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Notes on the work of contemporary weird fiction author Laird Barron.
"I wrote it in the Lovecraft vernacular as a five-finger exercise." (Reddit)
the ineffable nature of the cosmos (19)
Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it. (19)
back when I lived on a rambling farm in Eastern Washington. (19)
lumpy from all the abuse he had subjected them to in the military (19)
The man wore a big smile under his griseous beard. (19)
He preferred scotch, (19)
I could have told him all these things and that he was correct in his assumptions, but it did not amuse me to do so. (20)
Winter makes me lazy. It makes me torpid. (20)
or ordering the prawns at La Steakhouse. (20)
State of Washington Private Investigator's License (20)
Murphy Connell (20)
boy who played football at the University of Washington (20)
and a girl that had transferred to Rhode Island to pursue a degree in graphic design (20)
owner of a Rottweiler named Heller (20)
an ancient pack of Pall Malls. (20)
stationed in the Philippines (20)
I boiled tea with these hands gnarled unto dead madroña (21)
and efficiently riffled the books and National Geographics on the sagging shelf that I had meant to fix for a while. (21)
those accipitrine eyes (21)
smacking my lips over toothless gums (21)
One quick call to the Bureau of Land Management (22)
peripheral logic, as his wife often called it. (22)
the hood of the requisite '59 Chevrolet squatting between the barn and the house. (22)
The Rough Beast slouching toward Bethlehem of its own accord. (22)
And what rough beast , its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Scientists claim that there is a scheme to the vicious Tree of Life, (23)
"The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree.I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species.
…As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.”
toss-axes do not ring in the tulgy wood (23)
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,And burbled as it came!
As a famous man once said, there are no accidents 'round here. (23)
No luck, no golden chances
No mitigating circumstances nowIt's only common senseThere are no accidents round here
indeed, I might fill a pocket book with that pearl of wisdom, (23)
Fear sweat is distinctive, any predator knows that. (23)
He came into the barn against the muffled imprecations of his lizard brain. (23)
Curiosity did not kill the cat all by itself. (23)A simple expression of a key Barron motif. Humans are curious, and in Barron's fiction those that would prey on us have learned to use this trait to their advantage.
His relentless eyes adjusted by rapid degrees, fastening upon a mass of sea-green tarpaulin gone velvet in the subterranean illume. (23)Illume appears to be a poetic substitute for "illumination".
This sequestered mass reared above the exposed gulf of loft, nearly brushing the venerable center-beam, unexpressive in its obscured context, though immense and bounded by that gravid force to founding dirt. (24)Gravid means "pregnant", or "full".
Oh, admittedly it was a shallow rendering of That Which Cannot Be Named; (24)
. . . so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named.
I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced.
In my mind, here was the best kind of art—the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few. (24)Barron explores the motif of occult art hoarded by rich collectors in "The Imago Sequence". The photographs in that story have a powerful transformative effect on "the ripe few".
Came the rustle of polyurethane sloughing from the Face of Creation; a metaphor to frame the abrupt molting bloom of my deep insides. (24)If the phrase "Face of Creation" is a specific reference, I am not aware of it.
There, a shadow twisted on the floor; my shadow, but not me any more than a butterfly is the chrysalis whence it emerges. (24)
prolongated, splayed at angles, an obliquangular mass of smeared and clotted material, glaucous clay dredged from an old and abiding coomb where earthly veins dangle and fell waters drip as the sculpture dripped, milky-lucent starshine in the cryptic barn, an intumescent hulk rent from the floss of a carnival mirror. (24)
I cannot explain, nor must an artist defend his work or elucidate in such a way the reeling audience can fathom, brutes that they are. (24)
As for my investigator, I like to remember him that way—frozen in a rictus of anguish at wisdom gained too late. (24)
Imagine that instant as the poor insect falls into the pitcher plant. (24)
He was an Ice-Age hunter trapped in the gelid bosom of a glacier. (24)
I suffered the throes of blossoming. (25)
It tends to affect my reasoning. (25)
In dreams I swim as I did back when the oceans were warm and empty. (25)
There I am, floating inside a vast membrane, (25)
a cigar is just a cigar (25)
