped-up, breathless quality of two boys in the mid-1950’s, having fun, getting into scrapes, and outwitting the grownups in order to solve the mystery and save the day.
However.
The grown-ups in this case are their family members – ruthless, vicious, never telling the truth when twenty-five lies will work just as well, and prone to murdering siblings when it’s convenient (or fun) – or members of one of the five other family/corporations in the Compact, all of them willing to kidnap and torture rivals for information. The main characters themselves, twelve-year-old Drederick and his older brother Macbeth, are only able to survive because they’re exactly as ruthless as everyone else, as well as being intelligent well-trained fighters who are about as cheerfully amoral as you can imagine.
“Why am I always the one to get tortured?” Dred said. “I’m younger and more malleable. You should be torturing Mac to manipulate me!”
“I read your file,” Labrador said. “You have the empathy of a turnip.”
The plot is filled with assassins in disguise, betrayal, last-second escapes, and pulp sci-fi technology (like schoolwork being replaced with a hypnotic Dreamtime program while you sleep), and peppered with references to the boys’ previous improbable adventures. The story starts out quirky, but when the real action begins it happens fast, and the body count racks up as Dred and Mac prove that when you and your henchmen are under fire by hired Russian goons, you don’t have to outrun bullets, you just have to outrun your henchmen.
I can’t get into too much detail on the cosmic horror elements of the story without giving away too much, but …remember all those references in Lovecraft’s stories to dimensions that will drive you crazy if you even see a glimpse of them? There are sections of the story that come very close to describing what that would actually be like: mutated titans, time-travel that takes millions of years, and parts of the sky becoming sticky and solid, trapping things in place, like space probes. Or planets.
Laird Barron’s books are a little too unusual to show up in a Barnes and Noble or a used bookstore too often, and my wishlist on Paperback Swap had several of his books for months with no luck, and that was before PBS decided to start charging an extra fee for swaps. (Cut to an image of Kathryn with a handful of credits and a wishlist, standing in an empty warehouse. “Hello? Doesn’t anyone want to trade books anymore?”) But I think his writing is weird and disturbing and unique enough to track down the full-price books wherever you can find them, perfect for reading on darkwinter nights. And oh, look, there’s a story you can read for free online here.
Another short story so soon after this one? Don’t mind of I do…