Customer Reviews

The Imago Sequence and Other Stories

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3 star:		(1)
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Out of all the books I've read, and all the stories I've enjoyed, I'm never really sure which one I'll sit down to review until I actually start typing. I read this book, The Imago Sequence and Others, a few weeks ago and it's really stuck with me.

This is the author's, Laird Barron, first collection of short stories. I'm always on the lookout for new horror, so when I saw this book on the shelf in the library it grabbed my attention immediately.

The collection starts with "Old Virginia ", a story about an over-the-hill CIA agent assigned to guard a strange experiment in the woods of West Virginia. Of course, something goes wrong and the experiment gets out of hand, leading inevitably to very bad things. I really liked the tone of this one, and it sets the stage very well for the stories that follow.

"The Procession of the Black Sloth" is a strange story about ghosts and witchcraft set in modern day China. I like the atmosphere and characters, but the ending was kind of a let down after such a good buildup.

"Bulldozer" is set in the Old American West, and follows a Pinkerton Detective on the trail of a murderous circus strongman with some very strange abilities.

"Hallucigenia" starts with a rich couple's encounter with a giant wasp nest in an old abandon barn. They both are attacked by something they don't remember. While his wife is in a coma, the husband investigates who owns the barn and tries to find out what really happened there. The imagery in this story really stuck with me, and this story is be my favorite of the bunch.

"Parallax" is another weird story, this time about a husband whose wife mysteriously disappears one day. The husband is accused of murdering her, but even though one police officer (the wife's ex-boyfriend) continually harasses him, nothing is proven. I don't want to give too much away about this one, because there's a twist ending or two.

"The Imago Sequence" is about a group of pictures that slowly drives everyone mad if they stare at them too long. This story is told so well one has to wonder why it wasn't done before (maybe it has, though, and I just don't know about it). This is my second most favorite story of the collection.

Three other selections, "Shiva, Open Your Eye", "The Royal Zoo is Closed" and "Proboscis" are your standard the-world-ends-with-a-whimper-not-a-bang type of stories. Their protagonists aren't really fleshed out and there is no real plot to get hooked into.

While this is a very strong collection of tales, there are a few things that did annoy me about many of them. The first is that old trope of giving away the ending as the start of the story. I know many writers use this because it's a good way to grab the reader and suck them quickly into the story, but if used too often it can be confusing and hackneyed. Secondly, Barron's characters all take way too many drugs. I don't have a problem with drug use, per se, it's just so blatant and pervasive in these stories that it gets a little hard to believe after awhile.

Overall, this collection is a very good read, and I would love to have a copy for my shelves. I'm always on the look out for new authors who write in the milieu made famous H.P. Lovecraft. In this book, Laird Barron has managed to create the same feeling of cosmic horror, without resorting to outright imitation.

The Imago Sequence is a collection of short stories and vignettes dealing with horror, perception, and sanity. There is a certain pulp factor in the characters, locations, and situations but these stories aren't just Lovecraft pastiche. Yes, these stories often deal with entities or forces beyond human understanding and perception and the consequences on the human psyche when the protagonist stumbles upon the unseen. Yet the better stories in the collection also more vividly portray the shift from skepticism to revelation to horror than much of the original Lovecraft mythos ever did. Some of the stories are weaker than others - some plots get too abstract or too formulaic.

Some readers might enjoy that many of these stories take place in a modern-era type reality. It's a double-edge sword. It is sometimes challenging to feel suspense when you consider that most of these protagonists have access to cell phones, laptops, and GPS.

The best stories in the collection are probably Old Virginia, Hallucigenia, Parallax, and The Imago Sequence. I felt Procession of the Black Sloth was the weakest - too long, without enough of a payoff at the end.

This collection includes:

Old Virginia: As President Eisenhower prepares to leave office, a retired CIA agent is tasked to protect scientists experimenting in an isolated West Virginia cabin.

Shiva, Open Your Eyes: An old man and a state property assessor begin a dangerous cat-and-mouse - neither are what they seem - in a remote Eastern Washington farm.

Procession of the Black Sloth: A corporate espionage expert is sent to Hong Kong but stumbles upon the surreal and mysterious in gate communities of the Hong Kong expat community.

Bulldozer: A Pinkerton agent hunting a supernaturally strong killer in the American Old West stumbles upon a mystery of cosmic significance.

Proboscis: A failed actor tags along with some bounty hunter buddies to catch a killer yet quickly the situation changes.

