Laird Barron's Blog, page 43

Athena finished her 11th journey around the sun the other day. Her muzzle is going white. She moves a little slowly, her joints creak, and she’s become a lovable curmudgeon. No more mast cell tumors since March, although I check daily.

I wrote this about her a couple of years back:

“…As I count up everything I’ve done in my life–the good, the bad, the wins and losses, what was important and what turned out not to be, saying yes to allowing Athena into our home looms large. I don’t really have the words to express what her presence has meant to me, what it continues to mean.”

Still true.

Athena and I, years ago

I caught up with Richard Gavin at Necronomicon in August and also had a chance to meet his wonderful family. That remains a highlight of a memorable trip to Providence. Richard is one of the best writers in the business, and a good man as well. He’s written several collections–you enjoy dark, gothic, eerie tales in the tradition of MR James, Lovecraft, and Thomas Ligotti, check this guy out. His latest is called At Fear’s Altar.

Here is my introduction to his 2009 collection The Darkly Splendid Realm:

Vistas of Evil Splendor

by Laird Barron

There exists within the community of horror authors a subset that cleaves to the modalities established by the old masters and seeks to contemporize classical styles and themes while expanding upon the venerable canon. This conclave of relative new bloods has sparked a resurgence of traditional supernatural fiction, spearheaded by the likes of Barbara Roden, Don Tumasonis, John Langan, and the author of this collection, Richard Gavin.  Gavin, with his third collection, The Darkly Splendid Realm, exemplifies this modernistic treatment of legends such as Aikman, Blackwood, and Machen. He pens tales of grimness and melancholy, of ghosts and things much darker than ghosts, and in a fashion that does honor to the genre’s founders while blazing his own, unique path.

There are fourteen tales within these pages, each a keyhole view of the inexplicable and the ineffable. These dark tales range from accounts of childhood abuse that breeds literal monsters, to pacts between mortal fools and unholy forces, and one stunning novella dealing with twisted black sorcery at its most insidious and terrible. Another memorable story features a paean to Dunsany and Lovecraft that captures the awesome and sublime majesty of cosmic horror. These two pieces anchor the collection, and I promise they will leave an indelible mark upon your psyche. In Richard Gavin’s universe unwary travelers all too quickly find themselves sailing into Terra Incognita, or wandering the mists of oblivion. Loss of identity, the disintegration of sanity and self, black magic and body horror, and worse, are subjects about which Mr. Gavin is happy to discourse if you’ll pull up a chair and stay a while.

The Darkly Splendid Realm possesses the affecting quality of all first class literature: an insidious tendency to bore into your subconscious and put down roots.  Gavin doesn’t flinch from examining the bizarre or the grotesque, nor human frailty or inhuman malevolence. These tales let upon vistas of madness and evil splendor. I found myself mulling them over at odd times and long after I’d set the manuscript aside. On a couple of occasions, I shook myself awake from most disturbing dreams owed to the lingering effects of his unsettling visions. He knows how to get under your skin and haunt you.

This collection unspools like a concept album. Beneath the veneer and polish is a layer of gritty substrata. His voice is seductive and raw, his beats skilled, yet idiosyncratic and startling. The bleakness of his prose, its dark musicality, is striking and authentic. The gentleman’s not here to afford you simple gratification. His familiar notes mesh in unexpected, genre defying ways, and often evoke a sensation of disquiet, if not outright dread, rather than pat satisfaction. Gavin is fascinated with the pastoral and the austere, the intersections of steel and earth, of flesh and spirit, and the world and the spinning black void that waits just a step beyond its threshold. As Gavin’s work acknowledges a debt to classical authors, it also reflects other, more contemporary trends. The theme of the ineffectual and disaffected everyman is a persistent drumbeat in modern horror. In lesser hands, such characters are merely ciphers, passive victims, mute witnesses to impending doom, and their fates mean little except to serve as cautionary asides. Not so with this author

