I absolutely want to write something longer about this but it's insane how deeply every story here is suffused with horror at heterosexuality, even though I'm not sure the author realises it. It's really noticeable when you get to the best story in the book which is entirely about gay men and the only 2 women appear as dangerous interlopers that suddenly all the other stories got put in perspective for me. There's a heavy sense of gay anti natalism and het sex and the nuclear family as something that can only lead to horror. Idk if I'm reading too much into it but it just Makes Sense to me and after finding the first few stories a little disappointing when I got to Mysterium Tremendum which is an amazingly creepy and gay novella that suddenly everything clicked into place and I appreciated all the rest all the more. The story quality varied a bit but that one is great. ( )

Those of you bumming out about later Barron or ones that only know him from his weaker (IMHO), newer stuff need to go back to the two Nightshade Press collections of his earlier stuff and see what the man is capable of. This collection and The Imago Sequence are stunning and original new horror in the Lovecraft vein without being anything near a pastiche.

Every author is entitled to explore whatever they want, but we as readers don’t have to like it any more than we want to. I am confident Barron will find his way, if not back to stuff like Occultation, then into something just as interesting in the future. He just ain’t there now. But here we can revel in what there is. ( )

“Her trail started at the edge of camp. It was easy to follow the broken twigs, the gore-splattered needles and leaves, and though it wound serpentine through brush and trees, he quickly guessed the destination. She’d been dragged by her hair, like a carcass.
It was a long, bloody crawl to the den.
He lay on his side, panting, fixated on her sandal. The sandal was caked in black grime and wedged between split halves of a stone. He’d seen the other shoe a ways back, dangling from a bush. The sun fell below the jagged rim of the mountains. Heat rapidly dissipated, sucked into the advancing red shadows. He mumbled and whined to himself, incoherent except for flashes of insight that urged him to slice his throat and be done, and he would’ve committed the act, except when the moment came, he realized he’d dropped the improvised blade, that it was lost. And so all was lost. The moon crept up from its lair and grinned its devil grin. She cried out, muffled and faint. Or a coyote yipped over the ridge. He trembled from head to toe, galvanized to pitiful life by the image of her screaming, buried alive.”

—“—30—” by Laird Barron

𝘖𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 is a good collection of creepy stories steeped in the obsession of transmogrification. The very bad kind of tranformation. And there is rarely anything on the shadowed blue marble of Barron’s worldscape that can stop that “monsterification”. Which is cool. I can roll with that. But it’s not a great collection. The mutations are gory and gooey and sometimes portend to an even greater darkness (the bloody tip of the chthonic iceberg). The characters, though, are mostly watered down human tea. And it’s only fitting to equate these doomed bastards with potations since humans don’t seem much else in Barron’s world except meat broth and compost for the demon horde. I really couldn’t care about any character in this entire collection as much as I did each one’s gloopy demise. It’s so much better when you feel sorry for the poor fucker—otherwise it’s nothing more than a series of different matter in entropy, higher states to lower liquified states, and you can’t even remember the name of the dude who’s now a puddle and ruined your good goddamn shoes. And the clichés . . . Jesus . . . even I at least wrote “𝘤𝘩𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘤 iceberg” in this post.

My hopes were set high for this collection. I’d read his novel, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘐𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴, and really dug how much terror could be squeezed from scenes outside of the action. Locked doors and whispering baby voices . . . aliens? Monsters? I mean, wasn’t the gladiatorial shit enough? I loved that weird mélange he’d created. And 𝘖𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 had come highly recommended, it was in my bailiwick, had all kinds of blood and bloody beings, so . . . I don’t know . . . weak human tea, like I’ve said.

I will continue to read his newer fiction—maybe he’s embraced subtle horror and pathos over hotel intercourse and splatter. Yeah, there’s a lot of fucking in this, which, you know . . . I should’ve liked more. Oh well. I’m sure if Laird read my stuff he’d say it needed more humping. And Lovecraftian leviathans. And what’s with starting all your sentences with “and”, Mr. Sherman? And he’d be right.

Write?

I do need more humping in my fiction. But I promise you that when those lovers die mid-thrust, you’ll fucking care about their destruction.

Cthulhu iceberg? ( )

Pet peeve, in my world, the past tense of light is lit. He lit a cigarette, not lighted. I can't count the number of times I read lighted in this book and each time my teeth ground (grinded) against each other. Aside from that, there were a couple of decent stories in here, although they mostly read the same. Characters with different names in different stories reminded me of each other. Word usage was repetative. Readers remember odd descrptive word choices, so if a writer uses something strange once to describe something they shouldn't do it again, just makes the reader think, "hey, I read that 40 pages ago, it's not so cool now." Not only does it take the reader out of the story but it lessens it. The first few in this collection were a bit of a hard slog. The latter stories were better. ( )

A collection of mainly average stories, but varied in character, looking at various different aspects of weird fiction and urban unease. Some very very good, but in the main, they may have been reasonable in topic but strained or too long in delivery. Good for the afficiando but difficult for the casual reader. ( )