In Laird Barron’s work, to borrow from Weldon Kees, “the world, like a beast, impatient and quick, / Waits only for those that are dead. They’re stories about complicity, with Barron’s characters finally understanding too late what has made them vulnerable or evil. Evil and menace are anything but personal: these aren’t tales of revenge or of the need to put a ghost to rest, but rather stories about the small things we do to attract the attention of forces that would otherwise be indifferent to us. I’m going to talk about only three stories in detail, but before doing so, I’ll say that most of the nine stories involve people isolated from what is familiar to them, forced to confront ideas or forces that neither they nor we can completely take in. The Beautiful Thing that Awaits Us All is as strong an outing for Barron as any, and a good a place to start. He knows, too, where solid walls might in fact be false panels that can slide back to reveal new rooms, places where the genre hasn’t thought to go, but should. Barron knows the genre he is writing in, and knows it well. It is decidedly genre fiction - very smart Lovecraftian horror often (but not always) with a contemporary twist. I’m not going to argue that Barron’s short fiction is “really” literary fiction, since I think that misses the point. In a story from his collection Occultation, for instance, a man ejaculates himself into nothingness, a strangeness that inverts the strangeness of Antonin Artaud’s “Paul the Birds” in which someone ejaculates “a great white bird, like sperm which turns and spirals in the air.” He’s also willing to take us almost anywhere. At the same time, while fully conscious of genre conventions, Barron has quietly built up an impressive and unsettling body of work. He publishes his short stories in magazines like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and anthologies with names like The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination or Ghosts: Recent Hauntings or Cthulu’s Reign. He has a Weird Lovecraftian streak, and he doesn’t care who knows it. Barron’s fiction is Horror with a capital H. The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All(Nightshade Books, 2013) is Laird Barron’s fifth book and his third collection of short stories.
0 kommentar(er)