Gavin’s influences are apparent, but never overpowering. He demonstrates an artisan’s eye for mood and tempo. He understands how crucial atmosphere is to the horrific and weird, and indeed that the miserabilist themes of malaise, urban decay, and cultural and social isolation,  are integral elements. However, he also possesses a keen understanding that the very best tales are those anchored by flesh and blood human beings who are in turn confronted by cold, hard problems. Existential horror is all very nice, but material substance is vital. Storytelling, and most especially storytelling that involves fear and dread, relies upon physicality to reinforce atmosphere, solidity and compactness to counterbalance ambiguity and nebulousness, as important as these latter characteristics might be. Physicality is the five senses engaged, the who, what, how and why, the kinetic complement to primal emotion and calculating reason. Physicality drives reader identification and, at its most extreme, triggers an atavistic response when the reader is forcefully immersed in the narrative — he or she is now trapped in the pitch black cellar as the awful tread of some unknown thing approaches; he or she experiences the mind-numbing revelation as heretofore scattered clues coalesce into dreadful alignment.  Gavin’s protagonists are not always sympathetic, nor ought they be, but they are real and their plights compel us to empathize, to stop and put ourselves in their shoes, and to gaze with them for a few moments into the abyss.

“May you live in interesting times,” goes an ancient curse. Indeed, the times are interesting. Amidst the usual wars, famines, plagues, and general societal ill will, many parts of the world are suffering from a precipitous economic downturn, the likes of which has not been seen since The Great Depression . There is no telling how this global financial implosion will affect the publishing industry over the long haul. However, the appetite for horror fiction remains strong by all accounts, and perhaps that has something to do with our human need to contextualize and categorize, to peel back the layers of the scab and see how deep the wound really goes. Tales of the occult and the weird have always flourished during eras of real world strife. Humanity’s innate creativity and morbid curiosity persists in the face of doom and gloom.

At this juncture, small and independent press support for the horror and dark fantasy genres is prevalent enough to suggest another golden age of the short form. Economic futures may be cloudy, but I am convinced that here, as the first decade of the Twenty-first Century draws down, the rich tradition established by Poe, Le Fanu, Shelley, and the rest, has never been in better form, nor its future more assured, as represented by Richard Gavin and his The Darkly Splendid Realm.

To new writers, and especially to young writers: expect resistance. I am forty-three. I’ve written since I was five. I know one thing if I know anything.

They will try to stop you.

Resistance to artistic aspiration is typical. In general, people aren’t going to leap onboard your dream train. It’s cute for a teenager to talk of becoming a novelist, or a poet. The gloss is tarnished once you travel beyond the solar system of middling youth and into young adulthood. If it has not already begun, it will begin. If it has begun, it will now begin in earnest. People will gently, or not so gently, undermine your artistic endeavors. How will you pay off your loans? How will you pay off a mortgage? How will you afford a family? What will become of you?

Grow up. Get real. It’s for your own good. We love you. Stop, just stop.

They will attempt to subvert you. They will attempt to cajole and coerce you. They will roll their eyes and shake their heads and talk about you in hushed tones of mourning. When you pursue the dream of being an author, people always mourn you. They will bargain with you. They will read your words and pronounce you No Hemingway, no Jackson, no McCarthy. They will probably be correct in this latter judgment. It doesn’t matter. Hemingway was no Faulkner, Jackson was no Shelley, McCarthy is no Steinbeck. None of them were Shakespeare. Be sure they were told this or something like this and by someone who loved them, wanted the best for them.

Print is dead. Publishing is dead. No one reads. We love you. So stop.

They’ll do anything to blunt your progress, to deflect your trajectory. They’ll offer you a raise at the sausage plant. They’ll marry you, knock you up, or get knocked up. They’ll send you down the trail behind a team of huskies. They’ll jail you. Drug you. Withhold love. Punish you. Blast your mind with a 24 hour news cycle and infinite cartoons on the Cartoon Network. They will guilt you for the hours you spend apart, writing, dreaming. The most insidious of them will publish you, review you, praise or condemn you, encourage you to rest on your laurels or to simply quit, the world is better off without you, because you’ve made it, or because you never will. And so they say, Stop. Quit. We love you. Come back to us, don’t leave us here.

