In it's starred review, Publisher's Weekly says, "Barron intensifies the emotional impact of his fiction by providing protagonists who ultimately realize that their doom is inevitable and drag the reader down with them."
I could not agree more, in all that good and bad that goes with it.
The stories included:
"Old Virginia" (CIA agent protects a "psychic" asset circa Cold War; of course, it all goes to hell)
"Shiva, Open Your Eyes" (narrated from the perspective of a "monster" with a PI on his tail)
"Procession of the Black Sloth" (US ex-pat in Hong Kong finds that nightmares can seep into reality as he tries to untangle corporate espionage)
"Bulldozer" (Pinkteron agent hired PT Barnum hunts a killer who stole a Necronomicon-esque book)
"Proboscis" (an actor tags along with the poor man's Dog the Bounty Hunter team hunting a not so normal wanted man)
"Hallucigenia" (a wealthy man struggles to find answers after his wife's terrible accident)
"Parallax" (A famous artist's wife goes missing - as in vanishes from existence)
"The Royal Zoo is Closed" (end of the world...? Eh. Weak)
"The Imago Sequence" (a wealthy man tasks his thug/friend to acquire the final two paintings of a triptyche...paintings that, when taken together, could drive a man MAAAAAD!!)
Barron is categorized as a writer of "weird" fiction, meaning he traces his influences back to authors like Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, etc. - those folks who brought a sense of the unknown, cosmic terror to bear on us puny mortals. How can one man fight against malice that plots across eons. You can't, sorry, just start dribbling with madness.
I have a confession to make: I've never read Lovecraft, the popular face of weird fiction/cosmic horror. Though I have one of the Del Rey collections, it's sat collecting dust (and evil!!) for several years. I infrequently pick up short story collections, and while I've heard his style is good in small doses, such as short stories, I always want to read a whole book. Putting a bookmark in and thinking I'll come back to it always leads to failure*. So my knowledge of the Lovecraftian mythos is based on Wikipedia skimmings, pop culture references and BOOM Studios' early HPL comics.
After reading Barron, however, I may have to brave the abyss.
These nine stories are not all winners, but are all imaginatively written and uniquely crafted to bring forth an unsettling dread in the reader. To get criticisms out of the way first, the stories that hit a bum note were few: "Zoo" is an odd sketch that's too short to matter, "Proboscis" wasn't terribly engaging and "Bulldozer" feels like it's missing a little something. That's not to say they are bad. "Bulldozer" is a good story, and "Proboscis" just needs a little tweaking.
But here's the great thing. You might be thinking, "So 1/3 of the book is meh? Why bother?!" Those are three of the shortest stories, taking up a small number of pages. The meat of the collection rocks it on all creepy fronts.
Other reviewers have gone into the "manly man-against-Unknown" theme running through the majority of the stories. If you've read any of these "reviews," you can tell I'm not a literary critic. Barron does write stories with depth, not just a linked progression of cheap scares and gore. Whatever praise and acclaim he's gotten over the last decade or so is clearly deserved. Yet he's also writing modern pulp horror. I don't want to confuse you into thinking that they aren't intelligent or that they are out and out "literary" fiction.
There's a lot of prose that could be considered florid (like weird fiction masters of yesteryear) and diversions into our characters' heads that provide a greater understanding of their motivation than you would expect to find in a genre book (should you be an NYT reviewer). He finds a happy medium. My biggest worry as I started "Sloth," the first novelette of the collection, was the wealth of description and becoming drowned in it. I'm not a big fan of describing every little thing about the setting (or even the character - leave something to the imagination), and he seemed, until I got into the groove of his writing, to be an over-writer.
I realized, however, that his descriptions, though complex and with the potential to be flowery as a old woman's couch, were easily digestible.The language was evoking comparisons to normal touchstones in everyday life. Why create a metaphor that ends up confusing the reader?
His strongest stories are the title novelette, "The Imago Sequence," "Parallax," and "Procession of the Black Sloth."
The potential in "Imago" is easy to see: an everyman is looking for paintings that carry with them a curse to drive the viewer mad - if viewed in sequence. Well, our protagonist has seen the first and found it sticking in the back of his mind, bringing terrible dreams. What could go wrong when his boss/friend asks him to hunt down the other two? As both a title and concluding story, it stands tall above the rest as an expertly written piece. Of note is the inclusion of a lot of dialogue. This might sound silly, but Barron's stories are not talky, and that can hurt them. More dialogue and less creepy introspection and exposition is a good thing (and serves to break up mammoth paragraphs).
I won't say much about "Parallax," but the slow unwinding of the main character's backstory, centering around the ongoing hunt for his vanished wife, is not to be spoiled.
I made the mistake of reading a large chunk of "Procession of the Black Sloth" while eating. DO NOT DO THIS. In fact, don't eat anything immediately before, during or right after you read any of these stories. The mental unease he creates is swiftly transferred to your stomach once you start munching away on something. Why? You don't know if that food is going to suddenly turn into maggots as you chew. There, now you share my pain. "Sloth" is all eerie moments and some frightening, very visual scenes of pure horror. The main character has been hired to find a corporate spy in his company's Hong Kong office. The spy work, living the double life, isn't healthy for him, and on top of that, the apartment block he lives in was probably built on an ancient Chinese burial site for all the bits of eeeeevil seeping through the gaps. It's all a downward spiral, and you cannot help but ride it with the character.
I rated it 4/5 on Goodreads, and I'll stand by it on reflection.
-EMH
*Notable exceptions:
Sherlock Holmes - I have the two-volume Bantam mass markets and have read two of the novels and paused before diving into the short stories.
Stephen King's novellas - I tend to read them one at a time, here and there, though I power thru his story collections.
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