I don’t know if this is going to count as a review once I reveal how little I retained from reading this collection of stories. For spooky season, I have read a couple of story collections from horror writers who fall into the eldritch/Lovecraftian area of the spectrum. These are stories that convince us there are many unknowns out there in the universe — monstrous entities beyond the human world and beyond our understanding that we should fear and that may cause us harm. It sounds like a very niche theme, but it’s much broader than you might think. Barron’s collection contains a number of stories that follow a certain pattern: a person, over the course of events, starts to see a bit more of the reality beyond and eventually comes to encounter these otherworldly monsters/beings (or their minions).

While Barron does an incredible job with the writing, I was constantly getting thrown off (especially because I was listening to the audiobook), and I kept losing the plot along with my interest in the characters. Compared to John Langan (a similar type of horror writer whose collection I also read this month), Barron’s stories are deeply immersed in the narrator’s point of view. Even if you weren’t listening to an audiobook like me, I’m positive that you would be able to hear the voices of these characters clearly in the way the narration is written.

The characters are fairly similar across many of these stories: they have a gritty noirish quality, and many like to speak in a sarcastic, colloquial, slangy way. They use a lot of idioms and phrases full of contemporary references, and don’t slow down for the reader to absorb what they’re actually saying. We’re so deep in the character’s perspective that we have to pick up clues on the run in order to figure out the situation and even who these characters are. They assume you get it. In a way, it reminded me of reading the poetry of Robert Browning in my university English poetry class. In some of the stories, there was a very thin line between what was real and what was nightmare. Descriptions would blend or abruptly switch between something actually happening (which could also be a bit bizarre) and something only in the character’s mind.

This collection was a varied mix of stories and there were a couple that I liked, one I loved, and a few that I could at least follow. The rest were a hazy blur for me. So let’s talk about some of the longer, more substantial, or more interesting stories:

“Shiva, Open Your Eye”

My favourite story — which I’ve already raved about to friends — was relatively short (less than an hour), but it kind of fit a classic mold: as the narrator talks about themselves, the more you learn, the more you fear them. It’s like you’re mentally stepping back a bit with each page, inching to get away. It starts as a lopsided conversation (this one really made good use of the monologue format) when a police investigator comes around to ask the narrator a few broad questions in connection with a series of local murders. However, as they keep talking, the narrator reveals way more about themselves than you’d have imagined. I loved how this story caught me by surprise and kicked the twist up several notches and beyond. I was captivated.

“Procession of the Black Sloth”

I really didn’t enjoy this one about a corporate spy in Hong Kong who gets entangled with others staying in the same luxury expat apartment building. He gets invited to gatherings of a group of older women in the building who have a very odd vibe and belong to some strange kind of club. Eventually he gets brought to their bizarre rituals as well. I made it through this whole story, but I think I missed the ending because of how it was written. It didn’t stay in my brain, and I just didn’t get it. I don’t know.

“Hallucigenia”

An old rich man’s wife dies after a freak incident at an even freakier barn, and some creepy events follow, with various people in his sphere who want to dig into what really happened: Did he kill her? Things get weirder, and this story has many moments (as the title suggests) when you’re not sure what is real. Are we all seeing things? I didn’t actually finish this story. It lost me about two-thirds of the way through. I went back and tried to listen a second time, but lost interest and didn’t make it through (even though I knew the good stuff wouldn’t be revealed until the end).

“The Imago Sequence”

This story is inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” and focuses on rich folks (again) as the main character is working for a friend who has inherited an unsettling art photo that is one of three in a series known as the Imago Sequence. These photos have mysterious supernatural qualities and “mess with your head” if you view them, and they also make you want to acquire and view the whole set. Once he sees this image (which is actually #2 in the series), the narrator starts to lose his grip on reality and becomes obsessed with seeing the other two. Things definitely get weird and weirder as we go. I can see how this story borrows some ideas from “Pickman’s Model”, but it felt less scary. Even so, it’s one of the stories I liked in this collection. I liked the cosmic horror of it, how an image has the power to get into a person’s mind. With or without the supernatural factor, that’s really the essence of terror, isn’t it?

Though that recap covers slightly fewer than half the stories, they are the longest (the exception being “Shiva”, which I included just for me). They reflect my experience with the book and give you some sense of what to expect from Barron. I couldn’t absorb or remember much from the other stories, so it wouldn’t be honest of me to discuss them. Despite my middling success with this read, I still want to give Barron another shot someday. His writing and character voice are strong, but too much slips past me, and his style just isn’t a good fit for me. I’m hoping that another collection of his, which I own, will prove to be a bit better and more palatable whenever I decide to finally pop it in.

3 stars

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