The oceans have been decimated several times in the last billion years. (25)
and Homo sapiens formicating the earth. (25)
A cycle, indeed a cycle, and not a pleasant one if you are cursed with a brain and the wonder of what the cosmic gloaming shall hold for you. (25)
Like the old song, the more things change, the more I stay the same. (25)
When the lizards perished, (26)
and later wore the flesh and fur of warm-blooded creatures. (26)
When ice chilled and continents drifted together with dire results, (26)
Long ago in a cave on the side of a famous mountain in the Old World. (26)
we smoked psychedelic plants (26)
Purple dust and niveous spiral galaxy, a plain of hyaline rock broken by pyrgoidal clusters ringed in fire, temperatures sliding a groove betwixt boiling and freezing. (26)
The sweet huff of methane in my bellowing lungs (26)
They even prayed to terrible Shiva the Destroyer, who slept in his celestial palace. (27)
Nail me to a cross, burn me in a fire. A legend will rise up from the ashes. (27)
I vanished myself to the Bering Coast (27)
There is an old native ghost town on a stretch of desolate beach. (27)
Quonset huts with windows shattered or boarded. (27)
moaning through the abandoned FAA towers colored navy gray and rust. (27)
The shack waits and I light a kerosene lamp and (28)
Scratchy voice from a station in Nome recites the national news (28)
the United Nations is bombing some impoverished country into submission, (28)
war criminals from Bosnia are apprehended in Peru.(28)
A satellite orbiting Mars has gone offline, but NASA is quick to reassure the investors that all is routine (28)
in Ethiopia famine is tilling people under by the thousands, (28)
an explosion caused a plane to crash into the Atlantic, (28)
labor unions are threatening a crippling strike, (28)
a bizarre computer virus is hamstringing two major corporations (28)
I close my rheumy eyes and see a tinsel and sequined probe driving out, out beyond the cold chunk of Pluto. (28)
I see cabalists hunched over their ciphers, (28)
No monsters there, instead they lurk at school, at church, in his uncle's squamous brain. (28)
A refulgence that should not be seen begins to seep from the widening fissure. (29)
The story is my first pro sale. I wrote it in the Lovecraft vernacular as a five-finger exercise. … "Shiva..." emerged from an idea I had regarding the Old Testament God using Christ as a kind of finger puppet or sensor to interact with humanity. [RD_38v3mp]
Those are dim memories; easy to assume them to be the fabrications of loneliness or delusion. Until you recall these are human frailties. (25)***
There come interludes—a month, a year, centuries or more—and I simply am, untroubled by the questions of purpose. (25)
If I desired a thought from a passing mind, I plucked it fresh as sweet fruit from a budding branch. (26)
I was a man. And for great periods that is all I was. (26)
That I am a fragment of something much larger is obvious. (27)
There is a sense of urgency building. Mine, or the Other's? (28)
Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large…
(H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, p. 150)
Barron’s protagonist in Shiva certainly speaks Lovecraft's language. He wastes no time in telling us that humans are merely the latest in a long line of animals eking out a living on this planet, that we are dominant because contingent events have eliminated our predecessors, and that we have no greater purpose than that of nutrient.
While putting together The Imago Sequence, I envisioned a mosaic of loosely related, yet thematically reinforcing, stories that would explore humankind's insignificance when contrasted with the immensity of the cosmos. (Laird Barron, “The Laird Barron Sequence: Defining the Undefinable”, Clarkesworld Magazine) [CWM_21]
Hatcher kept some scotch in the pantry. Doctor Riley poured—I didn't trust my own hands yet. He lighted cigarettes. (…)
I sucked my cigarette to the filter in a single drag, exhaled and gulped scotch. Held out my glass for another three fingers' worth.
Royce swallowed hard and wondered briefly if he was going to be sick. He chewed on his knuckle. (…)
He decided to fix a drink, but the scotch was gone and the last beer too; even the mini bottles of Christian Brothers he kept in the pantry, with the oatmeal, flour, and mouse traps.
Royce walked downstairs without recollection of forming the intent to leave his apartment. Full dark had come and the sodium lamps kicked on, masking the faces of the guests in shades of red and amber. He scooped several glasses of champagne from an unattended platter, retired to one of the small tables, and drank rapidly and with little pleasure.
Following me clumsily to the study, he asked for some whiskey to steady his nerves.
("The Thing on the Doorstep")
Here—have another drink—I need one anyhow!
