Tags
American Literature, Book review., Books, Cosmopolitanism, Evolution, Fantasy, H. P. Lovecraft, Homosexuality, Horror, Humanism, Laird Barron, Mysterium Tremendum, Occultation, Pershing Dennard, Procession of the Black Sloth, Royce Hawthorne, Strappado, The Broadsword, The Imago Sequence, Weird Fiction
Not only is there little serious literary criticism about Laird Barron on the internet, but there is also a shortage of biographical information about this apparently-Alaskan horror author, which is rather unhelpful for one such as myself, who assumes that at least seventy percent of literary criticism should be psychoanalysis. Barron’s sole publicity photograph leaves one with the impression of a sturdy but somewhat soft American – (from his sturdiness he could only be an American) – who is gazing at his readers with one unnervingly intense eye and one gaping lunar crater. But what is behind this eye patch? – another eye? – or no eye? – or a raw, moist mass of overflowing maggots and translucent membrane and shrill, hyena tittering?
Upon reaching the end of Barron’s short-story collections The Imago Sequence (2001-2007) and Occultation ( 2007-2010), I was certain that Barron must be a gay man. I was convinced of this even before I had read his stories which feature gay characters – “Mysterium Tremendum” and “Strappado.” Let me hastily add – before you get the wrong idea – or before the only lawyer in Alaska, if there is one, starts emptying cupboards in search of his typewriter – that Barron is as straight as a Roman road. The few facts that I have garnered about him include that he is happily married. But the majority of his stories are variations upon the same idea: that a drearily masculine “tough man” – (even his gay characters are mostly macho and unimaginative) – is conquered by forces which are extravagant, gorgeous, gaudy and – if not necessarily homosexual (which is in itself a depressingly human concept) – then quite definitely camp.
What could be more camp, for example, than this jaunty-dastardly invitation to join Satan’s legions (from “Mysterium Tremendum”)?:
“Alas, nice guys do indeed finish last. I, however, believe in second chances and do-overs. Would you like a do-over, Willem? You’ll need to decide whether to come along with us and see the sights. Or not. You are more than welcome to join the fun. Goodness knows, I hope you do. Tommy does too.”
The tone of this address contrasts deliberately – almost abrasively – with that of the glum Willem’s earlier fretting over his inconsequential relationship troubles. But all of Willem’s problems can be resolved simply with a “do-over.” Elsewhere, in “The Broadsword,” the invading and all-powerful extraterrestrials turn out to be as frightening as the Monster Mash:
Immortals have no need for offspring. We’re gourmands, you see; and we do love our sport. We devour the children of every sentient race we metastasize to… we’ve quite enjoyed our visit here. The amenities are exquisite.
Darling! Just as the alien’s weapon “twinkled like Christmas lights,” the interior awaiting his victim is as kitschy and as sumptuous as Christmas in the shopping mall:
An eternal purple-black night ruled the fleshy coomb on an alien realm. Gargantuan tendrils slithered in the dark, coiling and uncoiling, and the denizens of the underworld arrived in an interminable procession through vermiculate tubes and tunnels, and gathered, chuckling and sighing, in appreciation of his agonies. In the great and abiding darkness, a sea of dead white faces brightened and glimmered like porcelain masks at a grotesque ball.
One almost grimaces at the tastelessness of it all – eternal, gargantuan, vermiculate – everything is thoroughly over the top! “We love you, Percy” the alien whispers, like a tipsy aunt under the mistletoe, except that the alien is about to ram a needle into Pershing’s eye.
The torture and dismemberment which one encounters throughout Barron’s fiction is chiefly a sort of eroticism – as graphic and as fascinating as pornography – not least in “Bulldozer” when Jonah Koenig’s fist disappears into the monster’s opening “terrible flower.” The sex in Barron’s fiction is virtually indistinguishable from the violence, and the sexual exchanges between his characters resembles a meaningless, emotionless torture, with a brutality that can at times bring a tear to the eye:
Royce lay flattened and nearly lifeless from absolute exhaustion… Her palms ground into his chest and he winced, thinking dimly of the bruises sure to come… He bucked in pseudo-orgasms… fire turned his lungs to ash and black tracers shot through his brain.
At times, these sex scenes are like descriptions of the cannibalistic mating between insects. In “Mysterium Tremendum,” sex and violence are seamlessly fused, as some poor “clean shaven, muscular” young students are lavishly smashed up in an orgy of carnage by a crew of rampaging gay warriors. In “Catch Hell,” Sonny Reynolds hilariously perishes after ejaculating out his own “decomposing” insides. Even this is not real horror – Sonny experiences an orgasm so spectacular that one can feel only envy.
