The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.
The protagonists of the short horror fiction of Laird Barron are . . . seekers. They’re always looking for something. Sometimes these things are pretty high stakes as with an expert in corporate espionage that journeys to Japan to try to track down spies that are stealing his company’s secrets. Sometimes they’re mundane, like when the guy with a flat tire decides to go see what’s in that old abandoned barn while he waits for his tire to be fixed. Sometimes they find what they were originally looking for; sometimes they don’t. But they always, and I mean always, find something else, something they will eventually wish with all their might that they had not found. The often brain-breaking nature of the things they find places Barron more or less in the genre of cosmic horror, I suppose, but he brings a toughness to the genre that it sometimes misses. Perhaps, given his fascination with investigators, the other genre he brings to mind is noir. His protagonists aren’t researchers or scientists most of the time; they’re practical, pragmatic, tough-minded guys, often guys who have a certain facility for violence. All the worse for them then, when they encounter something that all their tough-minded pragmatism and alpha-male posturing hasn’t prepared them for.
This book contains nine stories and, at their best, they’re gripping, disturbing, occasionally really scary and trippy. At their worst, they’re a little too ambiguous and just kind meander on the outskirts of the horror instead of really plunging us into it. Let me talk for a minute about some of the best. In the title story, the longest in the book, I think, a series of abstract photographs called the Imago Sequence has the art-world a buzz; but the final photograph can’t be found, so a private detective is hired to locate it. In Procession of the Black Sloth, a corporate espionage expert journeys to Japan on assignment, but begins to suspect that something is horribly wrong about the apartment building where he’s staying; this one just cranks the dread up to the max and one of the supporting characters in this story meets a fate that is genuinely nasty and nightmarish. Hallucigenia is the one about the old barn and the “villains” in that story are really memorable and gross; it’s a story that’s thematically about how the protagonists vast wealth still can’t shield him from the things that lurk on the other side of our reality. My favorite in the book is one of the shortest, Shiva, Open Your Eye; it’s the one story in the book that kind of breaks the “protagonist as investigator” mold and, in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read a story from the perspective of a protagonist like this one and I’ll leave it at that because you really must read it for yourself. Can I just also shout this guy out, by the way, for having ******* awesome titles? Procession of the Black Sloth? Shiva, Open Your Eye? Those are badass titles, dude.
The other stories range from mediocre to pretty good, but I think I’d just recommend a reader go through every story. My least favorite story is called Proboscis, but it’s an award-winning story; on the other hand, after I finished the book I discovered an online review where the reviewer said that my favorite, Shiva, Open Your Eye, was the worst in the book. Even with all the similarities between the stories in this book, Barron has managed to craft a lot of different experiences by placing his own tropes in a variety of settings and horror subgenres, like Asian Horror (Black Sloth), Lovecraftian Horror (Shiva), Sci-Fi Horror (Parallax), even Weird West (Bulldozer). So I suspect that every story in this book is someone’s favorite and also someone’s least favorite. But while we might not all agree on where this book is strongest and where it’s weakest, we’ll probably all feel a similar dark chill of dread somewhere along the way. This isn’t a super-consistent collection and there’s probably one or two stories that I just didn’t care for at all. But it’s a quick, chilling read and one I recommend if you’re up for a little investigative work. 3 stars.
tl;dr – collection of short horror stories isn’t all that consistent, but when at it’s best, it’s brilliant; disturbing, dark & grim stories of what happens when we see things we shouldn’t. 3 stars.