Breathlessly Awaiting: Lovecraft's Monsters

So I'm really excited for this anthology. I can't wait for it to show up on my doorstep like poor Edward Derby.

Gaiman, Barron, Kiernan, Langan, Ligotti and more. For full story listing, a pre-order portal, and an interview with editrix supreme Ellen Datlow,
click through to Lovecraft eZine.

Squee!

Book Review: Southern Gods, by John Horner Jacobs

    5/5 

1950s, the deep south. Hardboiled noir meets the Memphis blues and eldritch Lovecraftian horror. If any of those words ring your bell (or induce skittering waves of nauseous-yet-pleasurable horror), you must read Southern Gods right now.

Get ready to welcome the Old Ones to the bayou, when elusive blues player Ramblin' John Hastur releases a record that curdles the soul and calls to those that wait in the gulfs between the stars. Enter Bull, a damaged private dick in search of an A&R man gone missing while trying to sign Ramblin' John, and Sarah, an attractive lady with a gruesome family secret and an occult library to die for (who among us doesn't want a peek at the illustrated Necronomicon?), and you'll get an idea of what's in play in John Horner Jacobs' mind-blowing debut novel.

Needless to say, if that first paragraph is gibberish to you, or if appalling violence and obscene ancient rituals put you off your feed, please don't read this book. (There's also a smattering of sex, including a monumentally repulsive scene involving a kind of group possession, as well as lots of smoking, drinking and playing the blues, which you probably won't care for either, you prude.)

On the other hand, if you appreciate tight, literate prose seasoned with a great deal of thoroughly ooky splatter, look no further. Southern Gods made my Best of 2011 list: Horner brings a complicated era vividly to life and at the same time adds an original, dark, and swampy-foetid breath of air to the Lovecraft-inspired new weird.

You have been warned.

Book Review: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, by Laird Barron

4/5

I kind of went at Laird Barron’s oeuvre backwards. Though I had previously read the short stories “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 and Other Stories). 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 wrestler; the adventurer scion of a wealthy and privileged family. Fellow weird-fiction writer Brett J. 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 more often victims than heroes: we watch in disbelief 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, unleashed by drugs or driven to insanity.

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 something of a sly 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.