Occultation and Other Stories by Laird Barron
At one point, I assumed Laird Barron was a peer of Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber because his name came up so often when I researched Lovecraftian writers. Of course, I realized my mistake, but I think that informs you about how esteemed Barron is in Lovecraftian circles. So, it was only a matter of time before I dove into some of his work.
In Occultation and Other Stories, Barron presents an array of macabre tales that manage to avoid easy categorization. The story that spooked me the most in this collection was The Broadsword. It’s a tale where the protagonist is an older gentleman hearing people talk about nefarious doings in his apartment’s vents. Things get freakier from there. I enjoyed a ton about this tale, but what stuck with me the most is the fact that The Broadsword effectively recreated the feelings I got while devouring The Whisperer in Darkness for the first time.
Catch Hell and Mysterium Tremendum worked in similar ways for me. They conjured feelings I associated with classic horror stories, but Barron made them feel fresh in his voice. It was also a lot of fun to see “The Black Guide” used in Mysterium Tremendum after reading about it in Paul Tremblay’s Growing Things and Other Stories last month.
Two stories that felt intensely unique were Strappado and – -30- -. Strappado is essentially a tale about a man seeing a Banksy gone wrong. While – – 30 – – deals with the ecology of an area that has something unknown wrong with it. It reminded me a little of Jeff VanderMeer’s (who is thanked in the acknowledgements section) Annihilation, but this was published four years before that. Barron does some of his most effective work when he writes about nature, and I assume that his time living in Alaska probably gave him a unique perspective on the subject.
Lastly, Barron often challenges traditional Lovecraftian tropes. His protagonists come from different ethnicities and genders and go beyond the typical Lovecraftian type, and he deals with sex and sexuality in every story, something often avoided in Lovecraftian yarns. Besides sex, insects also seemed to show up to some degree in every story in this collection, but I’m not sure if that’s a coincidence or not. Bugs certainly play a huge role in Occultation’s first story, The Forest. In that opening story, Barron also has a character named Toshi, whom I assumed was partially inspired by famed Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi.
Overall, I enjoyed all these stories, and I’d like to revisit them to work through the nuts and bolts of how Barron writes. One of the pains of working forty-hour weeks and listening to everything on audible is that I don’t get to underline and mark up the text in front of me. Perhaps I’ll seek out a physical copy of Laird Barron’s Occultation and Other Stories to do just that.