(“Pickman’s Model”)
Wallace waved him off, awkwardly poured a glass of milk with his left hand, sloshed in some rum from an emergency bottle in a counter drawer. He held his glass with trembling fingers, eyeballing the slimy bubbles before they slid into his mouth; poured another. (“Hallucigenia”)
I fired up a Lucky Strike and congratulated my pessimistic nature. (p.1)
the design was a relic of the Cold War, back when the KGB had teeth and CIA operatives smoked Lucky Strikes
The Reds had found our happy little retreat in the woods. (p.1)
Or possibly, one of my boys was a mole. (p.1)
Davis swore he had heard chuckling and whispering behind the steel door after curfew. (p.1)
He also heard one of the doctors gibbering in a foreign tongue. (p.1)
Nonsense, of course. (p.1)
"Garland? You there?" (p.1)
Hatcher was my immediate subordinate. (p.1)
I passed him a cigarette. We smoked in contemplative silence. (p.1)
"Richards. He didn't report any activity." (p.1)
A chill tightened the muscles in the small of my back, reminded me of how things had gone wrong during '53 in the steamy hills of Cuba. (p.1)
It had been six years, and in this business a man didn't necessarily improve with age. (pp.1-2)
"Strauss may have a leak." (p.2)
Even so, intelligence regarding this program would carry a hefty price tag behind the Iron Curtain. (p.2)
Project TALLHAT was a Company job, but black ops. (p.2)
Doctors Porter and Riley called the shots. (p.2)
Upon return to Langley, Strauss would handle the debriefing. (p.2)
Strauss had known me since the first big war. (p.2)
You take Robey and Neil and arc south; I'll go north with Dox and Richards. Davis will guard the cabin. (p.2)
... at his legendary farmhouse in Langley. (p.2)
Before the San Andreas Fault took root in my hands and gave them tremors. (p.3)
"Roger, have you ever heard of MK-ULTRA?" (p.3)
Most of the leaves had fallen in carpets of red and brown. (p.3)
President Eisenhower's imminent departure. (p.3)
The trouble had started at the top with good old Ike suffering a stroke. (p.3)Eisenhower had a mild stroke on November 25, 1957. "Ike", meant as an abbreviation of his last name, was a family nickname. It was immortalized in the 1952 campaign slogan "I like Ike".
Company loyalists closed ranks, covering up evidence of the president's diminished faculties, his strange preoccupation with drawing caricatures of Dick Nixon. (p.3)
I knew from the topographical maps there was a mountain not far off; a low, shaggy hump called Badger Hill. (p.4)
College instead of Korea for the lot. (p.4)
They hadn't seen Soissons in 1915, Normandy in 1945, nor the jungles of Cuba in 1953. (p.4)
swallowed a glycerin tablet (p.4)
Porter was lizard-bald except for a copper circlet that trailed wires into his breast pocket. (p. 4)In many of Laird’s stories, science and magic seem to exist along a continuum. This is beautifully evoked with the copper circlet, with its echoes of protective talismans and magic circles, and its trailing wires, clear evidence of a technological purpose.
You psych boys are playing with all kinds of neat stuff—LSD, hypnosis, photokinetics. (p.5)
The problem is the KGB has pretty much the same programs. (p.5)The KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti) was the Soviet Union security agency from 1954 to 1991.
You and Riley slipped through the cracks after Caltech. (p.6)
The ones who thought they were testing diet pills. You gave them, what was it? Oh yes—peyote! (p.6)
Unorthodox Applications of Medicine and Technology (p.6)
I had turned on the charm that had earned me the title "Jolly Roger,"
Shelves, cabinets, a couple boxy machines with needles and tickertape spools. Between these machines an easel with indecipherable scrawls done in ink. I recognized some as calculus symbols. (p.6)The scientific props, here and elsewhere, serve to naturalize the supernatural elements of the story.
Approaching the figure on the bed, I was overcome with an abrupt sensation of vertigo. My hackles bunched. The light played tricks upon my senses, lending a fishbowl distortion to the old woman's sallow visage. (...) My belly quaked. (p.6-7)Roger’s visceral reaction is interesting. The threat is perceived instinctively, reflexively, before becoming an object of conscious thought.
Hatcher kept some scotch in the pantry. Doctor Riley poured—I didn't trust my own hands yet. He lighted cigarettes. (p.7)More self-medication.
Subject X behind the metal door (p.7)
You're too young to remember the first big war. (p.7)
I was twenty-eight when the Germans marched into France. (p.7)
Graduated Rogers and Williams with full honors (p.7)
This happened before Uncle Sam decided to make an 'official' presence. (p.7)
I helped organize the resistance, translated messages French intelligence intercepted. (p.7)
Listening for armor on the muddy road, the tramp of boots. (p.7)
Roby had been a short order cook in college, (p.8)
I got a doozy of a migraine. (p.8)
They reminded me of rumors surrounding the German experiments in Auschwitz. Mengele had been fond of bizarre contraptions. (p.8)
He was one of the Grand Old Men of the Company. (p.8)
Why send us to a shack in the middle of Timbuktu? (p.9)Timbuktu is a city in the West-African country of Mali. Located on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, it became known in Europe through legendary tales of its fabulous wealth, and it subsequently for its remoteness and mystery. It has entered popular usage as a metaphor for a faraway place.