The world of “weird fiction” has apparently crowned Barron as the heir to H. P. Lovecraft – (an enormously influential and innovative “weird” writer, who ended up consigning this initially-promising genre to permanent disreputability with his abysmal prose) – but Barron’s verdict upon the “civilised” psyche is inevitably different, and altogether less frightening, than that of Lovecraft. When Lovecraft was writing in the 1920s, he was genuinely unnerved by the fragility of white civilisation – those encroaching immigrants and Negro swamp zombies brought with them the possibility of a real doom – whereas Barron is living in an age which has largely forgotten the power of Lovecraft’s nightmares. A trip to another dimension, or to a Satanic grove, is rather like “coming out” – shaking off a dreary homebound humanity – and Barron’s cast of zombies and aliens are mostly welcoming. Lovecraft trembled at the otherworldly transformation or destruction of the psyche, but Barron merrily waves off Old Virginia riding piggyback on Captain Garland, and Nadine as she is percolated into insect consciousness, and the protagonist of “30” as a naughty tongue is slipped into his ear.
There is too much history – too much distance – too much culture and psychology – between Lovecraft and Barron, but, more damningly, Barron is even alienated from the horror of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. Dr Lous Creed, the hero of Pet Sematary, uses black magic to call back a demonic simulation of his lost son, Gage – this story is based upon the old Wendigo myth, and particularly Algernon Blackwood’s version of it – but the intensity of King’s novel derived from its unholy speculation – he was imagining something terrible happening to his own family. Danni, the heroine of Barron’s “The Lagerstatte,” similarly recalls her lost son and husband, but Barron is writing a cheery pastiche, and the format of the short story does not provide enough room and depth to cultivate any real human horror. Indeed, the hauntings in Barron’s story become as corny as MTV choreography: “When a city bus grumbled [rumbled?] past, every passenger’s head swivelled in unison… Every face pressed against the dirty windows belong to him.”
Barron discards the established victims of weird fiction – M.R. James’ celibate antiquarians and Lovecraft’s fleshless dreamers – in favour of tough, macho men of the world, who live in hotel rooms and bars – who are at home everywhere and nowhere. Significantly, Pershing Dennard’s home is a rented room in a converted hotel. Katherine Reynolds is put in a hospital which “they called… a home.” In the course of their private espionage assignments, Royce Hawthorne and Jonah Koenig become anchored in the shallow waters of unfamiliar towns. All of these characters drink alcohol like water, and it largely has the same effect upon them as water. Their lives are like aimless, endless parties – experience, to them, is a completely devalued coinage. The dialogue exchanged between them is snappy, sparkling, and largely meaningless – these characters recite one liners at each other and the result sounds curiously tinny and inhuman, like a chattering between birds. As the otherworldly looms, these characters’ lives turn out to be as worth saving as virginity.
Barron imagines the human condition as an interim and increasingly obsolete stage in a sort of cosmic evolution, and his fictions repeatedly discover that human beings are too selfish and limited to ever be happy with each other. The sorry couple in “30” are a case in point – they are set on an inexplicable course of mutual destruction, just because love is generally beyond them, and, faced with this disaster, the demonic forces can only offer “help.” The couples in Barron’s fiction are mostly bickering and out-of-kilter, and if they remain attached to each other it is only because they are too unimaginative to think otherwise. The sole exception to this rule can be found in “Parallax,” in which a tender couple are torn apart by forces which were apparently unleashed after some Satanic dabbling. Yet the Carsons will only be reunited in a world beyond the parallax, and much of Jack Carson’s personal hell is created by a demented detective who was excluded from Miranda’s love. In Barron’s world, horror and evil are under exclusively human copyright. Marvin Cortez is told, for example, that “It’s what you do well, hurting… I smell meanness cooking in your blood.”
Homosexuality – cosmopolitanism – transient experience and city living – furnish new opportunities to escape from humanity, and they possibly open new frontiers in our evolutionary development. The love between Glenn and Willem in “Mysterium Tremendum” is petty and troubled, and it turns out that Willem was always excluded from Glenn’s “inner circle,” so to speak. This old soldier fails to follow Glenn into the next world because he is too human, too unimaginative, and too square (the Satanism was picked up in college), and he is consequently condemned to a life of loneliness. The yuppies in “Strappado,” however, appear to be more loving, but this is the only one of Barron’s stories in which the dark forces are truly malevolent and frightening, possibly because they are initiated by humans alone.
The prospects for happiness – or at least freedom – are more favourable in a post-human condition. Mrs Chin muses upon “how much happier our lives would be, with the shark’s simple restorative capacity.” If Pershing Dennard is – unusually for Barron’s heroes – supplied with a bar full of friends and a spunky girlfriend called Wanda, then the only resort left for him is to take the whole lot of them with him into the next dimension. One may not recognise it at first, but this story has a happy ending, and even the little Eric who is lost along the way, rather like the “brat” in Saki’s “Esme,” is probably now in a more wholesome place. Eric may, after all, “have been crying from sheer temper. Children sometimes do.” Throughout Barron’s fiction, gruesome tortures abound, but largely to the same end as D.H. Lawrence’s conception of Poe’s terrors: “Man must be stripped even of himself. And it is a painful, sometimes a ghastly process.”
