Occultation And Other Stories Laird Barron by Laird, Barron 9781597801928, 1597801925 instant download after payment.

Laird Barron has emerged as one of the strongest voices in modern horror and dark fantasy fiction, building on the eldritch tradition pioneered by writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His stories have garnered critical acclaim and 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. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.

He returns with his second collection, Occultation. Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation's eight tales of terror (two never before published) include the Theodore Sturgeon and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated story "The Forest" and Shirley Jackson Award nominee "The Lagerstatte." Featuring an introduction by Michael Shea, Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron's fans have come to expect.

Contents:

Introduction by Michael Shea
The Forest
Occultation
The Lagerstatte
Mysterium Tremendum (original to this collection)
Catch Hell
Strappado
The Broadsword
--30-- (original to this collection)

Starred Review. Writing with a poet's eye for detail and a folklorist's understanding of mythos, Barron lives up to his reputation for elegant, subtle, and nightmare-inducing tales with a Lovecraftian edge in his second short story collection (after 2007's The Imago Sequence and Other Stories), which includes six reprints and three original stories. In The Lagerstätte, a woman who cannot come to terms with her husband's loss clings to an occult artifact said to reunite lovers whom death has separated. A guerrilla art exhibit turns murderous in the taut and bloody Strappado. A mysterious guidebook leads four men on a terrifying camping trip in Mysterium Tremendum. Heartbreaking, hilarious, sophisticated, and gory, these stories will thrill, trouble, and haunt Barron's fans and have newcomers scrambling to search for his other work. (June)
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Starred Review Most of, maybe all, the nine stories in Barron's second book belong to his bold and artful variation, launched in The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007), of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, according to which hideous aliens are emerging from within the earth to wipe out humanity. One says “maybe all” because Barron's tight focus on a single protagonist or two intimately related ones makes us unsure that we're getting all the info we need to figure out just what's going on. That is, Barron puts us in a predicament like those of the protagonists, who hardly believe what they must notice—or die. “The Lagerstätte” may be what it seems, an unusually harrowing record of a woman descending into suicidal madness after her husband and son perish in a plane crash, but then she does hear voices, like the much more overtly threatened macho gay friends in “Mysterium Tremendum,” memory-haunted retiree in “The Broadsword,” ex-lover wildlife researchers in “--30--,” and young marrieds investigating the house inherited from his occultist father in “Six Six Six.” Unfortunately, voices aren't all that the woman in “Occultation” hears. In every tale, everything heard and unheard, seen and unseen becomes creepier and creepier. The protagonists try to escape by drinking, drugging, fighting, fucking, even fleeing. Yet it's doubtful any of their gorgeously scary stories has much of a sequel. --Ray Olson