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A review by brucemri
The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron by Ross E. Lockhart, Justin Steele
5.0
Laird Barron's work is among the very best in contemporary horror. But any one author can only write so fast. The next best thing to more Barron stories is a volume full of work by other talented writers who show his influence on them in a bunch of ways. I liked some of these stories more than others, but there isn't a single one I thought wasn't worth my time, and as anthology readers know, that's not something you always get to say.
One of the stories, John Langan's "Ymir", actually uses specific characters from various Barron stories (to great effect - it really shines with both Barron and Langan merits). Many use various of Barrron's recurring milieus, from the post-human gladiatorial circuit to Alaska and southeast Asia. They all use the mesh of ambience and allusion that supports Barron's riff on cosmic horror. There are no happy endings here, and there's a lot of dissolution into the indescribable. But as with Barron's own work, there's a great deal of satisfaction, in dark tones. There's a great deal of bleak elegance, as in Langan's conclusion:
And he was gone. In his place was the child, the one who had traveled with her in the elevator, the one who had been standing on the ice in front of the Hummer, the one whose death she had felt tremble the steering wheel of her truck. Its mouth was open, alight with unearthly fire.
"You," she said. "Okay, I'm ready for this. Okay. Let's go. I'm ready."
As it turned out, she was not.
One of the many things I love about Barron's work is how thoroughly he steps out of the pit of protagonists who are all largely able-bodied straight white middle-class authorial sorts. Barron's characters have diverse relationships, and many are well below the middle class in social and economic terms. The stories here do likewise. In "Tenebrionidae", Scott Nicolay and Jesse James Douthit-Nicolay portray modern-day rail riders (as opposed to the Depression-era stock figures seen much more often). J.T. Glover and Jesse Bullington do a marvelous job with the Chinese community in Gilded Age Seattle in "Pale Apostle".
One of my favorite pieces in this volume is "Good Lord, Show Me the Way", by Molly Tanzer. It's all faculty e-mails between members of the anthropology department at an eastern university. They discuss the proposed dissertation topic, research, and (later) whereabouts of a graduate student who draws a bit too much on some of her experiences growing up in rural Washington. It's a great demonstration of just how it is that so many horrible things actually do unaddressed in real life and how so many monsters could hide. The professors' exchanges keep sliding into snark about snacks at the next department meeting and whether vegans are just lazy slackers or the vanguard of a moral enlightenment, and so on. Gradually the student's fate is lost in the shuffle, and while there may be regrets about it, there's always other matters that need attention to, so life continues.
But as I said at the outset, I enjoyed every single story here, and I expect this book to join my roster of volumes I re-read from time to time, when I want to savor a particular thing done really well. Very strongly recommended for fans of the genre, and as an introduction for those curious about what we fans have been enthusing about.
One of the stories, John Langan's "Ymir", actually uses specific characters from various Barron stories (to great effect - it really shines with both Barron and Langan merits). Many use various of Barrron's recurring milieus, from the post-human gladiatorial circuit to Alaska and southeast Asia. They all use the mesh of ambience and allusion that supports Barron's riff on cosmic horror. There are no happy endings here, and there's a lot of dissolution into the indescribable. But as with Barron's own work, there's a great deal of satisfaction, in dark tones. There's a great deal of bleak elegance, as in Langan's conclusion:
And he was gone. In his place was the child, the one who had traveled with her in the elevator, the one who had been standing on the ice in front of the Hummer, the one whose death she had felt tremble the steering wheel of her truck. Its mouth was open, alight with unearthly fire.
"You," she said. "Okay, I'm ready for this. Okay. Let's go. I'm ready."
As it turned out, she was not.
One of the many things I love about Barron's work is how thoroughly he steps out of the pit of protagonists who are all largely able-bodied straight white middle-class authorial sorts. Barron's characters have diverse relationships, and many are well below the middle class in social and economic terms. The stories here do likewise. In "Tenebrionidae", Scott Nicolay and Jesse James Douthit-Nicolay portray modern-day rail riders (as opposed to the Depression-era stock figures seen much more often). J.T. Glover and Jesse Bullington do a marvelous job with the Chinese community in Gilded Age Seattle in "Pale Apostle".
One of my favorite pieces in this volume is "Good Lord, Show Me the Way", by Molly Tanzer. It's all faculty e-mails between members of the anthropology department at an eastern university. They discuss the proposed dissertation topic, research, and (later) whereabouts of a graduate student who draws a bit too much on some of her experiences growing up in rural Washington. It's a great demonstration of just how it is that so many horrible things actually do unaddressed in real life and how so many monsters could hide. The professors' exchanges keep sliding into snark about snacks at the next department meeting and whether vegans are just lazy slackers or the vanguard of a moral enlightenment, and so on. Gradually the student's fate is lost in the shuffle, and while there may be regrets about it, there's always other matters that need attention to, so life continues.
But as I said at the outset, I enjoyed every single story here, and I expect this book to join my roster of volumes I re-read from time to time, when I want to savor a particular thing done really well. Very strongly recommended for fans of the genre, and as an introduction for those curious about what we fans have been enthusing about.