The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
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Average rating3.3
Over the course of two award-winning collections and a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron’s stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards. Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including “Blackwood’s Baby,” “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven,” and “The Men from Porlock,” The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
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After reading Occultation and loving it I really expected more from this collection. Barron's obsession with the hard-boiled larger-than-life tough guy grated me here as it felt well-worn and a bit tired to me by this point. I was craving another type of narrator, which we occasionally get here but sadly not often enough.
It's clear to me Barron was trying to step outside his comfort zone a bit with stories like “Vastation” and “More Dark” but these were more of a slog to me as they felt they relied too heavily on trying to do something new than being fun to read. Even some stories like “The Siphon” and “The Men from Porlock” which have exceedingly creepy final acts take a bit of a buy-in from me in the first 2/3 in that I didn't find the characters or setup all that compelling, but I acknowledge I may be alone in feeling that way.
I had about 6 months between reading the first half of the book and the second half so my memory on the earlier stories is escaping me. I do recall, however, quite enjoying “The Carrion Gods in their Heaven”.
Overall I think it has some good stuff in there, but far from Barron firing on all cylinders. I'd take just about anything in Occultation over anything here, but that's less to chagrin Barron's work on TBTTAUA and more to champion how great I think Occultation is as a collection.
