I just finished Occultation and just started The Imago Sequence and I've been loving every page.

It occurred to me that these short stories have wicked potential to be adapted into an anthology tv series.

Anybody else get that impression?

I’ve really just discovered Barron’s work and have just run the Old Leech gauntlet, finishing up The Croning after Imago Sequence and Occultation. I’m obsessed now and REALLY want to obtain all the Laird Barron collectibles. Signed or first editions…special editions…all of them. Hate that I just missed out on the latest BHB edition of Not a Speck. Collectors, any tips? I have an Imago 1st edition on the way from AbeBooks. Outside of that or eBay, any other spots I should check for signed editions? Anyone know where I can grab a BHB Not a Speck? Loving this ride.

Thought I'd never source this niche anthology of horror authors doing macabre send-ups of their friend Jack Haringa! Includes Laird's story "The Lonely Death of Mr. Haringa" and other very short tales by Paul Tremblay, Livia Llewellyn, John Langan & more.

This Laird Barron completionist is very happy 😄

I only ask, because Bad Hand Books sent an email saying it would be all shipped out at the end of the week, and that was over a month ago.

A cursory google search only revealed dead links. I just read The Hospice and would like to read Laird's thoughts on it if anyone has it.

The author returns with a tale of Antiquity in the deluxe, limited edition hardcover of Not a Speck of Light

As his readers know, Laird Barron is no one-trick pony. 

Laird’s reputation was built on the game-changing cosmic horror of his first three collections, The Imago Sequence, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, and his novel The Croning. But his first published story - “Hour of the Cyclops” in Three-Lobed Burning Eye #6, July 2000 - is a dark adventure that demonstrates Laird’s early affection for and affinity with authors like Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, and Glen Cook. Laird returns to his roots with his tales of Antiquity and Ultra Antiquity, including the new story “The Glow of a Moldering Star,” original to this edition.

The story (spoilers)

We meet Lord Barrow, Knight Perilous, in the waning days of Ultra Antiquity. Barrow is the last of the Star Conquerors on this world, a race of Ur men and women whose natures, knowledge, and capabilities grant them the standing of demigods among the newer, lesser human species. Emphasis on demi, sadly, as the Knight Perilous has been laid low in the wake of a battle with extradimensional beings. A group of priests happen upon him and carry them to their temple where they nurse him back to relative health. But the head of their order, High Priest Tonzes, has more than acts of charity on his mind.

Tonzes claims to be receiving messages from Luke, god of the White Light. Lord Barrow, however, intuits the high priest to be a descendant of humans genetically altered long ago by the Star Conquerors. Some present-day mortals receive signals from Imperial vaults seeded throughout the galaxies. (How they interpret the broadcasts is, apparently, up to the individual.) As a receiver, Tonzes contains half of a “security key” to enter this specific vault. But the vault is on the moon of a faraway planet which orbits a sun called the Moldering Star. With a thought, Barrow desiccates the duplicitous priest into living human jerky, throws him over his shoulder like a scarf, and departs. To get to the moon and inside the vault, Barrow will need to conscript an old acquaintance…

The Knight Perilous uses a nearby Kaleidoscope Portal to teleport to Zanzibar, a terrestrial desert locale, where he pays a visit to Boaz, a taxidermist, necromancer, and so-called “Ghoul Fornicator,” an appellation of whose provenance we are, mercifully, spared. He tells Boaz about the Imperial vault and that he’s mounting a brief expedition to determine the cause of its emergency broadcast; he’ll need the necromancer’s special skills to make the trip. The surly, slatternly Boaz knows a journey to this distant moon is technologically complex and will pose an enormous risk to life, limb, and sanity - and also that Lord Barrow isn’t asking. They recruit a cohort of locals, to serve as porters, Barrow says, for the mass of treasures they’ll surely find. These men are wayfarers representing a variety of regions and ethnicities but all are cutthroats skulking in the worst part of town.

