The Croning, Laird Barron
4.0 Stars
12-15-2024

What is a Croning but Laird persevering?

I was ambivalent about this book, and at different times during the reading I was placing it at anywhere from two to four stars. The main change in this book is a positive one, in that rather than writing a number of short stories here Laird crafted a longer running narrative. I thought this worked really well and allowed Laird to build and layer a narrative that had more power than his usual multiple disconnected stories. The larger story is still somewhat episodic, as you learn about different terrible episodes over the course of this one guy's life, but it is always building this larger over-arching story that grows gradually darker and more raddled. On the flip side, the crow meme. You know the one. Laird has already used this monster/mythos a couple of times before, and honestly once was enough, so I didn't really appreciate a whole book dealing with the same over-tuned creatures. You can only feed so many level-0 characters into the maw of a space-and-time-manipulating cosmic god and its billions of ultra-tech servitors before the exercise becomes boring and repetitive. I started to wander a bit there at the end; like has anyone tried a flame thrower on one of these guys? The confrontations always seem to happen when the MC only has their bare hands on hand, why not have even one character just have a try at pre-emptively burning their shit down? Or maybe some humor? They're going to torture you for eternity anyway, maybe make fun of them a bit first? Repeat what they say in a silly voice? Point out their tendency to Xanatos gambit any minor reverse?

But! On the flipped-flip side, this book was kind of genuinely depressing, so I feel like that deserves some sort of recognition? If nothing else Laird is a good writer; he might not be writing what I want him to write, and he is usually writing kind of the same thing, but his execution of both the momement-to-moment of the story and on his larger themes is always superb. So, good job?

And now a Laird re-cap and re-stock. For someone who isn't a Laird completionist, I feel like reading just one of his horror books, that is not Occultation, is probably enough. Occultation is the weakest of his collections, but all the others tend to cover the same themes, mythos, story beats, etc at about the same level of quality. So just read any one of them and you should be fine. I also think Laird would be really, really good if he branched out to write basically anything else but this? And great news, he actually has! It seems he's written a trilogy of noir-action-crime stories, and I think these should be a great fit for his style of writing. I'm excited to try them out next.