“Laird Barron is horror’s new messiah. If you want to experience this guy’s singularly brilliant writing...read this collection now.”
- Paul Goat Allen, B&N Explorations Blog
Today’s Free Fridays selection is a groundbreaking short story collection from horror master Laird Barron: Occultation and Other Stories. Since I don’t read a lot of horror myself, I’m turning to an expert in the field, book reviewer Paul Goat Allen, to introduce this week’s book:
“Inducing real fear in readers is no easy task—I can probably list the authors that have actually scared me in one breath: Lovecraft, Poe, King, Barker, Koontz, Matheson, and Campbell, although I’m most definitely forgetting a few… A lot of contemporary horror isn’t scary at all: it’s just gross. Shocking readers is easy. Scaring them takes talent.
Reading Laird Barron reminds me of what it was like discovering works from the aforementioned horror masters. The nine stories featured in his latest collection are painstakingly constructed—a darkly poetic narrative fuels these deftly plotted stories of existential angst…I’ll say it right now. Laird Barron is horror’s new messiah…And after you’ve devoured these nine dark gems, make sure you check under the bed before you go to sleep. As Barron wrote in “Mysterium Tremendum,” 'there are frightful things lurking in the shadows...' " (You can read Paul’s full review here).
Unsurprisingly, Paul also loved Barron’s new novel, The Croning, available now for NOOK.
Free Fridays Recommends
Each week, we ask our featured author to recommend a book or author that you may want to check out. Since authors are such passionate readers themselves, we thought you might like to find out what they love to read, too! Here’s what Laird recommends:
House of Windows by John Langan—it's among the finest supernatural horror novels to appear this young century. Stylish and lushly imagined, there is a hypnotic quality at play that intensifies the dread as events unspool within the narrative. Ghosts, hauntings, and visions of the arcane and the numinous richly accent a twisting tale of love, loss, and damnation. An acknowledged master of the short form, Langan arrives with a first novel that is remarkably assured, and most assuredly a chiller.
NOOK owners: go to shop and search for “Laird Barron” to download his incredibly haunting books.