Hallucigenia: A wealthy playboy and his new young wife stumble upon a dangerous secret that forces the man on a journey of desperate research and discovery to understand what is happening.

Parallax: A grieving widower tries to comprehend his wife's disappearance and his life's decline.

The Royal Zoo is Closed: A young professional develops a sense of emotional paresthesia about his life and the world around him as he tries to understand why.

The Imago Sequence: A surreal photo leads a local tough-guy to investigate the photographer, gallery owner, and an isolated cult involved in the painting.

A powerful collection of short fiction, all the more impressive as it's Barron's first. In fact, when I try to think of a better debut collection in recent years, I can only come up with Kelly Link's as a rough equivalent.

Overall I'd rank it a tiny notch below Occultation, Barron's follow-up collection, only because some of the earlier stories don't have quite the same richness and complexity as the rest. Still, there's not a single piece here that's less than impressive.

The stories "Procession of the Black Sloth," "Hallucigenia" and "The Imago Sequence" rank up there with the best stuff in Occultation. This is a vital collection by one of the handful of most important writers of the fantastic (encompassing fantasy, science fiction or horror) currently active.

Since becoming engrossed in the works of Thomas Ligotti I've been seeking out weird horror stories. These are pretty much all I read right now. I found the works of Quentin Crisp and Mark Samuels, both kind of difficult to obtain due to the limited edition releases of their works through more obscure presses. These men possessed a slow - ponderous power in their works, quite distinctive in their own way but very tied in to the vibe that Ligotti possessed.

So after scanning Amazon I came across this collection of stories. Intrigued, I bought it and as soon as I got it read the whole thing, which is unusual for me as I usually put a book down after a few stories to give some freshness to the ones that remain.

Barron is like if Mickey Spillane wrote eldrich horror tales. Every one of his stories has a very distinct voice and even the ones that aren't in the first person are written very stylishly. This is definitely not Ligotti, but rather a very distinct and different take on horror fiction. It's tough to write stories that evoke the spirit of mind-paralyzing overwhelming horror that Lovecraft evoked without sounding derivative. I don't remember a single reference to any of the pantheon of Lovecraft beings, yet through many of the stories I felt that kinship Barron must have with Lovecraft. Many amazing and overwhelming horrors await our hapless heroes as they inch towards a fate that seems destined from the start.

He's also really good at evoking the feel and the environment of the State of Washington. Curiously enough, I was reading this book as I visited some relatives in Washington, seeing the state for the first time, and I could see and feel a lot of the locations that Barron writes about.

I highly recommend this collection and I am looking forward with great anticipation the next book from Barron.

Simply put, Laird's first collection is a must have, and one of the best collections of horror fiction put out this decade. Tons of style and attention to narrative detail, that frankly, makes the writer-me feel lazy in comparison. These stories are so well written, you could set your watch to them.

The images are horrifying and shocking in their otherness, and beauty. Laird often writes about otherness, but it's always the damaged and real characters who flounder and search for flawed bits of redemption who discover (or are culpable for) the otherness, the truly dying world. Cosmic horror abounds, and it achieves tangible fear and disquiet by the painstakingly built atmosphere, the sheer weight Laird brings to every story, and by the marvelously real zealots, who are your neighbors, who are complicit in the whole bloody mess.

Not a clunker in the bunch. Not even close. Favorites include BULLDOZER, a Pinkerton man blazing his own ruinous path toward a mysterious murderer; HALLUCIGENIA, a tycoon and young wife stumble upon a strange, deserted barn, and images and scenes throughout this story are simply stunning; and the novella new to the collection PROCESSION OF THE BLACK SLOTH, which is a big, bubbling stew of horror references, satire, tough-talking guys and dolls, and horror galore--so much creepy fun.

Can't recommend this book enough. If you don't buy it, you're a dope.

This book has been one of the most discussed-quoted-praised-criticised items since its publication, and hence it is rather difficult to believe that this was Laird Barron's first collection of short stories. The stories in this collection has been described with different kind of name-tags, but in my humble opinion they are examples of literature that Lovecraft, with the guidance of a very good editor, would have written in modern times. The author's vision is truly cosmic, and horrifying in terms of the fate that visits the hapless protagonists in the stories. Several of them are written so sharply that one gets into an expectant mode wishing a hard-boiled solution to the problems (and very-very disturbing images that are being piled up across the pages and the landscape), and then it all ends up in nought! Nevertheless, recommended.

