This Yellow Madness: Laird Barron

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Laird Barron

A quick thought on Laird's new collection . . .

Laird Barron has wholly absorbed the metaphysical horrors of HPL's cosmos, the grit and spice of Howard, and the enchanted fragrances of Smith, and filtered and hued his searing fusions in noir and a hundred other disciplines. And with his unerring and brilliant wordsmithing and vast, captivating imagination he has gifted readers with this 2nd collection of masterworks. Yes, masterworks!

Robert M. Price, Ellen Datlow, and many others have praised him as one of the very finest. Truer words have not been uttered. I cannot decide if Occultation is a better collection then Imago, but I know Laird has put money in my power company's pockets, for after reading this new, core-stirring work, which propelled me through the dark corridors of the strange and the fantastic, I kept my lights on for days.

As Barron's work rests alongside the very best of the field, horror fans NEED this wonder! !! `nuff said!

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Thomas Ligotti says --

“Let us posit that Bukowski is the sun. Or Brautigan, Burroughs and the Beats—a solar Coney Island of the Mind where Timothy Leary’s dead and dead Cthulhu waits and sings the live long daydream believer. Then Joe Pulver’s Portraits of Ruin would be the burst of planets, Big Bang-Bang, Marquee Moons hanging on for what they got, scream of consciousness—in Outer Space no one can hear it . . . except Coffin Joe, Monster Mash Potato that big ol’ Portraits of Ruin—Mars needs it, you need it, so just open the lid and shake your fist—then say: “They kill horses, horses, horses, horses.” Thank you. Come again?”

SIMON STRANTZAS on PoR

"Fearless. Daring. Poetic prose for the unhinged. Each tale in "Portraits of Ruin" packs the sort of mental wallop that leaves the reader reeling. From the scorched deserts to the highest foreign towers, across plains of reality and beneath burning suns, this is no volume for the weak, for the conventional. It is a wake-up call from one of the genre's most visionary masters. A book for those who see differently, for those not afraid to know the truth no matter how terrible the cost. I envy anyone about to experience Pulver's horrors for the first time." - Simon Strantzas, author of Nightingale Songs

Robert M. Price says

"Pulver's genius in his ability to shape-shift stylistically
between Raymond Chandler and Thomas Ligotti--without your even noticing! Like the gospel demon, his name ought to be Legion, since he assumes a new voice and persona as every particular chapter or sequence requires. In the new book,
Pulver's polyphonic gifts mutate to a new and even more powerful pitch. There is nothing like it! It sounds, indeed reads, like a living contradiction in terms! The result is a deep dark forest of wonders, containing both monsters and molesters, both angels and devils." -- Robert M. Price