Search Results for: Laird Barron

Ave Atque Vale: Celebrating the Life and Work of Michael Shea

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Michael Shea was one of the most distinguished and loved figures in the field of speculative fiction. He twice won The World Fantasy Award, and his work also received nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, August Derleth and International Horror Guild awards. Ranging from wildly baroque dark fantasy to cosmic horror and grimly humorous parodies of contemporary “reality” culture, his writing conveys the sense of wonder and awe that imaginative readers crave and appreciate, and one can develop an insatiable…

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Goth Chick News: Your Binge List, Part Deux

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A few weeks back I gave you the list of preliminary ballots for The Horror Writers Association (HWA) 2016 Bram Stoker Awards. Not only is this award the most awesome visually, but any of the works honored by making the preliminary cut are more than worthy of your cold-weather binging. However, on February 23rd the HWA announced the finalists for the Stoker in each category. So if you were having trouble deciding where to begin, this should help narrow the…

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A Summer’s Day at a Local Pool… and a Bold New Voice in Horror: Altar by Philip Fracassi

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“How are they moving like that? she thought. A few adults were running and then — at that moment — instinct took over, and she darted toward her son, not noticing when she knocked down another woman who was kneeling and tugging at her hair, not hearing the new screams, the screams of terror that were replacing the sounds of life like a spreading fungus…” (pgs. 40-1) Back when I was a graduate student, back when I thought I was…

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November 2016 Locus Now on Sale

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The November issue of Locus, the news magazine of the science fiction & fantasy field, is packed with great stuff, including reports on the British Fantasy Awards and the Gemmell Awards, interviews with Pat Cadigan and Cat Rambo, a column by Cory Doctorow, a report on Japanese Science Fiction, obituaries of Robert E. Weinberg and Ed Gorman, and reviews of short fiction and books by Alastair Reynolds, Juliet Marillier, Laird Barron, Ilona Andrews, Jonathan Strahan, and many others. In addition to…

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Reading Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Eight

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Despite me not being a horror writer (or much of a reader, or a movie watcher), it surprises me that about a quarter of my posts end up touching on horror in some way. That being said, I am trying to crack to horror code, to see what makes it work, mostly because I’d love to have additional tools in my writerly toolbelt, and partly because I just like to figure stuff out. I recently finished reading Ellen Datlow’s The…

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Future Treasures: What the #@&% Is That? edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen

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What’s the deal with all these fabulous Saga anthologies? Where are they all coming from? First there’s The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, which arrived just last week. If you love fairy tales (and who doesn’t?), it’s the most important and high profile anthology in years. But as much as I love fairy tales, my heart truly belongs to monster movies, and tales of strange and nasty creatures. John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen…

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New Treasures: Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom by David Neilsen

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Ah, Halloween. That gorgeous, short-lived season when publishers cram a year’s worth of spooky fiction into a single month. If you pay attention for the next few weeks, you’ll see a delicious flood of horror for all ages in your local bookstore. New novels and collections by Stephen King, Laird Barron, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Robert Aickman, and many others. There’s plenty for younger readers, too (after all, they tend to embrace the Halloween spirit even more than us old folks). One of the…

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Future Treasures: Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 3, edited by Simon Strantzas and Michael Kelly

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Michael Kelly’s Year’s Best Weird Fiction has fast become one of my favorite Year’s Best series. Kelly is the editor of the acclaimed anthology series Shadows and Tall Trees, and every year he invites a guest editor to help select the finest strange and weird fiction from the last 12 months. Laird Barron and Kathe Koja ably assisted with the first two volumes, and this year Simon Strantzas (Burnt Black Suns, Shadows Edge) bent his considerable editorial talents to the…

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A Fine Tribute to the Godfather of Weird Literature: The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, edited by Paula Guran

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Within The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, masterfully edited by Paula Guran, you will find a plethora of bewitching stories. Plenty of brilliant writers who contributed their talents incorporate Lovecraft’s universe into their tales. Others invent their own worlds and wink at the Godfather of weird literature. One went so far as to sum Lovecraft up in a biography. In her piece “Variations on Lovecraftian Themes,” Veronica Schanoes shines an unforgiving light on Lovecraft’s racism and Anti-Semitism. That’s not to say…

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New Treasures: The Fisherman by John Langan

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John Langan has had a stellar career. His first collection, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime, 2008) was nominated for a Stoker Award, and his debut novel House of Windows (2010) was warmly received. But it was his second collection, The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus Press, 2013), that really put him on the map, with plenty of folks praising it as one of the best collections of the year. His second novel The Fisherman has all…

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