The Croning [Hardcover]

Laird Barron (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 1, 2012

Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us. Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret...of The Croning. From Laird Barron, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation, comes The Croning, a debut novel of cosmic horror.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Laird Barron is the author of two collections: The Imago Sequence and Occultation. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in the wilds of Upstate New York.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Night Shade Books (May 1, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597802301
• ISBN-13: 978-1597802307
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #626,406 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born and raised in Alaska, I did time in the wilderness. I raced in several Iditarods. Later, I got the hell out and migrated to Washington State where I devoted myself to American Combato and reading guys like Parker, Ellroy, and McCarthy. At night I wrote tales that smash up noir, crime and horror.

I currently reside in Upstate New York and am writing a novel about the evil that men do.

(photo courtesy JD Busch)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing first novel by a modern horror master! May 1, 2012

By Justin Steele

Format:Hardcover

I remember when I read my first Laird Barron story, "Catch Hell", in Ellen Datlow's Lovecraft Unbound. When I finished reading the final page, I placed the book down, logged onto my Amazon account, and ordered his first story collection. A few days later it arrived, and I've been a fan ever since, devouring his second collection and novella when they were published.

With this in mind, it's fair to say that expectations were very high for The Croning. It's also fair to say that Mr. Barron not only meets those expectations, he beats them. He beats them bloody.

I've always been wary of the "perfect" review, but there really isn't much to find wrong with this novel. The plot comes together beautifully, the characters are very well realized, and the sense of dread pulsing in the background and steadily growing until the climax can only be done by a master. If this author's stories gave you nightmares, than this novel will take it a step further and give you all out night terrors.

This book would be a great start for anyone new to Barron's work, and will give an idea of how talented he is. Fans of anything reminiscent of Lovecraft's works or themes must read Barron. There's no question about it. Even fans of horror in general should pick this book up; what's between the covers will terrify anyone. Lastly, anyone who is already a Barron fan will be overjoyed by this novel. It's also great fun spotting all the connections to his other stories, which help to further his own horrifying "mythos".

Now that I'm finished I find myself re-reading all his short stories and eagerly awaiting more new fiction!

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Always Check for Zippers, and Trust Your Dog May 13, 2012

By B. Henderson

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Pastiche of the secret society horror flicks of the 70s. A well-intentioned, well-grounded, and keenly self-aware homage to Lovecraft. Postmodern retelling of a certain fairy tale about a certain grubby critter what name begins with R. A cosmic custody battle.

What Laird Barron accomplishes, among so many other things in The Croning is a stitching together of tropes that call out from myth and fairy tale, from that odd blip of literary history where H.P. Lovecraft toiled on into the Friday nights and Saturday afternoons where horror movies rode those squelchy analog frequencies to scare the crap out of you if that was your thing when you hoped your TV antenna caught more than public television and one other channel. Then you wished it hadn't.

Don Miller is not a doughty protagonist. While he has his two-fisted moments, he's mostly an affable, absentminded professor married to a gorgeous anthropologist descended of aristocratic stock. Don's dirty work with rocks still keeps him separated from that jet-setting, trust-funding, old-money world through which Michelle will always navigate with more decorum than her husband could ever hope to summon. Barron takes us on a sixty-plus-year journey, rifling through shifting timelines and keeping focus tightened on Don's accretion of revelations about sudden trips to darker corners to Mexico or the Siberian taiga--all of it secondhand and colored by gaps and holes in Don's memories.

Because you can't hat-tip to Lovecraft, see, without screwing with your protagonist's mind, and Barron doesn't wait until the denouement to do this. He rather adroitly gets Don's brainpan Swiss cheesed in Act 1. In the 1950's. Then the 1980's. Yet again in the Now.

Barron paints the story with great brushstrokes of tropes: the secret society, the corporate and government conspiracies, the creaky mansions, the ritual sacrifices, the unexplained disappearances, the wackadoodle Hollow Earth stuff (oh, and it is *not* hokey here), maggoty, limbless grotesques in service to Old Leech of the Dark Ones. I mean, this is not a stew of horror send-ups per se; it is the strange brew itself. Croning, you see.

Let me be clear about something: Laird Barron juggles those multiple plot lines well, but The Croning is a book you can put down. Let me further qualify: This is not a failure on the author's part in hooking the audience but a necessity in a novel whose narrative acrobatics demand an accretion of suspense and a few red herrings. Hey, third-limited POV worked well in this case. There will reach a point where you can't put the book down, where the cellar door is open, where the mouth of the cave yawns its immutable blackness at you, and you are stuck. Committed. Forego engagements because you have to confront the abyss along with dear ol' damned Don Miller. And, yes, at some point you may even wonder how the protagonist has made it through life long enough to do anything, let alone manage headlining a horror storyline.

It's all because They love him.

And it's a big finish, a solid payoff Laird Barron delivers on those carefully laid flagstones earlier in the novel.

Because, you see, you've already read this story. You know it. But Barron shows you the square was just a cube with this weird dilating hole wormed straight through its center. When you put your eye up to it--

Well, you'll see.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Rumperstiltskin meets Old Leech September 7, 2012

By Pearce Hansen

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Like one of Pavlov's dogs, I've become conditioned to excitement whenever I hear of an upcoming publication by Laird Barron. At the risk of sounding fan-boyish, Laird is one of the two most significant writers working in the horror genre today (the other, of course, being Thomas Ligotti). His work is also, IMHO, worthy to stand the examination of a longer term perspective -- if the species hasn't gone extinct a hundred years ago, Laird will be rated up there with Charles Beaumont and H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Poe, Shirley Jackson and Flannery O'Connor. Yes folks -- the man is that good.

Like the best of American letters, Mr. Barron's work transcends genre and plops firmly down in literary territory. We Americans are such a curious medley of opposites -- we simultaneously fill our lives with the crass and the tasteless, yet insist on sophisticated depths to our most innocent of pleasures -- and Laird's books fit the bill. His stories and novels resonate and haunt, leading to depths of self exploration that have literally caused me to wake up in the middle of the night and stare at the ceiling, wondering what he meant by a particular passage. These pieces bubble and fester within you, Laird's craftsmanship ensuring that when you are impacted, the assault will come from an undefended quarter where your psyche is most vulnerable.

As a writer, I am awed by his prowess. But please don't think he is no more than a 'writer's writer' -- while you'll need a vocabulary as price of admission, Barron's work is highly accessible, eminently readable, and as exciting as any of the best pulp Americana. I will admit to a bias in his favor because of certain similarities in our respective provenances -- while his hard scrabble upbringing in rural Alaska could not be further away from my own youth on the darker streets of Oakland, we share certain world views due to both having endured the kinds of experiences the wise and the squeamish are lucky to shy from.

But enough of the general: The Croning is, I believe, Laird's first foray into the novel format, and its a doozy. The story touches on many elements, places and events that will be familiar to anyone who's read Occultation or The Imago Sequence -- but it is neither re-hash, nor self congratulation. From a horrific reinvention of the Rumpelstiltskin myth, through a climax as truly nightmarish and disturbing as the endings of Pet Cemetary, and The Haunting of Hill House, The Croning will not allow you to put it down.

I'm arrogant enough to believe my own writing is not utter trash. And those of you familiar with my tastes know that I'm jaded enough to only tolerate the best: I prefer the Western Canon and the finest of the fine, as many of you already know.

And I can't get enough of this guy.

Take that for what its worth, but do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The Croning. Then go out and buy about ten copies of everything else he's written -- trust me, you want this fella to keep writing.