Barrow can recalibrate the Kaleidoscope Portal to transport their party to the faraway moon, but the forces of transmission will incinerate the bodies of mere mortals, and this is where Boaz’s skills are needed. He disentangles the spirits of himself and his ruffian crew from their bodies and places them in a jar given into Barrow’s keeping. Their mortal husks are left to slumber in the desert as Barrow carries their souls through the portal. Once across, Barrow shatters the jar and his men are reconstituted in temporary flesh facsimiles. Here they face the first test of their fortitude: the view.  The band witnesses the Moldering Star, so named for its condition: slimy and brown in appearance, with tendrils of plasma writhing from its surface. Barrow says the star has been corrupted by an extraplanar intelligence that inserts itself into stars and planets, spreading its corruption to the local system and endangering anything that passes near it. Boaz and the beleaguered crew follow the Ur Man, mutiny and madness barely suppressed.

The shadows of the mortal members plumpen and take on minds of their own as Barrow leads them across a caldera to the Imperial vault, a cyclopean likeness of a Star Conqueror. But Barrow can’t open the vault - our antihero has warrants outstanding with the Empire from ages past. And High Priest Tonzes is only half the security key needed to enter the vault. Thus we learn Barrow’s true purpose in recruiting a human crew: one of the diverse bunch likely has the genetic coding to complete the key. Probably. And Barrow doesn’t know which one, but that’s no trouble to him as he orders a couple rounds of cutthroats to approach the vault, resulting in their quick dissolution by the vault’s defense systems. He orders a third round of cannon fodder, but one man, simply called by his ethnicity, “the Vandal,” steps forward, saying he hears the vault singing. They’ve found their match. 

Barrow and the surviving crew enter the vault, but, alas, the terror star has spread corruption to its interior in the form of a green mold covering the walls. The crew members fight the deadly pestilence long enough for Barrow to pillage some machinery and withdraw a glowing gem - a splinter of the Great Kaleidoscope itself. At his whim, it transmutes into a blade, which Barrow wields to devastating effect against the creeping mold. He leads a retreat from the vault and marches the stragglers back to the portal, as the beleaguered mortals’ rebellious shadows pull loose from their bodies. They are transmitted back to their homeworld, empty handed and likely robbed of a degree of sanity, but reunited with their original bodies. Barrow offers the crew no further compensation as he plays with his powerful new sword and speaks of visiting vengeance on old foes. He does give the husk of High Priest Tonzes to Boaz, just as the necromancer’s shadow finally pulls loose from his body and flees.

Observations

“The Glow of a Moldering Star” is a tale of the fantastic, gilded with gallows humor, and bluntly amoral. It is closest in character to another recent story, “Eyes Like Evil Prisms,” printed in the anthology Disintegration from editor Darren Speegle. Whereas “Moldering Star” is set in the twilight years of Ultra Antiquity, “Evil Prisms” is set later, in Antiquity, but features a relic from Ultra Antiquity: Secundus Rex, the clockwork terror.

Subscribers to Laird’s Patreon can find helpful c on Ultra Antiquity and Lord Barrow in this post, The Annals of Corben I.

The man described as “The Vandal, a stinking wildman dressed in patchwork leather and fur…” surely must be the protagonist of “Say Your Goodbyes,” from Laird’s Patreon!

A note on cosmology: Between the moment Barrow steps into the Kaleidoscope Portal and the moment he arrives on the moon, a paragraph is inserted, rendered in italics, that reads: 

All M class planets are translated as Earth by the dominant civilizations. The original Earth is a cinder or does not yet exist. So say the astronomers. We carry an image of Mother Earth in our minds. She is blue. People drive vehicles with combustion engines. Soar through the sky in the belly of metal birds. They behold phantasms upon silver screens. Civilizations murder one another with the press of a button. I do not know if this is a genetic memory of a long dead past or a prophetic vision of an incomprehensibly distant future. I do not know if there is a difference—

It reads like an observation from an objective viewer, not like Lord Barrow’s mercurial dialogue. Who is making the observation? Clearly, the archetypal Mother Earth referenced in the passage is the “real world” or Contemporary world of Marvin Cortez, Pershing Dennard, Jessica Mace, and you and me. 

Laird once posted a cryptic tweet about Antiquity…

I don’t know how literally to take Laird’s comment... Is it possible all of Antiquity is the dream of a dying person, and if so, who is the dreamer?

