Laird Barron - The Imago Sequence and Other Stories

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Laird Barron – The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2007, hc, 239 p.; this edition Ebook)



Cover: Eleni Tsami

Contents:

Old Virginia (2003)
Shiva, Open Your Eye (2001)
Procession of the Black Sloth
Bulldozer (2004)
Proboscis (2005)
Hallucigenia (2006)
Parallax (2005)
The Royal Zoo Is Closed (2006)
The Imago Sequence (2005)

American Laird Barron began publishing in the new millennium. Starting in poetry he sold stories to F & SF and quickly made a name of himself especially in Lovecraftian fiction. Unlike many other writers he didn't start with outright pastiches but stories sharing the atmosphere of the Cosmos. Combining elements from horror, pulp and noir, featuring often macho heroes confronted with the fragmenting reality of the New Weird. Born in Alaska, his stories often display a compelling impression of authenticity, it is all very American, but with an often impressive literary voice.

This collection – his first – won the Shirley Jackson Award in 2007. Barron wrote a lot of stories and novellas over the years, then he concentrated on a couple of noir novels about a mob enforcer in Alaska. Forthcoming is a Conan novella in the ongoing Heroic Legends series of Titan Books.

Old Virginia (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2003)

Deep in the woods of West Virginia. 1959. Garland is a veteran of the two big wars, but working for the CIA in Cuba he failed. Now he and a couple of other enforcers are baby-sitters for project TALLHAT, a hush hush experiment of MK-ULTRA. The scientists do experiments with old and seemingly senile Virginia who is supposed to be a psychic remote viewer. Or is she? Soon the group is under attack. Is it the commies? Or has it something to do with the vanished Roanoke Colony and CROATOAN? Something evil is lurking in the woods, and it will turn their brains to jelly.

For such a short story Barron throws in a lot of different tropes and ideas. Old used-up veterans, CIA black ops, political problems in the Cold War, old entities and historical mysteries. Some nightmarish visions thrown in and the expected down-beat ending.

Shiva, Open Your Eye (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2001)

PI Connell searches for 30 missing persons on the farm of the narrator. Who is a monster which lived before the coming of the dinosaurs. His current life-cycle is ending, so he goes to sleep in the sea.

Told without any dialogue, this begins again with a familiar setting but becomes philosophical musings about monsters and dark gods. Tottering on the small line between pretentious and original.


Procession of the Black Sloth (Original to the collection)

Royce is private security and send to Hong Kong. There is industrial espionage at an American corporation. Going undercover he moves into a guarded complex to spy on Coyne, who is a suspect and lives with his old mother. Royce gets acquainted to the colony of Americans and Europeans living there. The job is boring and tedious, Royce gets ever more paranoid, caught in a haze of too much booze and boredom. He begins to suffer blackouts, unexplainable things happen. Coyne's mother is part of a group of old women around Mrs. Ward, who seem to lead some sort of pagan cult, amusing herself with native rent boys. Royce descends into a spiral of madness.

Complex and ambitious, high on dark atmosphere, machismo, and hopelessness, there are no happy people here. The hapless protagonist, a professional liar, gets trapped into a bleak and absolutely joyless world of foreigners living in the Far East. It remains ambivalent if the protagonist just gets mad or runs afoul some supernatural conspiracy in the guise of Asian Horror Cinema. The best here is the bleak and horrific atmosphere. There is some impressive writing on display, some choice truly nightmarish parts. Still I thought the story too long for its own good, sometimes a bit too rambling and the ending a bit too ambivalent.

TBC.