Edited by Paula Guran. Prime (prime-
books.com), $16.95 trade paper (480p) ISBN 978-1-60701-450-8
From the seemingly bottomless reservoir of Lovecraftian pastiches and homages, Guran (New Cthulhu) has sieved 19 above-average reprints, all published between 2010 and 2014, and most tailoring their terrors to contemporary times. The monstrous...
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Laird Barron, Author . Night Shade $24.95 (239p) ISBN 978-1-59780-088-4
Horrors that defy description and challenge reader expectations charge the electrifying stories in this powerful debut collection. Barron synthesizes influences ranging from H.P. Lovecraft to hard-boiled crime fiction in nine ingeniously plotted...
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Laird Barron, Author . Night Shade $24.95 (245p) ISBN 978-1-59780-192-8
Writing with a poet's eye for detail and a folklorist's understanding of mythos, Barron lives up to his reputation for elegant, subtle, and nightmare-inducing tales with a Lovecraftian edge in his second short story collection (after 2007&#
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Laird Barron. Night Shade (www.nightshadebooks.com), $24.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-59780-230-7
Teeming with the cosmic horrors that distinguish the fiction of Lovecraft, Machen, and other weird fiction masters, this eerie first novel offers up a picture of human civilization as a plaything in the claws of malignant alien entities. Don Miller,
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Laird Barron. Night Shade (www.nightshadebooks.com), $26.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-59780-467-7
Most of the masterfully told Lovecraftian weird tales in this collection were originally published as standalone pieces, but the seven very different core stories that take place near Olympia, Wash., have reappearing features—howling winds, an altar
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Laird Barron. JournalStone, $9.95 trade paper (104p) ISBN 978-1-942712-86-2
Barron (The Croning) demonstrates his prowess in combining disparate narrative threads into one captivating, complex tale. Nanashi, a member of the Yakuza, has deliberately shrouded his own past, resting his fate on precarious ties with the Heron...
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Laird Barron. JournalStone, $18.95 trade paper (296p) ISBN 978-1-945373-05-3
Barron's fourth collection (after 2013's Shades of Blue and Gray), containing 11 reprints and one original story, will not disappoint fans of his trademark literate, unconventional horror. Few writers would have the imagination to transform the late
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Laird Barron. Putnam, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-7352-1287-9
Barron’s often formulaic first crime novel falls short of the high standard set by his horror fiction (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories). Isaiah Coleridge aspires to be a Sam Spade–like gumshoe, but instead he works as a strongman for the Mafia’s
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Laird Barron. Putnam, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-0-7352-1289-3
Barron’s second novel featuring retired mob strongman Isaiah Coleridge (after 2018’s Blood Standard) is as nasty as a cornered pit viper—and its plot is about as sinuous. Isaiah is newly established as a PI in his Hudson River Valley digs when he’s...
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Laird Barron. Putnam, $27 (336p) ISBN 978-0-593-08499-1
In Barron’s disappointing third Isaiah Coleridge novel (after 2019’s Black Mountain), Badja Adeyemi, “a right bastard of an ex-NYPD cop,” hires PI Coleridge, a former mob strong-arm man, to look into the case of his nephew, Sean Pruitt, who died at...
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Edited by Ellen Datlow. Night Shade (www.nightshadebooks.com), $15.99 trade paper (448p) ISBN 978-1-59780-399-1
The 18 scary stories that Datlow (Supernatural Noir) has selected as the best of 2011 hint at even worse horrors lurking beyond the fringes of their narratives. In “The Little Green God of Agony,” Stephen King profiles an exorcist and faith healer...
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Edited by Michael Bailey and Darren Speegle. Written Backwards, $15.95 trade paper (306p) ISBN 978-1-62641-267-5
Human evolution, in its many possible forms, is the focus of this gripping anthology of spooky science fiction. In Lisa Morton’s “Eyes of the Beholders,” a group of space colonists who return to Earth after a failed and tragic mission find the...
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Edited by Paula Guran. Prime, $19.95 trade paper (576p) ISBN 978-1-60701-431-7
In Guran’s fifth edition of eclectic nightmares, new and veteran authors blend psychological terror and supernatural wonder into disturbing hybrid tales, which confront “that which we do not know.” Many of these stories first appeared in small-press
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Edited by Christopher Golden. Gallery, $18 trade paper (544p) ISBN 978-1-4767-8309-3
The notion of the romantic vampire is transcended to chilling and even heartbreaking effect in this stellar anthology of tales collected by Golden (Tin Men). The best is Laird Barron’s atmospheric, Alaska-set “In a Cavern, in a Canyon,” in which one
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Edited by Ross E. Lockhart. Night Shade, $15.99 (540p) ISBN 978-1-59780-232-1
The enduring allure of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, now nearly a century old, is evident in this representative anthology of modern tales, most of which were written in the last decade. The breadth of cosmic horrors they evoke range from the...
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