The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Laird Barron
4.0 Stars
12-15-2024

A surprising number of Satanists

Pretty Lairdish. The stories are similar to the early ones of his that I read, though the tone has lightened by about 20%. A prototypical early Laird Barron story has an unbalanced protagonist that is alcoholic/drugged/suicidal, and they are facing off against God, and God wants to eat them, and then God eats them in a horrible fashion. So there's not a lot of autonomy or chance to survive for the MCs, though in various cases their struggles could be pleasingly scary or memorably horrific or just really unpleasant and depressing. In these more recent stories, I feel like the protagonists have slightly more of a chance; in a few of them the MC even survives with part of their sanity intact. I kind of like this turn by Barron. I also found it gratifying/uplifting that in one of the stories, the monsters at least partly come to the attention of the security state and the NSA, which kind of edges these stories into Delta Green territory, which I generally like and which I think would be a some new and interesting territory for Laird to explore. It's fine to have horrible deaths and monsters and things that are vastly powerful and that we don't even slightly understand, but also it seems unfair to pit these monsters against random alcoholics. Put these entities up against the Mormons in the FBI, CIA, etc., and then evaluate how well they do.

Another change I noticed is that Barron is building up more of a mythology now; where the early stories were a bunch of horrific one-offs, here he is doing more to link his current and earlier stories into a larger web. I'm kind of ok with this, but it also feels a bit like selling out and McStandarizing his stories rather than having them each be their own wild and individual tale of some cosmic horror that we don't understand.

On the downside, there's not one but two different meta-stories in here that involve the author writing about authors. This is always a sure sign that a writer is running out of fresh ideas, and as a reader these sorts of stories become unbearably twee after the first few dozen that you've read.

And finally, a half dozen nice things in this collection:

- a description of a dire-antelope eating a guy's head
- a description of the stars, star-siphoning a guy
- a description of a melee with a bunch of Hills-have-Eyes peasants
- a short but quite likeable story of Selma and Louise and skinshifting
- the crones, who start out extremely creepy and then continue becoming more creepy for every sentence of the next 5 pages
- the buzzing of flourescent lights. For some reason most authors never mention the message being hummed out by flourescent lights, even though this is the sort of lived detail that we all experience and which would do a lot to ground and enrich their novels