Royce Hawthorne may witness a man climbing a mountain of knives and his lover’s hideous torments, but the general merriness of Mrs Ward and her hags offers pure life. Royce seems to forget or lose his body somewhere in his story, until he is left with only a knotted, shrivelling comfort blanket of old consciousness, and, in an ironic affirmation of Ambrose Bierce’s cynicism, he really will have to pluck out his eyes in order to improve his vision. Wallace Smith can only be reconciled with his wife Helen if he accepts that her humanity is lost and that he will have to love her in her newfound form as a fabulous, cannibalistic gulper eel. Marvin Cortez ventures in quest of what he thinks is something otherworldly, but which will turn out to be a perfected image of himself. One of the Broadsword aliens sums these things up best: “We chop out all the things that make you lesser life forms weak and then pump you full of love.”
[There is further reading on Barron here and here. On the theme of “wierd fiction,” see Tychy passim for articles on M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood. Ed.]
Mike Allen said:
There may be serious literary criticism of Laird Barron’s fiction out there, but this review most definitely does not qualify.
Mike Allen said:
I might add that maybe Mr. Tichy should post his own picture up here on the website, so that he can be subjects to the same manner of unsavory personal sarcasm he employs here.
Mike Allen said:
I might add that maybe Mr. Tichy should post his own picture up here on the website, so that he can be subjected to the same manner of unsavory personal sarcasm he employs here.
Nicole said:
Refreshing as it is to see the lack of “serious literary criticism” and the “shortage of biographical information” being addressed, I’m afraid I find it very difficult to take a review at all seriously when it opens with 250+ words of passive-aggressive fluff that does nothing but speculate about a writer’s personal appearance and sexuality.
But hey. Maybe my definitions of “serious literary criticism” and “biographical information” just aren’t flexible enough.
JD said:
This is quite possibly the worst critique of I have ever read on line, in print or on the side of a bathroom stall. Aside from exposing your own homo phobia, inability to create or carry a written argument and sheer lack of research, your sentence structure is horrendous enough to make an English professor cry.
Please do the world a favor and stick to complaining about the current length of your neighbor’s grass or to your cat on the condition of it’s litter box. Leave the rest of creation alone, you will then keep from looking like any more of a fool then you already do.
tychy said:
… ahem… there’s no apostrophe in “its litter box,” if we’re on the topic of crying English professors. And it’s hard to take lessons on English from a writer who mixes up then and than.
has anybody got any thoughts on the article itself?
JW said:
I do have a thought: Your the basis of your article is flawed, and thus it is not very good.
From the psychoanalytic perspective, it suggests you have some issues with your sexuality. Projecting these onto the fiction you read makes you a very subjective critic, and not really worthy of attention (except, maybe, by people who consider Perez Hilton an important voice…irony, eh?).
For the psychoanalytic method to be employed correctly, the therapist must be capable of observing beyond his own issues. As you have failed to do this in the article, you should probably consider not using this method as a basis for further reviews.
Sadly, you made yourself look ill-informed and homophobic with this one. Good luck in the future.
ps-fighting with the grammar police is never a classy thing to do. Bit amateur, isn’t it?
griffinwords said:
There is so much wrong with this it’s difficult to know where to begin. Are you honestly surprised that people are stuck on the personal insults and mockery which seem to be the true heart of, and motivation for, this “review?”
T.B. said:
“has anybody got any thoughts on the article itself?”
I do! I do! I wanted to ask if you did any actual research at all before you wrote it? I’m pretty sure you didn’t, because if you had, then you’d know Mr. Barron lost his eye in a childhood battle with cancer, and I don’t think anyone could possibly be as heartless, cruel, inconsiderate and just plain rude as you were, had you actually taken the time to find out about it first.
tychy said:
enough of this! – it is just getting sillier and sillier!
if anybody can see anything genuinely “insulting” in this article then please quote what is wrong, and i will respond – there have been mea culpas on Tychy in the past… i’m not sure that mentioning that Laird Barron has an eye patch is “insulting” – indeed, i merely asked why he wore one and you have provided the answer, so the matter has been entirely put to bed.
this article is mostly descriptive and largely complimentary. it compares Barron to Poe – believe me, this is a compliment. the messing about at the beginning seems, to me, good humoured.
i don’t understand how an article which writes about homosexuality opening “new frontiers in our evolutionary development” can be… err… homophobic? indeed, i don’t know why you all assume that i am heterosexual.
why is there little serious literary criticism about Laird Barron? the answer seems to be increasingly apparent…
LSL said:
There is actually quite a lot of serious criticism and reviews about Laird and his fiction, and numerous interviews where he goes into great detail about his life. In fact, Laird links to most of them on his website and from his Livejournal. If you’d bothered to do any kind of serious research at all – or frankly, the most minimal amount of research – you’d know that. Your laziness and smarmy approach to your subject matter is what’s rude and insulting – as if you couldn’t be bothered for one single minute to spent any time finding out about the man you presume and assume so much about. And because I believe that you’re not stupid, and that within this protean mess of false assumptions about his personal life there are some interesting theories about his fiction, it’s also supremely insulting to you. You both deserved better.
FYI: Roman streets are straight. Roman roads have curves.