The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - By Laird Barron Page 0,1

pair of Shirley Jackson awards. His recent novel, The Croning, has earned rave reviews. It’s my bet that next year you’re going to see the latter on several Best Novel award ballots in the field of the fantastic.

Turns out there’s another Laird Barron novel, The Light is the Darkness, that I’ve somehow missed. But finding out that I’ve got an unread Barron book in my future is kind of like coming up against a king-sized Yuggothian fungi and discovering that you’ve got one more very serious bullet in your clip.

One more thing: On my bookshelf, you can find Laird between Neal Barrett, Jr. and Ambrose Bierce.

That’s a pretty fine place to be.

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The man himself?

I know what I’ve read online and in interviews. Laird’s a native Alaskan. He came up tough and has often said that he survived his youth. He’s worked in construction and as a commercial fisherman. He raced sled dogs in three Iditarods. If you read Laird’s blog, you’ll find he occasional recounts these experiences with an honesty that’s both self-aware and (in today’s world) astonishingly rare. His truths are often unvarnished. Or, as my old man used to say: “He doesn’t gild the lily.”

Like most writers, Laird is a creature of his experiences and influences. In the larger scheme of things (and in the territory of Alaska) his experiences may not be unique, but when it comes to writers of the fantastic they’re pretty close to it. To stretch the point enough to put it in Lovecraftese: “The grist for Mr. Barron’s mill is of a singular variety.” But like the best writers, Laird has discovered ways to twist his influences and reinvent them, and (ultimately) make them his own.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that Laird has an appreciation for the sardonic, too. You’ll see that when you read his story “Vastation.” You may also discover it in distant corners of the Internet, where Laird sometimes shows up as The Man with the Lee Van Cleef Icon. And you’ll find it, too, in a series of posts done last year by Laird’s friends: “The Secret Life of Laird Barron.”

Google that.

You’ll find out that you can have a pretty good time, laughing in the dark.

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But let’s stick with Laird’s influences for a moment… and the fuel that drives his creative engine. Here’s a taste of an interview I conducted with Mr. Barron for my blog:

PARTRIDGE: The first time I read Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” I was on a backpacking trip in Northern California with nothing around but redwoods. It was an unsettling experience, to say the least. You’re from Alaska, and you certainly dipped deep into the dark fiction well while living in a remote environment. Do you think that gave you a different view as a reader, and how did it mold you as a writer?

BARRON: I was born and raised in Alaska, a number of those years spent in wilderness camp as my family migrated with the snow. We raised huskies for travel and freighting purposes, as well as racing in mid-distance competitions and the Iditarod. Money was tight, but books we had and I read voraciously, often by kerosene lamplight. The Arctic isolation, the vast, brooding environment, contributes to a dark psychology that might dilute with time and distance, but never truly dissipates from the spirit. I’ve siphoned and filtered that energy, channeled it into the atmospherics of the stories I write.

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As you’re about to see, those atmospherics come through loud and clear in Laird’s fiction. Sometimes. At other times, they’re transmitted as little more than a whisper… the kind of whisper that can cold-cock you as surely as a slaughterhouse hammer.

Again, you’ll find several examples in the stories ahead. It’s not my intention to steal thunder from these tales. But here’s one example that’s a favorite of mine, cribbed from my aforementioned blog interview with Laird:

BARRON: Touching again on the geographical influence of Alaska, I’ll give you a less abstract example of how the primordial energy of that area affects people from varied backgrounds. In the winter of 1993 I was racing a team of huskies across the imposing hills between the ghost town of Iditarod and the village of Shageluk. It was near sunset, thirty or forty below Fahrenheit, lonely wilderness in all directions, and the team trudged along due to poor trail conditions. I was tired, all attention focused upon directing the dogs and keeping the sled from crashing as we