Occultation

✍ Scribed by Barron, Laird

• Book ID: 108880163
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 207 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781597801928

✦ Synopsis

Most of, maybe all, the nine stories in Barron's second book belong to his bold and artful variation, launched in The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007), of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, according to which hideous aliens are emerging from within the earth to wipe out humanity. One says “maybe all” because Barron's tight focus on a single protagonist or two intimately related ones makes us unsure that we're getting all the info we need to figure out just what's going on. That is, Barron puts us in a predicament like those of the protagonists, who hardly believe what they must notice—or die. “The Lagerstatte” may be what it seems, an unusually harrowing record of a woman descending into suicidal madness after her husband and son perish in a plane crash, but then she does hear voices, like the much more overtly threatened macho gay friends in “Mysterium Tremendum,” memory-haunted retiree in “The Broadsword,” ex-lover wildlife researchers in “--30--,” and young marrieds investigating the house inherited from his occultist father in “Six Six Six.” Unfortunately, voices aren't all that the woman in “Occultation” hears. In every tale, everything heard and unheard, seen and unseen becomes creepier and creepier. The protagonists try to escape by drinking, drugging, fighting, fucking, even fleeing. Yet it's doubtful any of their gorgeously scary stories has much of a sequel.