The Broadsword: Best Early Works of Laird Barron - LETTERED EDITION

One of his archetypal situations is “Men go into Nature and get much more than they bargained for.” The Men from Porlock was based on a nightmare about hidden doors in monolithic trees swinging open and revealing the black things uncoiling inside. A group of lumberjacks penetrate the deep backwoods wilderness only to come across an isolated village and its strange inhabitants… 

--30-- features another type of wilderness: a desert location, inspired by Charles Manson’s Spahn Ranch, where two ex-lovers survey the region supernaturally saturated by a Satanic cult’s murders. The masterful atmosphere of the Otherworldly is greatly enhanced by the intriguing interpersonal drama between the two witty protagonists.

The author himself considers The Broadsword a cornerstone of his corpus. It reads like a sequel to T.E.D. Klein’s brilliant “Children of the Kingdom,” focused as it is on an elderly man who resides in the old urban Broadsword hotel. He begins to sense, through the walls and piping, the voices of entities entirely non-human.

Proboscis is about bounty hunters who captured and delivered a serial killer with super-human powers. He escapes from prison and goes after them in an atmospheric chase into the Unnamable.

In Hand of Glory a gangster is after a powerful man who may have killed his father using a soul-stealing technique which merges the occult with early photography.

But it’s not all about the testosterone heavies. The Redfield Girls is a ghost story with an all-female cast: a group of elderly teachers, plus a young girl, on a lake-side vacation summon a real world legend (and also a contemporary tragedy) from the icy waters.

A woman is caught in a vacuum between melancholy and nightmare in The Lagerstätte. She tries to cope with the recent deaths of her husband and son and joins a support group for suicidal women, only to discover that other grieving souls vanish mysteriously, as though dragged away by their dearly departed. This is quiet, but harrowing psychological horror about unhealable spiritual wounds, partly inspired by recent Asian horror cinema.

Fun-loving teenagers also get unexpected just deserts: in Andy Kaufman Creeping Through the Trees a young girl discovers something dark and deadly behind the eyes of a comedian, while in (Little Miss) Queen of Darkness a queer youth regrets putting Dracula’s ring on their finger after it initiates apocalypse.

But it’s not all grim and horrific: Sun Down reads like an R-rated black comedy of Addams Family proportions, with added cosmic horror. It deals with a uniquely unnatural family who inherits a cabin left by a witchy, deceased aunt.