Reviews

Praise for The Imago Sequence & Other Stories:

“Horrors that defy description and challenge reader expectations charge the electrifying stories in this powerful debut collection. Barron synthesizes influences ranging from H.P. Lovecraft to hard-boiled crime fiction in nine ingeniously plotted tales whose many layers peel away to reveal highly original and viscerally unsettling premises. “Old Virginia” is narrated by a Cold War-era CIA agent, unaware that the chaos around him is due not to Communists but to occult forces escaping the control of the scientists he’s guarding. In the period western “Bulldozer,” a Pinkerton agent discovers that serial killings are part of an elaborate occult ritual for placating a supernatural entity. The title story concerns a triptych of photographs used by a malign cult to snare acquisitive art collectors. Barron intensifies the emotional impact of his fiction by providing protagonists who ultimately realize that their doom is inevitable and drag the reader down with them. These vividly imagined and eerily credible stories herald a potent new voice in horror fiction.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review


“Laird Barron’s The Imago Sequence and Other Stories is the portfolio of an emerging master of contemporary Lovecraftian horror, whose vivid impressionistic style unfolds gaping doom upon a cross-section of American North-westerners: wealthy playboys, washed-up actors, avant-garde artists, frustrated musclemen, and (going back in time) a Pinkerton gunslinger visiting the region. In time, Barron may make Olympia, Washington as sustainedly ghoulish a precinct as Lovecraft’s Arkham; he certainly has the imagination and rigor with the supernatural to do so.”

—Nick Gevers for LOCUS Magazine


“Laird Barron writes like a predatory insect, injecting larval nightmares that devour your brain as they grow, snatching unwary readers and dragging them down into a worm-eaten underworld riddled with madness. Passages of mind-rending beauty and awe recall the deep classics of cosmic horror, Lovecraft and Blackwood and Machen, while standing on their own as completely modern and original creations. The Imago Sequence & Other Stories belongs on every horror connoisseur’s shelf of landmark debut collections, sandwiched between Michael Shea’s Polyphemus and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood.”

—Marc Laidlaw, Author of the World Fantasy Award nominated The 37th Mandala


“Horror is of the Earth, as Laird Barron deeply, stunningly knows. Horror is Earth’s salutation to our mortality, its intimate touch of greeting, the touch of eons upon our little bubbling brains, upon our skins. In Laird Barron’s work, horror wraps its viscid lips around your hand, around your whole arm. It sits astride your shoulders like a demon baboon, and rides you down under the ground, forever. For my money, Laird Barron is far and away the best of the new generation of horror writers.”

—Michael Shea, World Fantasy Award winning author of Polyphemus


“A very impressive array of stories from a distinctive talent.”

—Don D’Ammassa, Critical Mass


“If you’re looking for an heir to the Lovecraft legacy, Barron holds the title.”

—Matt Adder for Bookgasm


More Praise for Laird Barron:

“Laird Barron, meanwhile, is rapidly maturing into a first-class writer of moody, tenebrous American horror.”

—Nick Gevers, LOCUS Magazine


“…Barron’s brilliant, fevered prose, humorous at times and hallucinatory at others, amplifies an awareness of the absurd becoming monstrous…the impression grows that Barron is a miraculous synthesis of Lovecraft and Lucius Shepard, with the original grotesque imagination of the one and the evocative density of the other.”

—Nick Gevers for LOCUS Magazine


“Barron jumbles language effectively: now the rough, formal drawl of the frontier, now the disjointed spectacular language of an Ezra Pound, a James Joyce…A shot of Cormac McCarthy and a shot of Raymond Chandler, neither shaken nor stirred: just pounded straight down.”

—Blunt Jackson for The Internet Review of Science Fiction


“…Laird Barron’s powerfully atmospheric “Hallucigenia,” a dark fantasy masterwork that blends Lovecraftian horror with particle physics.”

—Publishers Weekly