Friday, January 1, 2016

Answers to questions

If you are here, you are going to have questions. Let me attempt to answer a few of them.

What is this?

This is a blog, in which I’ll post some notes on Laird Barron’s stories.

Why?

That’s a good question. Laird is a contemporary author whose work, so far, I find fascinating, and I’m not sufficiently patient to wait until his career has ended to start analyzing why that is. There is no guarantee that his future output will hold the same interest for me. He will, I presume, continue to write what he wants to write.

Who are you?

Someone unqualified to be doing this work. I’m not a scholar, a writer, or a literary critic. I’m not particularly insightful, I have no doubt that my writing will leave much to be desired, and that I will frequently be wrong. If you care enough to comment and correct me, you will have been paying much closer attention than I will have had anticipated.

I’m a board game designer in my spare time, with a few published games. I had been working on a solo investigation game based on the works of Lovecraft, Chambers, Chandler, and Hammett for many months when I stumbled upon Laird Barron’s work (in a Cthulhu anthology). His stories are, if anything, more suited to the game in progress than the authors previously mentioned. They are more thematically coherent, and have shared elements which reward close reading. Both these attributes simplify the task of distilling and adapting the stories in a game format.

How is this going to work?

Poorly, is my guess. Ideally, I would love to produce a full set of annotations for each Barron story, but I lack the proper qualifications, not to mention the biographical information, correspondence, etc. which would make them complete and authoritative. That will likely be work of the next generation(s).

I like the format of the Lovecraft Reread over on Tor’s site. I plan on tackling one story at a time, probably in the order in which they are found in the published collections. I plan on highlighting the things that I have noticed, the elements which I have found interesting, puzzling, or frustrating. There isn't a lot of scholarship on Barron, and I expect that I will be asking more questions than I'll be able to answer, which I suppose is where scholarship needs to start.

6 comments:

  1. Am thoroughly intrigued. I love LB through (mostly) current work though I cannot imagine he can topple himself from lofty heights such as Broadsword, Myst. Tre. and others from collections 1 and 2.
    Procession may be my favorite story of all time which takes into account a thousand stories or more over twenty five years. I will check back here for sure!

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  2. I don't suppose you fancy looking at Proboscis any time soon, do you?

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    1. Proboscis is coming relatively soon. I'm doing the stories in 'The Imago Sequence and Other Stories' in the order in which they appear, so after "Shiva, Open Your Eye", I'll be doing "Bulldozer", "Procession of the Black Sloth", and "Proboscis".

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  3. You still alive out there? :)

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    1. Yes, indeed. New post on de Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" and the first part of the notes for "Procession of the Black Sloth" are coming soon.

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    2. Excellent. The Leech is hungry.

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