by Laird BarronBlurb:
Over the course of two award-winning collections and a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron’s stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.
Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including “Blackwood’s Baby”, “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven”, and “The Men from Porlock”, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.
My Reaction:
In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge right away that I stopped reading after 70%, skimmed the next story ("Vastation"), and stopped even skimming after that. Technically, this is a DNF (did not finish).
I tend to think I'll enjoy short stories more than I actually do. Short stories simply don't (typically) offer the kind of character development and longer-arc story-telling that I like best, and they are frequently (unsatisfyingly) open-ended. There are exceptions, and I'm tempted by short story collections that sound promising-- but even when I enjoy them, I find them more work to read than a novel and requiring more motivation to finish. This collection was no exception.
Still, even as a person who wants to like short stories but often struggles with them, I can say something positive about these. First, I appreciate that at least I could more or less understand what was happening in (most of) them. (Parts of the first story were a little disorienting, though, and "Vastation" was definitely out there.) Sometimes it seems that short story writers take pride in being incomprehensible, laboring under the misconception that if the reader has any grasp of what is happening (much less why), it's a sign that the author lacks that ineffable something.
I also found more of these stories to have true conclusions than I've come to expect from modern short stories. Conclusions! A satisfying sense that the story has come to an intentional end rather than just keeling over in mid-stride! Amazing!
Actually, it's funny that I keep seeing reviewers complaining-- or maybe simply commenting-- that these stories lack cut-and-dried conclusions. Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but I have the impression that I knew basically where most of the stories/characters were headed, at the end. (Not-quite-a-spoiler alert: Usually, death or a fate worse than.) In any case, that I at least felt there was a sense of conclusion was good enough for me, I guess!
Then there's the writing itself, which is skillful. It's not quite to my personal taste, but I'd say it's well-crafted (if rather self-conscious).
Now for the negatives. I've already admitted that I'm probably just not the ideal reader for most modern short stories. Well, that's not the only reason I found myself unwilling to keep reading. Unfortunately, I find this style of horror ineffective. I'm not sure whether it's more properly called "cosmic horror" or "the weird"-- or even "Lovecraftian horror"-- but it just doesn't usually work on me. Some of "the weird" that I've come across (in my limited forays into the genre) have given me distinct moments of "The Creeps", but it's certainly not my go-to genre for all my spine-chilling, goosefleshing needs. At some point, I just find these stories of Infinite Weirdness... boring.
As others have noted, it's impossible to care what happens to most of these characters-- with the exception of "The Redfield Girls". However, unlikable, unsympathetic characters seem to be rather more common than not in this type of story. (Rather like those horror movies that apparently desire you to hate the characters so much that you won't mind seeing them finished off one by one.)
There was also a bit more gore than I like. I can deal with some of it-- especially if it seems necessary for the story/book, but gross-out/body horror-- while it does gross me well and truly out-- is not what I'm looking for in horror. I'm that weirdo who finds all the gratuitously grody zombie close-ups/zombo-cameos in The Walking Dead uninteresting, if not outright annoying. ("Look, we get it: Zombies be decomposin'. Now, can we get back to the survival story?!") These stories aren't even that extreme, in the realm of gross horror, but it was gross enough often enough that I noticed I was skimming to sidestep the blood and guts. Blugh.
...So, anyway... If you love cosmic horror, you should give these stories a try. If you're left cold by the unknowable Blah-Blah-Blah drifting in from some dark corner of the universe (like some sort of scary, gargantuan, blood-feasting jellyfish), maybe it's not worth the effort.
I see that many reviewers particularly enjoyed the last two stories, which I skipped, so I may go back and read them, if/when the mood returns. However, unless there's something unexpected in those last two tales, whatever it is that inspires such adulation from this author's many fans will remain a mystery to me!
I'm rounding up to a 3, but really, this is more of a 2.5 for me.
