Image from Barron’s site
Laird Barron is one of the few post-Lovecraft horror writers that I enjoy. The others, off the top of my head, being Thomas Ligotti and (some) Stephen King, though I’m not nearly as knowledgeable about this genre as I probably ought to be. (If you haven’t read Nethescurial, it is available online for free legitimately, and is a good place to start with Ligotti.)
That is a prelude to noting that the Kindle version of Barron’s recent release, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, is on sale at Amazon until October 31st for $2. That’s a pretty good deal given that otherwise it is priced as a standard mainstream fiction release (around $20 for the hardcover from Amazon).
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All is a collection of short stories. These are not overly clever stories with twists that try to surprise you, but rather solid, almost straight forward tales that seem to move forward toward inexorable doom, which is exactly how I like my horror stories. I’ve only read the first two stories so far, so I can’t vouch for the entire contents, but I enjoyed both of them.
Somewhat related, are there any other writers in this vein that I should be aware of?
* Perhaps Clive Barker deserves a seat at this table, but I haven’t read anything by him in more than 15 years, and so I don’t know if the actual texts live up to my memory of them.
Awesome, thanks for the heads up. That looks to be perfect reading for October, and I’ve been meaning to pick up one of Laird’s collections. Inertia has been overcome.