Laird Barron

Laird Samuel Barron (born March 5, 1970) is an American author and poet, much of whose work falls within the horror, noir, or horror noir and dark fantasy genres. He has also been the managing editor of the now-defunct online literary magazine Melic Review. He lives in Upstate New York.

Early life

Barron spent his early years in Alaska. He has described his youth as exceedingly harsh because his family was poor and lived in isolated areas.

Career

In Alaska, Barron raced the Iditarod three times during the early 1990s, and worked as a fisherman on the Bering Sea.

He retired from racing and moved to Washington in 1994. He became active on the poetry scene, publishing with a number of online journals and eventually serving as the managing editor of the Melic Review. His professional writing debut occurred in 2001 when Gordon Van Gelder published "Shiva, Open Your Eye" in the September issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Barron's debut collection, The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, was published in 2007 by Night Shade Books.

He has stated his affection for pulp fiction, westerns, and noir, and his work typically combines one or more of these elements with a horrific or weird supernatural intrusion. Barron has referred to the Bible and the Necronomicon as "the greatest horror stories ever told."

In addition to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Barron's work has been featured in SCI FICTION, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards.

He was a 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson Award winner for his collections The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation and Other Stories. "Mysterium Tremendum" won a 2010 Shirley Jackson Award for best novella. He is also a 2009 nominee for his novelette "Catch Hell". Other award nominations include the Crawford Award, Sturgeon Award, International Horror Guild Award, World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award and the Locus Award.

His second novel, The Croning, was published in 2012 by Night Shade Books. His next three novels were published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, and featured a new character: mob enforcer turned private investigator Isaiah Coleridge.

Appraisal

Critic S.T. Joshi discussed Barron's work in 21st Century Horror, giving the author a mixed assessment.

Barron's first two story collections include what Joshi describes as "some of the best weird writing of the past several decades". Joshi characterizes Barron as exhibiting "a prose style of singular panache and deftness, along with a complex fusion of several genres [which] can produce scintillating effects unlike those found in any other writer in the field". On a more negative note, Joshi says Barron's writing can "devolve into a schtick, as Barron overuses the same motifs over and over again" and has changed his writing style for the worse over the years, with a "turgid, clotted" writing stye promoted by the likes of the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Adaptations

His story "-30-" was adapted into the 2018 film They Remain starring William Jackson Harper.