They will do anything to stop you. Remember. They love you. You have to be ready for that.

A litany of topics regarding the weird with mention of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All.

Weird as the New Modern

I like The Cure. I’m also a fan of the Toadies. Here are the Toadies covering “A Forest.”

I’ve been friends with John Langan for over a decade, so let that serve as full disclosure. The thing of it is, we became fast friends because we admire one another’s writing. John and I made our pro debuts in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction a month or two apart back in 2001. We began to correspond via email and pretty much just bonded.

I loved his first collection, Mr. Gaunt & Other Uneasy Encounters. It’s a great work that did its job in getting him on the map, especially that title novella that pours forth with overtones of MR James and HP Lovecraft. These days, his presence in horror anthologies–originals and year’s bests–is ubiquitous. He has become a must-have, go-to author for editors putting together cutting edge horror and dark fantasy.

The Wide Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies is the culmination of all that celebrated work he’s done the past four or five years. Much as I adored that debut collection, this latter book achieves what so few sophomore efforts ever do–it thoroughly surpasses its predecessor. John is an academic and there’s a demented, albeit surgical, preciseness to the fashion that he dissects classic horror tropes and then reassembles them into some gory jigsaw. In a Langan tale you’ll get vampires and ghouls, werewolves will hunt their prey to earth, and cosmic horrors will unfold origami-style in a cascade effect of stars blowing their fuses.

Satanic fertility cults and war-haunted criminals, crazed lit professors who want to give you the straight dope on Poe, paper balloons from hell…but all of it reimagined, distorted, welded like Scorsese, Lovecraft, and Bergman mutated from a test tube and unleashed upon a hapless world, a tri-headed, fire-breathing destroying angel, twenty stories high and lurching across the plain toward your city with hell in its eyes.

I endorse it heartily.

to a thumb drive/external hard drive/email folder/ or a cloud service, such as SkyDrive or Dropbox, wise up. Or buy yourself a giant box of Kleenex, because you’re going to need something to soak up all those bitter tears one of these days.

In other news, if you are a new writer and are not familiar with Writer Beware, get hip. The sharks are always circling.

Thank you to my girlfriend Jessica for her efforts to help put together the Inquiring Minds show, and for her tireless support of me and my writing each and every day. I love her dearly. It is difficult, putting up with a writer. And drawing to the horror suit? The gods are cruel. It’s an old saw, but true–you are only as successful as the people who love and support you.

Jessica and I at the Diwali Festival in New Paltz 2013. Courtesy J. Giralico

A terrific reading at Inquiring Minds last night, thanks to Deborah and the rest of the staff. Jessica emceed the event with aplomb. The store was packed and John and I signed numerous books before and after the main event.

John read the opening from his meta-horror tale “The Revel.” He crushed it. I’ve been to many appearances with JL; this one was exceptional. The reading space at IM is intimate–the author is seated five feet from the front row of the audience, so it’s a different experience from most venues. There’s a sort of MR James reading a Christmas ghost story to friends vibe and I think that brings out the best in us. I drank a hell of a lot of McClelland’s and read “Slave Arm.” Afterward, we had a fifteen minute Q&A. More scotch, cookies, and mingling with guests. Then the staff threw us out.

Tonight I will be at Inquiring Minds of New Paltz with John Langan. We’re supplying food and booze. Thank you to events coordinator Deborah Engel-Di Mauro, and to my wonderful girlfriend Jessica Maciag for all their work putting this together.

I’m reading a story called “Slave Arm” and signing afterward. Hard R for those deciding whether or not to bring kids or easily shocked in-laws.

You can find “Slave Arm” in Blood Type: An Anthology of Vampire SF On The Cutting Edge along with stories by Stephen Graham Jones, Jay Wilburn, and Tim Waggoner. Proceeds go to the The Cystic Fibrosis Trust.

We had a solar eclipse this morning. So I’m sure everything will be fine.