As a little reward for being nearly finished reading The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All I went ahead and bought North American Lake Monsters. I couldn't figure out for a while why I kept seeing it among my recommended reading from Amazon, but more than a passing glance revealed it was a collection of short stories to do with all manner of horrors, at their root mostly human. That is the tie that binds all those stories into a collection, or so some of the reviews boast. Either way, it appeals to me.
I wasn't so sure when I first cracked open Laird Barron's $13 Kindle book that my money had been well spent. The first story was slow to start but managed to grip me a few pages in. Still, not a promising start, especially where it seemed much of the second story fell flat. I realized this is not necessarily due to his story-telling but his golly-gee-whiz characterization of most of the female protagonists. When he's writing from a man's perspective, there is a fluidity I never question. The moment he jumps into a woman's head and starts driving or gets a gaggle of them together, it feels far too contrived and stilted. It gets better, though.
About midway through, the book's impressions of evil and the dark take a turn from the menace of what might lurk beneath in our traditional sense of the devil and hell to the cosmic Lovecraftian horror the human mind can barely conceive of. Barron gives it form and movement and more than enough reason to leave a little light on at night. Not that that would save you.
I actually still have another book I meant to dig into before I even purchased Lake Monsters, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies. I believe it was also recommended to me based on the purchase I had made of another Lovecraft collection. I swear my brain will be mush unfit for Cthulhu by the time I am done. ^_^
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