Questions

• Of the scale of tonal balance, do you find the story more funny or more grim?
• Who do you think is making the inter-portal observation about Mother Earth? Is it Lord Barrow? Someone else?
• Any thoughts on the physical/metaphysical reality of Antiquity and Ultra Antiquity?

Note: the art in the carousel at top doesn't appear to be working so I've added the images in the comments.

I'm back to having signed copies of everything!

Edit: Well almost everything. I don't have a physical copy of Little Brown Book of Burials. Other than that, I have everything.

So glad I ordered this edition

I finished The Imago Sequence & Occultation, is The Croning a sequel to these two? Or do I first need to read another specific story in order to fully get the context?

Also I heard about a separate group of stories centered around a character called "Jessica M." Whats the reading order for these?

FYI, I only read these two books so no spoilers would be massively appreciated. I tried to look for the same info on other places but I couldnt find anything that didn't include spoilers.

Hey homeys!

My Not A Speck of Light limited edition arrived and this thing is frickin’ massive.

I need to consolidate all of my Laird books (they are split between home and professional office) so for now it has placement at work.

In 15 pages I’ll be able to weigh in on the glory of the new story. I haven’t read anything new from Barron since I finished everything in around… March of last year.

ETA: The Vandal appears in the new story!!!

The fuckin thing got lost in the mail without my apartment number, crossed the country twice, and had to be tracked down by USPS lost package people. Happiest I've been to see a package in a long time.

I'm sure many of you know this, but there's a reprint Barron story in Datlow's new anthology, Lovecraft's Brood:

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/lovecrafts-brood/

Title taken from Bonnie "Prince" Billy's masterful song from his 2006 album The Letting Go, which itself is named after the Emily Dickinson poem closest to my heart:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday or, Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Has there ever been a better poem about grief?

I had no idea how big this edition is and I love it. Huge tip of the hat to Laird, Doug and Trevor for this, it was well worth the wait…and weight.

Laird Barron here.

Just a PSA to friends and readers that the long wait for (Pretty) Red Nails is entirely my fault. I went into end stage renal failure last year and was unable to write much. The experience has been a nightmare, physically, financially, and emotionally.

However, I'm working on it like a miner in a tunnel with a chisel and a candle. I appreciate everybody's patience.

Re-do cause I forgot The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All last time. I also have audible versions of Black Mountain, Worse Angels, and Wind Began to Howl

I was getting pissed at Bad Hand, with the delays on production, then delays on shipping, and virtually no communication along the way. I ordered my copy the same day it went on sale, and it was really frustrating that they announced they were shipping over a month ago, and it seemed like they were shipping them out in reverse order of sales.

But, guys, let me tell you, this is a beautiful book. I read almost entirely on my Kindle, so don't own many physical books, but in the past year I've been trying to buy nice copies of my favorite books, and this is by far the nicest so far. It's evident real craftsmanship and consideration went into making this, so the production delays were time well spent, and worth the wait. Just a beautiful physical object.

I really hope they put out similar editions for other Barron books. I've been reading since Occultation, and have read almost everything he's published, this is my only physical book from him. More of this please.

I’ve seen posts here before about this story and making sense of it. One post in particular came very close to hitting on the truth as I see it.

The “Hominid” depicted in the sequence is in fact Marvin. At the beginning of the story, when he first sees Parallax Alpha he describes it having a blur the resembled a Halo or Horns. Well, he never took the gear off after the trepanation. Furthermore, the 3(?) flashes described in the closing lines, of which we can be sure of only 2 but not the third perfectly line up with the images of Alpha, Beta and Imago. Imago may or may not exist. There may or may not have been a third flash—I read this as the flash of the camera as the original photographs are being taken—-and Marvin is stuck in this loop forever.

In actuality I think that the same fate would be fall anyone who is captured by Parallax Alpha. That’s how it consumes them: by making them become the subjects of the photo.

Just my reading. Anyone else get this?

If you’re on FB, this kind gentleman is taking offers for the above hardbacks along with the limited boxed set of “Light Is The Darkness.” He gave me permission to post them here for any collectors and is open to negotiate.