2007, Night Shade Books

From out of the blue, Laird Barron burst onto the scene in the early '00s as a fully formed writer, a literary Athena born adult-sized from the head of Zeus. Since then, he has racked up Year's-Best reprints and Bram Stoker Award, International Horror Guild Award and World Fantasy Award nominations the way you or I might rack up billiard balls. Perhaps you've heard of him.

Or, more likely, perhaps you haven't yet. That may be because Barron has only a handful of stories to his name so far. Lucky for you, most of them have been collected in a handsome volume from award-winning small press Night Shade Books. Spanning Barron's output from 2000 through 2007, these 9 tales (10 in the special limited edition, which includes his first published story, "Hour of the Cyclops") appeared in venues better known for science fiction and fantasy than horror. But rest assured, horror they are. Supernatural, cosmic horror -- exactly what Lovecraft, Machen and Bierce would be writing today if they were still around.

Like those past masters, Barron writes phantasmagorias, hallucinatory nightmares of worlds beyond his characters' control, where the veil can be torn away for a moment to reveal, ever so briefly, the true face of reality. In "Old Virginia", we meet a Cold War-era operative assigned to protect a group of scientists conducting telepathic experiments on a subject they have mistakenly, and fatally, assumed to be human. "Shiva, Open Your Eye" introduces us to a serial killer who believes himself to be an avatar of God, and may in fact really be so. "Procession of the Black Sloth" is original to the collection, and one of the strongest horror novelettes in recent memory. A corporate spy is sent to Hong Kong to find out who's selling industry secrets to the competition. Instead, what he finds is a world of witchcraft, horrific hallucinations and shifting realities, all on a road leading straight to damnation.

"Bulldozer", one of my favorites from the collection, could be described as an episode of Deadwood by way of Arkham. A Pinkerton detective travels out west in the late1800s, the tail end of the gold rush, to find a criminal who was once a strongman in P.T. Barnum's circus before running off with the showman's money and leave a string of corpses in his wake. Of course, this is no ordinary criminal, and as with so many of Barron's stories, we soon learn the strongman is an acolyte of no ordinary god. The no-ordinary-criminal also figures in "Proboscis", which contains some of Barron's best character work as a down-and-out actor travels with a group of bounty hunters into fiercely original nightmare territory.

Nominated for the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards, "Hallucigenia" is a dark, frightening novella in which a wealthy captain of industry is so plagued by otherworldly horrors he can no longer discern what's real and what's not. "Parallax", another strong piece, shows us what happens when the scientific principle that an object appears displaced when seen from two different points is taken to a terrifyingly personal level in the story of a missing person, while "The Royal Zoo is Closed" details the end of the world through the eyes of a jaded, shiftless man who couldn't care less.

But the coup de grace is the title story itself, "The Imago Sequence." An aging bruiser is sent by his only friend, a wealthy classmate, to investigate the history of a series of mysterious, disturbing photographs bought by his uncle, who has disappeared under strange circumstances. Over the course of the investigation, he learns that quite a few of the photos' previous owners have disappeared, while others wound up in the loony bin. Add a not-so-religious cult, a disturbing trephination scene and a kicker of an ending, and you've got nothing short of a horror masterpiece.

What makes Barron's stories so special is not just his fertile imagination but also his attention to language. His writing is smooth, crisp, evocative, and at times hypnotically lavish. He is clearly a writer who knows the power of just the right word at just the right time. Now is the perfect time to discover Laird Barron's fiction for yourself, and The Imago Sequence and Other Stories is the the perfect place to start. It's one of the finest horror collections of 2007.