The first thing I want to say is that I immediately bought "Occulation" after reading this book, so there was definitely enough between the covers to propel me to further pursue Barron's work. Unlike other Lovecraft pastiches, you can't really tell that he's writing in the Cthulu Mythos. In fact, if I hadn't read again and again that his work married elements of the Mythos to it, I probably wouldn't have even noticed. I would say his work is Mythos-like, and follows the same kind of story arc, but what is revealed is usually so ambiguous that it could be almost anything "from beyond".

All and all the stuff is enjoyable to read, but I do have a few minor problems with it. For one, his plot arcs use conventions that I am used to, and they don't engage me as much as they should. They usually take the form of slow reveals--you know, like everyone involved around a piece of art either goes crazy or dies. When I first read Lovecraft 40 years ago this kind of slow reveal of the weird was new and chilling. But it's not now, and because we know we're reading a genre story, while we may not know the details of what is coming, we certainly can speculate that it is going to be something horrific "from beyond" so some of the suspense is weakened. That's why I like guys like Ligotti and Aickman--you simply don't know what the hell is going on until the end (and sometimes not even then! LOL). It doesn't help that Barron doesn't vary much from the design of this story arc.

The other thing about Barron--and maybe because I've read so much Weird fiction I'm a bit jaded and this is influencing my opinion--is he sometimes executes great build-ups and the ending becomes a let down. Some other reviews have touched on this. One of the creepiest build-ups occurs in "Hallucegenia"--which I found the most memorable story in the book along with "Old Virginia", "the Imago Sequence", and "Procession of the Black Sloth"--where the wife is physically deteriorating and we are horrified at the prospect of what might happen to her. Barron does a good job creating an atmosphere of hopelessness and despair and the incident in the barn that kicks off the whole story is unexpected and very creepy. But in the end I thought the pay off was too predictable. I wanted something unpredictable to happen.

"Procession of the Black Sloth" is another example. There's some pretty off-the-wall stuff going on with a rich palette of characters, an interesting subplot about corporate espionage, and the fact that the story is set in China, which helps make the story interesting and distinctive. But again I felt cheated with a sub-par payoff.

Other stories, like "Bulldozer" I feel are even more problematic because the advent of the supernatural element occurs almost suddenly like the onset of an unexpected dream. I know that he is trying to blur the lines between the mundane and "the other" but the switch happens so suddenly that I don't feel adequately prepared for it and not in a good way. It's more like getting disoriented, senses blurring like maybe I've had too much NyQuil. There's no real impact when the switch happens, just a kind of "uh, where am I?" effect. Other stories like "Shiva Open Your Eyes" in my opinion suffer from this same failure to clearly establish a world with rules that are then clearly ruptured.

I know a lot of this has to do with me reading so many slow reveal stories in my lifetime. When Ligotti fails to clearly establish a world with rules we are familiar with, it doesn't bother me because that's not his goal. But it seems to me that Barron wants to inject the otherworldly into the daily lives of the protagonists and I guess I'm saying I don't think there is adequate contrast in some of his stories, usually the shorter ones (a related issue in these stories is that the characters may be a wee bit underdeveloped).

That being said, there are many scenes in this book that stayed with me for some time and I can't say that about too many writers. There aren't that many people trying to do what Barron is doing. He's not doing a flat-out Mythos tribute (thank God!) but I don't think he is quite original enough to be considered a great Weird writer, like Aickman or Ligotti or Straub -- at least at this point in time. I will, however, continue to anticipate his stuff and see if he develops a more idiosyncratic style still capable of chilling the reader. Check him out and see what you think.

Not since Tom Piccirilli's A Choir of Ill Children have I read a work which so utterly transcends the written page. The images Laird Barron creates are both fearsome and stunning- they will stay with you long after you've completed this astoundingly good anthology.

As others have commented, there is some small debt to HPL here but Barron takes the concept of cosmic horror and births it anew. The horror here is both mind numbing in its scope and devestatingly personal.

A truly amazing collection. I await Laird's first novel with impatient anticipation.

Either The Imago Sequence and Other Stories or something I ate gave me a screaming-to-awake nightmare, so that's a recommendation. I even fell out of bed. If I were blurbing this, I'd write "The Imago Sequence and Other Stories made me fall out of bed with horror!!!"

Barron collides at least two things -- the wounded, jaded, unheroic, macho American tough guy from Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy with a Lovecraftian secret history -- that haven't been collided much before to my knowledge.

