Reviews

• Creepy, thrilling and fantastic! I read this collection over a number of months reading a story every now and then. And each time I returned to it, I was blown away by the quality of story telling throughout the collection. This has been my first Laird Barron collection I have read, and it definitely won't be the last. Laird has the skill of brilliant story telling, and I enjoyed every single story in this collection. If you have not checked Laird out yet, I heavily recommend you do! Overall, 5* Favourite stories - The Broadsword and -30-

• Boring stories, goes nowhere. Nothing live Lovecraft. The stories are so slow and it goes nowhere and abruptly stops with no conclusion. Stopped reading midway.

• Laird Barron has gained a reputation over the course of his short career as a master working in the same slice of horror that H.P. Lovecraft first launched - that is, a section of horror filled with horrific demons and monsters beyond any sense of imagination, otherworldly realms that are dangerously close to our own, and a pervading sense of darkness that fills our world in places we least expect. What sets Barron apart, though, is the complex and literary feel of his prose, which makes his stories feel incredibly constructed - a plus - but also dense and a bit forbidding. Over the course of these tales, Barron charts a group that's looking to move forward to the next phase of evolution, an anthropologist whose obsession with Satanic imagery tempts him to open some unclosable doors, and a group of gay men whose wilderness expedition leads them to places that should have stayed forgotten. These sound like the ideas of pulp horror, and simple plot summaries would do nothing to convince you otherwise. But to paraphrase Roger Ebert, these stories are not about what they are about; they are about how they are about them. From broken marriages to lost loves, from the pain of loss to the shadow of the past, Barron's characters are complex, nuanced, flawed people who would fit perfectly into any literary novel written today. But what you'll remember about Barron are the horrors he creates, horrors which are every bit as literate and exquisitely crafted and rendered as his people. Occultation is a hard sell, in many ways; it inhabits a world between literature and true horror that's hard to pin down, and one where very few authors tend to work. (I would say the inimitable Brian Evenson is one of the few in the same field.) The prose can be forbidding at first, even for a "serious" reader like me, and I won't say that it didn't take me a couple of stories to get into the book's rhythm. But as I continued to read, I found myself captivated by Barron's rich, horrifying world and his masterful prose. For those who like their horror with a touch of culture and literature, Occultation is a brilliant choice.

• I have read this (and every other title by this author) three, four, and five times, and will do so again. Every time that I go through his stories, I notice a new facet of detail. I really can't recommend his books strongly enough.

• Decent modern weird-ish horror. To me this read like a cross between Stephen King and HP Lovecraft, though more King than Lovecraft unfortunately. The stories have a tendency to jump about a bit and revisit the same type of characters which left me with a sense of 'seen it all before' by the time I got to the end of the collection. I thought the least successful efforts were 'Catch Hell' and 'Six Six Six', both of which had a pretty obvious 'Rosemary's Baby'/Hammer Horror devil worship thing going on. 'Six Six Six' particularly jumped about all over the place and felt as if it had been phoned in. My favourites were the (very) short 'Occultation' which had a very unnerving David Lynch type quality (though some might say it doesn't really go anywhere) and, particularly, 'Mysterium Tremendum' which I felt was the only story in the collection really worthy of the Lovecraft comparisons. 'The Broadsword' was also very good though that suffered from being a bit incoherent and jumbled in its themes. On the whole though I enjoyed the collection, just wouldn't rate it half as highly as some. 3.5 stars would be more accurate but I'm rounding up for effort! Would certainly try more Laird Barron in the future, particularly at not so steep a price.

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