Laird Samuel Barron (born 5 March 1970) is an American author, who mainly writes within the Horror and Dark Fantasy genres.
Barron grew up in rural Alaska, and described his upbringing as "dirt poor, Depression-era poor," and noted that his exceedingly harsh youth kick-started his interest in reading, leading to him developing an early affection for pulp fiction, westerns, and noir, and eventually writing stories of his own, as he felt it was the only real escape he had from his hardships.
Quite a few of his stories have Cosmic Horror Story trappings, and frequently homages and takes inspiration from the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, Peter Straub, and other prominent writers from the genre. Looking over his body of work, he tends to show some pronounced unique quirks of his own. Much like how King tends to have his stories set in and around his homestate of Maine, Barron tends to have his stories set in the American Northwest, either in his native state of Alaska, or the state of Washington, especially around the city of Olympia in the latter case. Meanwhile, quite of few of his protagonists are very much unlike Lovecraft's withdrawn and nerdy scholars and antiquarians, usually being more traditionally masculine, frequently being tough, self-confident, Manly Men who are used to make their way in the world through their own grit and determination, and, more often than not, have quite a few dirty deeds on their resumé, who end up being caught off-guard when they inevitably stumble upon something that is trougher, older, and much, much meaner than themselves.
Many of Barron's stories are by to varying degrees implied to be set in the same universe with bits of their mythology overlapping and having occasional references to each other, though occasionally he changes setting entirely to worlds were the history and workings of the world obviously is quite different to his main setting. Even then, there hints that these other settings might actually be connected through some sort of a multiverse that contains several Alternate Timelines.
Body of work
Short Stories Collections
- The Imago Sequence & Other Stories (2007)
- Occultation (2010)
- The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (2013)
- A Little Brown Book of Burials (2015)
- Swift to Chase (2016)
- Not a Speck of Light (planned for 2024)
Novels
- The Light is the Darkness (2010)
- The Croning (2012)
- Man with No Name (2015)
- The Isaiah Coleridge series
- Blood Standard (2018)
- Black Mountain (2019)
- Worse Angels (2020)
- The Wind Began to Howl (2023)
Tropes in his works:
- Cast Full of Gay: Willem, the protagonist of the short story, "Mysterium Tremendum", is a gay man. The three other principal characters in the story are Willem's boyfriend, Glenn, and Victor and Dane, another gay couple that Willem and Glenn are close friends with.
- Cosmic Horror Reveal: While the Isaiah Coleridge series appears to be set in a mundane world, there are several references and allusions to Barron's other works. Worse Angels then firmly reveals that it does indeed take place in the same universe as The Croning and the other Old Leech stories, when Coleridge has an encounter with the supernatural. That said, the story does offer a rational explanation for everything that happened, though Barron has commented that it is mostly there to prevent Continuity Lock-Out for readers unfamiliar with his other works.
- Humanoid Abomination: The Children of the Old Leech, who are the recurring villains of many of Barron's stories. They can be described as some sort of intergalactic parasite, who procreate by assimilating other "lesser" species by turning them into more of themselves and feed on emotions (primarily revulsion, fear, and anguish) as well as human children, both of which they consider delicacies. While their true form is implied to be worm-like (and is further implied to be a much lesser version of their father, the Old Leech himself), they mostly assume a human form while on Earth, mostly due to the fact that they abhor sunlight and can better resist it while dressed in a human shell and it makes it easier for them to walk around unnoticed.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Characters in the short story "More Dark" are barely disguised stand-ins for Barron himself and other contemporary horror writers; in particular the figure central to the plot is the caricature of Thomas Ligotti. Some of the caricatures are quite affectionate, others... not so much.
- Religious Horror: Barron has noted in several interviews and retrospectives that he often goes to The Bible as a source of inspiration for his stories, as he sees much of the material in the Old Testament as very open to being Played for Horror, describing God as depicted in that part of the book as "a colossal, ancient brute, a maelstrom of blood and fire, of appetite and wrath." More specifically, the Old Leech can very easily be read as a twisted take on old Yahweh himself, and then there is the other recurring villain from several of his stories, Black Bill aka Splayfoot Bill, who is depicted as a demon-like entity that overtly leans into several trappings of the Big Red Devil trope (although in thread with Barron's other stories, Bill might actually be an alien entity).