There's a certain sameness in the overall conception of several of the stories (first-person-narrating tough guy encounters horribly, horrifyingly awry cosmos, gets stripped of his manhood by cackling representative of chaos), but the imagery and the characterization really carry the day. Also, there's a lot of violence towards men. It's like he's trying to balance the scales. Cracks appear in reality. Cracks appear in traditional constructions of masculinity.

It's hard to summarize any of the stories without giving away the surprising horrors that await. Several appear to occur in pretty much the same universe, one that's Lovecraftian without explicitly name-checking Lovecraft's alien pantheon. Much of the action occurs in Washington State and other West Coast areas (Alaska and Northern California both figure), where real-world oddities (the Mima mounds) jostle up against assorted incursions into everyday reality by some truly awful things. Barron's characters are generally doomed, beset by forces that can't be stopped, incapable of action until it's far too late.

One thing done well here is making characters sympathetic whose backgrounds are anything but (a ruthless real-estate tycoon, a leg-breaker, an aging CIA operative, a right bastard of a Pinkerton detective) -- thus, the stories don't reduce down to EC-style revenge horror, in which the supernatural takes vengeance where the natural has failed. And yet that's the basic concept that Barron uses in some of these stories. But what's coming is so awful that no man deserves it. Or maybe he does. I'll be damned if I know. Tough and poetic and occasionally very funny, Barron really is already one of horror's brightest talents. Highly recommended.

The first thing that struck me about Imago was that, after having read it and Occultation - Laird's debut anthology - for the first time, I immediately turned around and read them both all over again. That's never happened to me before with any other book - not sure what it means, just taking note.

Laird is often spoken of in the same breath with Thomas Ligotti, but they could not be more different. While I am in awe of Ligotti's work, his universe is one of futility - of clockwork horrors that don't even afford their victims the grace of personal animosity. Laird's horrors are intimately personal, with a predator/prey relationship oft-times fraught with gleeful malice - while his protagonists are doomed, they oppose their fate with a frontiersman's fatalism and stoic refusal to submit - this, I assume a result of Laird's upbringing in rural Alaska. While the characters in both Ligotti's and Barron's tales wind up as no more than peristaltic grist for the maw of Lovecraftian horrors intent on provender, Laird's protags at least have the decency to kick and struggle on their way down the gullet, rather than succumbing to the numb despair exhibited by Ligotti's people.

Then there is craft. Laird leaves so much unsaid that the majority of his stories unfold puzzle-like behind your unconsciousness after you're done with them, ultimately looming several times their original size back in your oh-so-vulnerable lizard brain. His wording, phrasing, and editing are flawless - literally among the best wordsmithing I have encountered among writers active today. I am reminded of Joyce Carol Oates' very best in some of Laird's work, or Ramsey Campbell at his most hallucinogenic - Laird's characters are often face to face with facts and realities they refuse to recognize or acknowledge. Allusion is especially strong in all of Barron's work.

This is strong stuff - not because of its often graphic violence, or its bleak Lovecraftian cosmological mindset - but more for Laird's unrelenting insinuation. With Laird Barron, resistance is futile - if anyone reads a hundred years from now, he'll still be in print.

I read this before Occultation, and it was my first exposure to Laird's work. 'Old Virginia' stunned and delighted -- I've read other reviews faulting the story for reasons that escape me, but it totally worked: I've KNOWN deadly old wrecks like Virginia's narrator, over the hill sociopaths are doubly dangerous. 'Procession of the Black Sloth' is a work of genius -- Laird dug deep in this Chinese ghost story, and achieved something that violates the reader on SO many layers and levels.

'Bulldozer' is vigorous and muscular -- one of my objections to HPL was that all his pale-pink-brains seem to swoon when confronted with the Outside -- but one suspects his sheltered dilettantes might do the same if faced with fisticuffs or a naked woman. Not so Pinkerton man Jonah Koenig of Molly Maguire infamy!!! My contention has always been that REAL men would oppose the Old Ones -- probably lose horribly, but at least do their best to leave a bad aftertaste on the way down.

'Proboscis' is just evil, but eminently re-readable, and I recommend it for journeyman writers trying to study craft. 'Hallucigenia' accomplished something I will confess is laughably difficult for hypocritical me: it made me feel sympathy for a rich dude, without apologizing at all -- yes, that's it: in this tale Laird evoked empathy perhaps better than he has in any of his other works; 'Hallucigenia' is a stellar piece.

Then we get to 'The Imago Sequence.' I will attempt no editorial comments other than to opine that its Laird's finest accomplishment to date (well, 'Hour of the Cyclops,' readable for free online is a close second).

Why haven't you bought this book yet?