She's a remote viewer. A clairvoyant. She draws pictures, the researchers extrapolate. (p.9)Clairvoyance is the purported ability to gain information (often visual) through extrasensory perception. Remote viewing programs were established by the U.S. Army (Stargate Project) and the CIA (program SCANATE) in the 1970s. A 1995 report commissioned by the CIA found that it had not been proven to work, and was not used operationally. This has not discouraged writers from making hay with the possibilities implicit in such a program.
A mimeograph machine produced duplicate copies of a document by forcing ink through a stencil onto a sheet of paper. It was widely used before the advent of the photocopier in the 1960s.Numerous mimeographed letters and library documents comprised the file. (p.9)
One such entry from A Colonial History of Carolina and Her Settlements (p.9)
molecular biologist, a physicist, a bona fide psychic (p.10)Laird is again establishing the idea that the supernatural can be understood scientifically. Another interpretation would be that the intelligent supernatural entities are consciously using the bait of scientific knowledge in order to lure chosen human individuals. The theme of supernatural creatures using (scientific) curiosity to ensnare humans is one that Barron returns to with regularity. The roots of the idea are ancient (see: Garden of Eden, Faust) but the presentation is fresh.
That night I dreamt of mayhem. (p.10)Premonitory, symbolic, and/or frightening dreams are a frequent used device in Barron’s stories. They serve a similar function to the physical reactions noted previously. For the protagonist, they are warnings from the subconscious about an upcoming danger. For the reader, they are warnings from the author that the character is in danger. From a practical standpoint, dreams are useful for introducing information which the protagonist and the reader would otherwise be denied.
On the sixth morning my unhappy world raveled. (p.10)The events unfold at a pace dictated by the antagonist. She is in complete control of the situation from the start.
The rank odor oozing from him would have gagged a goat. (p.11)
Oh God! She rode us all night—oh Christ! (p.13)
Betrayed by that devil Strauss? Sure, he was Machiavelli with a hard-on. (p.13)
Nor did I dream of walking through the black winter of Dresden surrounded by swirling flakes of ash. (p.15)
A great hole opened in the ground before them. It stank of carrion. (p.15)
At least a hundred men, women and children. (p.15)The number tallies well with the missing Roanoke colonists (115). The historical record is silent about their ultimate fate. While death from starvation or assimilation into local tribes are likelier, Laird provides this glimpse at an alternative possibility.
Who are you? I asked as several portions of her shadow elongated from the central axis, dipped as questing tendrils. Then, a dim, wet susurration. I thought of pitcher plants grown monstrous and shut my eyes tight. (p.15)A tendril is the thin spirally coiling stem of a climbing plant that attaches to walls, fences, etc. (Merriam-Webster)
Mother wants to meet you. Such a vital existence you have pursued! Not often does She entertain provender as seasoned as yourself. If you're lucky, the others will have sated Her. She will birth you as a new man. A man in Her image. You'll get old, yes. Being old is a wonderful thing, though. The older you become, the more things you taste. The more you taste, the more pleasure you experience. There is so much pleasure to be had. (p.16)There is a lot to unpack in this paragraph. Given that many of the other stories in the collection will expand on these ideas, and that I’ll be looking at a few of them in the discussion, I’ll simply flag it and move on.
You know who Mother is—a colonist wrote Her name on the palisade, didn't he? A name given by white explorers to certain natives who worshipped Her. (p.16)We can infer that CROATOAN is Mother’s name. This raises a host of questions about language and culture in non-human sentient beings, but we will have to wait for answers.
I was the first Christian birth in the New World. (p.16)See previous note on Virginia.
Mother is quite simple, actually. She has basic needs . . . (p.16)
"Do you suppose men invented chess? I promise you, there are contests far livelier. (p.16)Chess is a two-player game which uses a board and 32 pieces in two colours. Each player has a king, a queen, 2 rooks, 2 knights, 2 bishops, and 8 pawns, which are weaker pieces and therefore considered expendable. The object of the game is to capture the opposing player’s king. The game is believed to have been invented in India sometime between 280-550.
The dinosaurs couldn't do it in a hundred million years. Nor the sharks in their oceans given three times that. (p.17)
With subtle guidance they—you—can return this world to the paradise it was when the ice was thick and the sun dim. (p.17)
We need men like Adolph,
Men who would bring the winter darkness so they might caper around bonfires. (p.17)
Hiroshima bloomed upon my mind's canvas (p.17)Hiroshima, a city on Japan’s Honshu island, was hit with a nuclear bomb dropped by United States Air Force on August 6, 1945.
and Verdun, (p.17)
I got as far as CRO before Virginia came and rode me into the woods to meet her mother. (p.17)